S2E5 | SMOG
Transcript
TH: Tori Hoover
EV: Emma Vendetta
ML: Maren Loveland
JG: Jennifer Gutman
KA: Kim Abeles
AA: Anna Lea Albright
INTRODUCTION
TH:
Okay, so picture this: A suburban neighborhood. Ranch houses, set far back from the road. Quarter acre lots with trees around houses. Maybe a box shrub or a hydrangea or two. Lots of grass; no sidewalks, no traffic lights. In your mind, what does that picture sound like?
If you showed me that image in a photograph and you asked me to guess what it sounded like there, I’d probably say that it’s pretty quiet. I’d probably imagine some wind through the trees around the houses. Some birds, maybe insects. Maybe a dog barking in the distance, or a lawn mower.
See, the picture I’m describing is actually my neighborhood in Nashville. And it does sound like those things. But above that, over that, drowning that out, is also the sound of traffic. See, in reality, I live at what is basically the intersection of three major highways in Nashville. One of them, Briley Parkway, is actually eight lanes wide; it goes past Opryland. And so in my neighborhood, car noise is incessant. You’ll also often get the sound of helicopters flying to the hospital nearby, and I also live fifteen minutes from the airport, so you’re constantly getting the sound of planes so loud that it feels like they’re landing in our backyard. Actually, as I’ve been recording this, I’ve had to keep pausing because planes are flying overhead constantly.
I’ve lived in this neighborhood for six years now, and so all this sound has kind of faded into the background for me. But recently we had a friend come and visit. He’s a city planner, and the very first thing he said when he walked outside, was how loud it was. And once he said that, I started to hear it again, almost for the first time, really. The squeaking brakes, the horns, the whooshing air of the vehicles as they pass, planes overhead — I realized how immune I had become to it. It was late October, but it was still sticky outside, the way it often is in Nashville, but later and later into the year these days. And our friend had remarked how strange it was to have to wear shorts this late into the year. And so, my own shirt damp with sweat, looking up at the hazy sky above us and listening to the sounds of the neighborhood, I heard something else, too: the ambient noise of climate change.
Nashville isn’t a city known for its smoggy air. And yet, even on the clearest mornings, I drive into the city and see it wreathed in haze. The sky is just a little bit wrong – not quite blue, not quite clear. Things look just slightly off. Living here, the ambient noise of climate change has also come to mean the sound of smog.
And once you start listening for it, once you start hearing it, you realize it’s all around us: climate change as background music.
TH:
From Vanderbilt University, in Nashville Tennessee, this is Art of Interference, a podcast about creative responses to climate change. In each episode, we talk with artists and experts who work at the intersection of nature, technology, and science today.
Today’s episode is hosted by Emma Vendetta and me, Tori Hoover.
PART 1: KIM ABELES AND SMOG
TH:
So Emma—
EV:
—Tori.
TH:
You’re a California girl again.
EV:
I am indeed. Made the move cross-country and haven’t looked back.
TH:
So how’s the West Coast treating you these days?
EV:
What can I say? The beach is my front yard and the city has all the Asian fusion food I can eat. It’s pretty magical.
TH:
Do you guys get a lot of smog in Northern California?
EV:
More fog than smog, I’d say. Shout out to Karl and a throwback to our episode on Fog from season 1.
TH:
Well, today’s artist is a fellow Californian, like yourself – albeit an Angeleno rather than a Northern Californian.
EV:
I guess I can forgive her for that.
TH:
Her name is Kim Abeles, and she’s been making art about smog for nearly forty years.
KA:
My name is Kim Abeles.
KA:
I came out to California to go to graduate school at UC Irvine and stayed here and got very interested in the environment very early on, in the early eighties.
TH:
She’s a multimedia artist whose installations and community projects have been featured in the Atlantic and the New York Times. She’s received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, and the California Community Foundation — among others.
KA:
I would complain about the air quality and was often getting in arguments with people. So environmental work really started by wanting to see how you would visualize something that always looks like it’s in somebody else’s backyard.
TH:
In 1987, Kim came up with a method to create images from the smog in the air, essentially creating prints out of particulate matter by placing stencils over plates, fabric, or plastic left out on the roof of her studio. But even before that, she was preoccupied with the Los Angeles haze.
KA:
The first smog collector actually came out of a series of installation works and even performative works, that were trying to see the San Gabriel mountains from my studio downtown. And you know, they’re really only like 16 miles away, but because of the smog, I had never seen them from my studio.
TH:
One of Kim’s earliest pieces actually had to do with photographing every day out of her fire escape, trying to get a view of that mountain.
KA:
And it really took over a year; it took a year and two months. So then I walked there on a smog alert day, like, how close did I have to be to start to be seeing it and actually the closer I got, the less I could actually see it because the smog really tucks against that mountain. So I went as the crow flies, which means if I had to ask people to cut through their houses, I did. L.A. is one of those cities that, if you really want to understand the environment itself, you’ve got to get out of your car. You have to really be in it and to really engage with it.
TH:
And that project, that mountain project, inspired the very first image she created with her particulate matter method. It was basically just a shape, really. But like much of her work, the image itself carries a number of different meanings.
KA:
So, the smog collector, the first one was really an image. Of that, what I call this mountain wedge, because it looked like a mountain at the top, but from the side, it was the shape of the building. So just, you know, 2 verticals and a horizontal at the bottom.
EV:
So as a form, the Smog Collector image is most like a print or a stencil — a pre-cut image transferred onto a material?
TH:
Exactly. This first Smog Collector is just printed on paper. It’s a simple rectangle, portrait orientation — but along the top is the outline of a ridge. It also gives the impression of the kind of image you might see in a textbook, as though we’re seeing both the mountain and the depths of the surface beneath it, almost like an iceberg.
KA:
I like these multi-level impressions, you know, like, what is a mountain anyway? And what’s our relationship to nature, when we typically see it in more like museum settings, or somehow we’re protected from getting dirty? As opposed to realizing that we are part of nature. We’re not just bystanders or, you know, observers. We really, not only have a responsibility, but we have an engagement with it.
EV:
“We’re not just bystanders.” She’s very right about that. When it comes to nature, we as humans often see ourselves as something apart. But obviously we’re not!
TH:
Not at all. And there’s a tension here, between the natural and the man-made, which is itself a product of something natural — wood from trees, or metal from the earth – but made unnatural.
EV:
The uncanny, in a way.
TH:
Right. And what is smog, if not a kind of uncanny form of fog? Fog, corrupted.
EV:
That’s one of the things about smog that makes it so different from the other elements we’ve covered on this show: from dew, from breath, from, yeah, fog — it’s a man-made phenomenon. Isn’t it?
TH:
And it’s important to call it out as such. Hence the name, smog. Not smoke. Not fog. Smog. It’s a kind of unnatural-sounding name for an unnatural phenomenon.
KA:
When I made my first statement about the smog collectors, and I point out that it’s in 1907 that they first coined the word smog in London, in a newspaper, nobody had really, like, identified what it is. And as you know, If you don’t give a term to something, it’s really not going to sink in what, what that is. It’s almost like a Jungian thing, right? Like we have to give, we have to give a visual to something for us to really understand it as people.
INTERFERENCE 1: SMOG IN LA
ML:
Hey guys, do you mind if I jump in for a second?
EV:
Sure thing, Maren.
ML:
I think it’s worth backing up to talk about what smog actually is.
TH:
Well, the word itself, of course, is a portmanteau for “smoke” and “fog.”
ML:
Right. There are some citations of the word as far back as the eighteen-forties, but as Kim says, the term really picked up speed around the turn of the century. In 1905, a London newspaper quoted Dr. Henry Des Voeux, who had delivered a paper to the Public Health Congress noting the pervasive presence of “smokey fog, or what was known as ‘smog.’” The paper wrote that “Dr. Des Voeux did a public service in coining a new word for the London fog,” but the old name for the phenomenon also remained in circulation: Londoners often referred to it as “pea soup fog.”
EV:
Sounds delicious.
ML:
Well, not exactly. Pea soup fog was called that because it was so incredibly thick. People were essentially choking on this stuff.
EV:
Really?
ML:
Yes. Here’s an extreme example: In December of 1952, uncommonly cold weather combined with particularly windless conditions to create an unusually thick layer of smog that lasted for 4 days. That smog was so insanely thick that it even reached inside people’s houses. At the time, the government estimated that up to 4,000 people died as a direct result of the smog, and more recent research suggests the real total may be double or even triple that.
BBC Newscaster:
It started on the fifth of December. Fog laid a blanket over the London area. The fog and smoke mixed together in a dark yellow choking mass. As the five days passed, the emergency built up. Ice and frost joined in to make matters even worse.
EV:
Wait, between four and twelve thousand people died from bad smog? Yikes.
ML:
Like I said, an extreme example, but smog in London was regularly pretty bad back in the day.
EV:
Okay, this might be a dumb question, but… what was it, exactly? This whole “pea soup smog” situation?
ML:
I mean, London smog was a kind of visible air pollution, just as we think of it today. It’s a man-made problem, really, that comes from a combination of vehicular emissions, coal combustion, industrial factories, incinerators, and forest and agricultural fires.
TH:
Today, most of the smog we see is what’s called photochemical smog. Photochemical smog is produced when sunlight reacts with nitrogen oxides and at least one volatile organic compound in the atmosphere.
EV:
Okay, but that doesn’t tell me that much. Can you give me some specifics?
TH:
So: nitrogen oxides come from things like power plants and factory emissions and car fumes. And volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, are released from all sorts of things, from fossil fuels to the solvents used in paint and ink to your aerosol hairspray.
ML:
When sunlight hits these chemicals, they form airborne particles and ground-level ozone—or smog.
TH:
Here’s a question I have for you, Maren. You live in Los Angeles, right?
ML:
I do.
TH:
Have you guys had any bad air quality days since you’ve moved? Like, super smoggy?
ML:
I’ve definitely noticed it a couple of the days that we’ve been here, but you can definitely see it in the air. It’s visible.
TH:
So what do you know about why Los Angeles specifically is known for being so smoggy?
ML:
Well, LA and the surrounding areas are sometimes called “the valley,” right?
EV:
Right. Ugh, the number of times I’ve been told I have a valley girl voice.
TH:
Like Cher in Clueless!
Emma:
As if.
ML:
Well, there’s a reason it’s called the Valley. Geographically, the city is located in a low basin, surrounded by the ocean on one side and mountains on the other three. The cold ocean currents depress air temperatures, which creates a phenomenon known as an “inversion layer.” In this environment, temperature actually increases as you rise in altitude. The inversion effect essentially creates a thin layer of air above the city that can’t easily escape from the basin.
TH:
And then you’ve got the insane sprawl of LA County, which means there’s a ton of cars on the road.
ML:
Right. Combine that physical environment with the city’s notoriously heavy traffic and other pollutants, and you basically have the perfect conditions for trapping air pollution close to the ground.
EV:
So it’s like a natural convection oven.
TH:
An Easy Bake, if you will.
EV:
Got it. So neither pea soup sky nor easy bake oven sky are anywhere near as delicious as they sound.
PART 1.2:
TH:
You know, I’ve been trying to describe to you what a Smog Collector really looks like, but it’s kind of hard.
EV:
The struggles of an audio medium.
TH:
From far away, a Smog Collector piece can kind of look like a charcoal rubbing, or like a print somehow made with a lead pencil. But when you get closer, what appears to be solid color is actually something else. It’s grainy — quite literally dirty. It actually kind of reminds me of, like, dirty linoleum flooring? Or how bacteria look under a microscope. Here, I’m actually going to send you some images of these pieces so you can tell me what you see in them.
EV:
Okay, let me see… Oh wow.
TH:
This one is “Forty Days and Forty Nights of Smog.”
EV:
Oh, cool.
TH:
So you can see, she’s got like a table set out, and there’s chairs around it, and then on the plates are smog… food.
EV:
I mean, yeah. I’m seeing like a tomato salad situation on that bowl, and then a tea bag in the teacup. Okay… knife, butter block, wow.
TH:
And “Forty Days and Forty Nights,” that’s actually the number of days that Noah was in the ark and that Jesus was in the desert being tempted by the devil. So there’s some play going on in that, like the temptation of sin and then the apocalypse.
EV:
Yeah, there is a total sense of humor. It’s like, my family often says, “It’s laugh or cry, and we’ve already cried.” Which just means that things might be bleak, but at a certain point you have to bring humor to a situation, or you can’t survive the situation.
TH:
It’s not just dire. There are levels to interacting with one of these pieces.
KA:
The humor, there’s kind of this weird experience, I’ve seen it multiple times. There’s a piece where it’s a dinner table set, where the plates and the food and everything is made out of smog. So people approach it and they look like these very lovely etchings. And I see the look and the physicality of the way they change when they realize what it is. I mean, obviously a lot of particulate is microscopic, but when you get an accumulation of that, you see, I didn’t paint these little dots on there or anything, this is really airborne particulate that has fallen on these. And the change that overcomes them… There’s a chuckle that happens after the horror. It’s sort of like these different emotions that a person goes through when they observe it. And I suppose because someone’s gone through a series of different emotions, and the humor, you need to lift them back up, I think.
TH:
It’s all about bringing the emotions back around. Because Kim feels the best way to induce change is to bring a kind of lightness to this heavy subject.
KA:
If there’s sort of a practical reason, I see the value of it in work and this kind of work is that,we certainly don’t want people to go away from messages and messaging that we’re communicating and feel this hopelessness. I mean, that, that goes nowhere at all.
EV:
So you said Kim wants to induce change. How is her work trying to do that? Is it through the messages of the art, or is there another dimension to it?
TH:
Well, that call to action is certainly inherent in the art she’s making. There’s something grotesque about creating a dinner set out of smog that does make the viewer’s stomach turn. But Kim is also trying to get the word out by making sure her art is displayed in public places. For instance, she did a series of Smog Collectors that were displayed in the waiting areas of California Vehicle Emissions Test sites.
EV:
Now that’s a really interesting place to put those — right into the belly of the beast. Art recontextualized into daily life gives this a whole new spin, right?
TH:
And Kim is also actively trying to democratize the process of making art. The smog collector process is replicable, and she’s big into using is as a teaching moment – in classes and communities.
KA:
I get a lot out of it.
EV:
A woman after my own heart.
KA:
I do want to say, I think the projects have to be a little difficult. They gotta be difficult. They just have to have a little bit of level of skill set that somebody’s got to learn to do it. That kind of absorbed understanding, that sort of intellect-with-emotional, isn’t going to happen if it’s just too easy. I do a lot of different workshops on a lot of different subjects, but we always have to start with a conversation and a dialogue about well, what’s causing this, and what prevents it, and what’s your understanding of it in your neighborhood? Like, really make it more specific to where you are, right? And that dialogue is really important because, you know, any image can be made, but we definitely want an image that’s been thoughtful to why the person wanted to do that. And it can be a simple image, but what was your thought process to get there?
TH:
Kim told me one story about a tutorial she taught that turned out very differently than she expected.
KA:
And the thing is, I’ve always kind of marveled when you get a group of people together and they’re doing a workshop together. In Boulder actually, a few students did the mascot emblem of CU and I was like, oh, I should have told them not to do that. I thought they were all gonna do cars and factories, you know what I mean? But what I understood from that is those kids that did that, with the CU emblem, they were talking about a sense of place. And that was such a turnaround for me as a person observing what was going on. Because this is about your grassroots effort, where you are, and how all this affects not only you, but your family, your close friends, your schools, your neighborhood. It required from me an open mind that at first I wasn’t willing to give.
EV:
To see it in your own image, or an image that resonates with you, it shows how art is deeply personal. And that’s central to Kim’s work as both a teacher and an artist: art is influenced by all the experiences and ideologies we bring with us when we look at a piece.
TH:
Excuse the awful metaphor, but no person is a blank canvas.
EV:
Right? Kim’s work is affecting precisely because she’s reaching out to us in the places where we live, and, crucially, breathe — whether the Smog Collector is situated at a dinner table in a gallery or in the waiting room of our local vehicle emissions testing facility.
PART 2: THE SMOGGY IMPRESSIONISTS
TH:
You know, Emma, we’ve talked a lot throughout this podcast’s life about the art of datafication. Representing data in art is something that I also brought up with Kim, too. She often includes, in her painting titles, a description of where and for how long any given Smog Collector was left outside to collect particulate matter.
KA:
Yeah, you know, it was funny, at Cal State Fullerton, uh, Jennifer Frias had organized this show of like, a survey of my small collector work. And I had never seen a lot of them all together through the years. And a representative from the Bureau of Automotive Repair came to the reception and said to me, “Oh, well, you know what interests me? I like comparing the locations and the dates of these pieces that you have.” Most people were looking a lot at the imagery. Right? And she was actually seeing that this became a comparative study over almost 40 years. They all say how long the plate was put outside, whether it was four days or 40 days or in between, and also where it was placed. So it does become like, in the case of her, she did see it as data.
EV:
Oh, that’s interesting. So, like, if I left a plate outside for the same amount of time in different cities, it could give me a sense of the difference in air quality in those cities.
TH:
Exactly. Or if you made one for the same amount of time, for, say, the first week of March every year for a decade, it could tell you something about air quality over time in that one place. And that representative from the Bureau of Automotive Repair, she was seeing that information within the existing pieces.
EV:
I love that.
TH:
And it turns out, Kim’s work is far from the only art we can use to understand the history of air quality.
EV:
Okay…
TH:
So, Emma, what do you think of when I say “impressionism”?
EV:
Ooh, I think of Monet and Manet. I think of blurry shapes that maybe make more sense at a distance than up close. It was a reversion of realism, right? How am I doing?
TH:
You’re right on track. The art world was in the midst of this era of realism and still life and portraiture, and then here were these painters taking their easels outside, using small, visible brush strokes to capture the changing qualities of the landscape, painting ordinary life from unfamiliar angles.
EV:
It’s about the ephemerality of light and life, right?
TH:
And to that point, for me, when I think about Impressionism, I actually don’t think about water lilies, as impressive as they are. I think about cities. About Degas’ ballerinas and bathers, Renoir’s parks and promenades, Pissaro’s paintings of the Boulevard Montmartre.
EV:
All images filled with life, and with the human. And if you stick with Monet, you’re probably thinking about his images of cities. Venice and Paris and London in all their changeability and blur. Like, you’ve got water in the foreground, a blurry bridge in the middle-ground, and the faint outline of parliament in the background. That beautiful light, those kind of fuzzy shapes and colors.
TH:
And you may not think it to look at them, but those images — Monet’s cities — are their own data set about industrialism and climate change.
AA:
I used to always say it as like impressionism contains elements of polluted realism.
TH:
This is Anna Lea Albright.
AA:
I’m Anna Lea Albright, and I’m currently a postdoc at Harvard Center for the Environment. And I’m an atmospheric scientist by training. I did my PhD on the role of clouds in climate change, especially clouds in Barbados and how they might respond to changes in circulation with warming and so on. But in parallel, I have a deep interest in studying art history and especially in studying skies in paintings.
TH:
In 2023, Anna Lea and her collaborators published a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found a connection between the changing stylistic aesthetics of impressionism and the changing physical environment.
AA:
About five years ago, while visiting paintings in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay, I noticed that some works by Turner, as well as Whistler and Monet, depict optical effects that we would expect from increasing air pollution. I knew that this was an existing hypothesis in art history. And so I started doing this project together with a professor at Harvard named Peter Hypers, who’s a climate scientist. And at the same time, we also worked with art historians at Musée d’Orsay including Fabienne Chevalier, and a professor at Boston University named Jonathan Ribner. And so our work just adds a bit more empirical evidence for this existing hypothesis.
TH:
They looked at 60 paintings by J.M.W. Turner and 38 of Monet’s, and using this data set, they basically argue that the world became blurrier throughout the course of the artists’ careers.
AA:
What I would say is our main finding is that changes in the environment through air pollution – so, changes in the visual environment – can act as an additional source of creative inspiration to these great artists.
EV:
That makes sense, right? The Industrial Revolution is belching smoke into the air, and it’s obfuscating pretty much everything.
TH:
The study found a 61% correlation rate between smog and contrast in the paintings. Using a mathematical model, they analyzed how sharp and distinct objects were, finding that less contrast meant hazier conditions. They also measured the amount of white in paintings, since whiter hues indicated more haze. Though of course that’s not to suggest that these artists weren’t doing something totally groundbreaking.
AA:
I always want to caution that we don’t want to suggest anything that’s overly simplistic or deterministic, as if artists will paint in a certain way when exposed to certain environmental conditions. It’s very much that they’re actively drawing inspiration from a changing environment. There’s a lot of interest in what influenced the creativity of these brilliant artists. And we make the argument that air pollution was an additional factor among many factors that played a role in generating new motifs and new ways of painting,
EV:
So why does this matter?
TH:
It adds something to our understanding of this art when we know that the artists themselves were aware of the changing environment, and that their paintings were in part meant to reflect it.
EV:
I can see that. There’s a sense of modernity-as-spectacle in these images that is on the one hand beautiful and exciting and on the other quite overwhelming, mysterious in its amorphous qualities.
TH:
Like, historians have often said that Turner’s work celebrates the glorious rise of England’s Industrial Age — that he’s depicting trains and railroads and docks with a sense of awe. Which is true, to a certain extent. But it’s not quite so black-and-white. Like the work itself, it’s hazier than that.
EV:
Take Turner’s famous “Rain, Steam and Speed,” which depicts the black mass of a steam engine barrelling toward the viewer. That train takes up only the right third of the image, though; the rest is a blur of hazy yellows and browns and blues, more the suggestion of a landscape than anything else. We see the light reflecting on a hillside below the railroad bridge, but it is difficult to make out. Both it and the clouds above are muddled by smoke and steam.
TH:
When you look at the image, with its stark and short foreground, we have a sense of the great speed of the train, how amazing that must have been in comparison to, say, a galloping horse. And though it’s hard to make out in the painting, we know there’s also a small rabbit or hare situated along the track, which emphasizes that difference between the natural and industrial world.
AA:
So I guess the way that when I present it more in like a conference or something, There’s this quote, when Turner painted this painting, rain, steam, speed, the newspaper, the times of London came out with this quote, whether Turner’s paintings are dazzling unrealities or whether their reality seized upon at a moment’s glance, we leave his detractors and admirers to settle between them. And in our work, we add a bit more empirical evidence for the latter of certain elements of realities seized upon at a moment’s glance. And I think there’s long been a debate of how much these paintings are purely imagined, purely a figment of these artists imagination, or whether there’s some grounding in reality, some sort of polluted realism, and we see that this tension was already occurring in the 1840s and even before, and so I think it’s an interesting debate to be in, um, and we are adding a little bit of physical and statistical evidence for a certain reality.
EV:
“Rain, Steam and Speed” does in some ways herald that new technology. But the train’s commanding presence also fills me as a viewer with a sense of helplessness about the coming modern age, the speed with which it is moving. By depicting this subject, Turner may be embracing change — but I think he’s also showing how discomfiting it is, in the contrast between nature and industry.
PART 3: SLOW VIOLENCE
TH:
In the Great London Smog of 1952, the health impacts of polluted air were rapid and readily apparent. People literally could not breathe. The air looked polluted and dirty. The daily impact of smog might feel a little less clear, though. A lot of urban residents are used to a little bit of smog in their everyday lives. It’s become the air we breathe, literally and metaphorically.
EV:
A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that an increase of about three parts per billion of ground-level ozone outside your home was equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes every day for 29 years.
TH:
Insane. And in covering that story, NPR noted that while most types of air pollution have been on the decline in the US in the last several decades, smog has been harder to control.
EV:
That’s in part because, as we have more hot days due to climate change broadly, the conditions become better for the formation of ground-level ozone.
TH:
Frequent smog days correspond with the development of asthma and emphysema, heart disease, neurological disorders and even cancer. Put it this way: smog is really bad for us.
EV:
It damages trees and plants, too. Not to mention its impact on wildlife.
TH:
This microscopic damage, which happens slowly over time, is part of what Professor Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” In his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Nixon defines slow violence as:
JG as RN:
“A violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”
EV:
One of the most insidious things about slow violence is that it happens to us in the course of our daily lives. Sure, we see it in the increased impact of natural disasters and the like, but it’s also present in the mutations of our cells and genes.
TH:
In the fumes I’m breathing in when I spray ants on my counter.
EV:
And in the higher rates of asthma among kids in polluted communities.
TH:
That’s part of what makes Kim Abeles’ art so affecting. Her pieces are very preoccupied with the domestic, and the way our homes can be the things that hurt us.
KA:
We feel safe in our homes. I was born in 1952, and that was such a decade that went on about cleaning the house and the wife is gonna just make this spotless place. I mean, any advertising you see from that era is definitely focused on that as if that was the only thing that we were suited for. And that kind of ridiculousness of that, in combination with all the toxic things that women in particular or anybody who cleaned houses for the wealthy had to use to clean these places, that wipes out this illusion of the safety in the house image, right? Those kind of hypocritical combinations, I think, are very potent to me. And also, women are particularly vulnerable because of our fat content, to absorbing these things in our bloodstream as are children.
EV:
It’s interesting to think how certain physical differences might mean that pollution can impact kids or women more.
TH:
Yeah, it’s another aspect of slow violence — the way it exacerbates the already systemic injustices among marginalized populations. It’s the presence of incinerators and other major pollution-creators in poor neighborhoods over rich ones. It’s the damage done to the bodies of construction workers and farmers and other physical laborers. It’s the way women are damaged by cleaning products formulated and sold to them by men.
INTERFERENCE 2: “I CAN’T BREATHE”
JG:
Hey guys, can I take a second to interfere with this conversation?
EV:
Sure, Jen — what’s up?
JG:
Since we’re talking about slow violence and the unequal impacts of climate change, I wanted to jump in and talk a little bit more about racism in relation to climate change. And, more specifically, about one air-related slogan in particular: “I can’t breathe.”
TH:
You know, in 2014, in the aftermath of Eric Garner’s murder, the linguist Ben Zimmer wrote a piece for Wired analyzing what makes that phrase so potent. He wrote that to chant those words in the context of a protest, with thousands of others doing the same, is an act of radical empathy and solidarity. “It is a kind of rhetorical tribute to inhabit his subject position,” he writes.
EV:
And Zimmer also writes about the many metaphorical valences of that phrase, the way it’s been used to communicate the threat racial injustice poses to democracy.
JG:
And that’s all true. But it’s also quite literally applicable on a wider scale. Climate activist Leah Thomas also wrote a piece about that slogan, in which she examines the ways “I can’t breathe” is also a rallying cry for environmentalists of color. Thomas coined the term “intersectional environmentalism,” inspired by Kimberle Crenshaw’s legal framework of intersectional feminism, to amplify the connection between marginalized communities and the impacts of climate change. In her piece for Elle, Thomas writes that a majority of Americans living near hazardous waste sites are people of color, and Black Americans are “three times more likely to die from exposure to air pollutants than their white counterparts.”
TH:
Rob Nixon has noted how the phrase “I can’t breathe” has cropped up in street art around the world. In a presentation he gave to The American Library in Paris, Nixon showcased a mural in Cape Town, South Africa, that featured an image of an old car with “I Can’t Breathe” scrawled behind it. He notes that the wall separates a major roadway from a series of shanty communities located very close to a coal-fired power plant.
RN:
So they physiologically are subject to adverse health effects, but they’re also overpoliced like most poor communities around the world. And so this phrase, “I can’t breathe,” has different temporal dimensions. It’s about being exposed over the long term to the negative effects of toxic air and then also, more metaphorically, the idea of being strangled by over-policing.
JG:
It’s important, though, that we always really center the racial implications of this slogan. This phrase is important, remember, because it’s something that multiple Black men have cried out in the moments before their deaths on-camera. Eric Garner, George Floyd, and so many others. We need to take care not to co-opt and decontextualize that phrasing for our own purposes.
EV:
Right. And while Nixon’s definition of slow violence revolves around the environment, we might also think about racism itself as a kind of slow violence — in other words, it’s not a one-sided equation.
JG:
For instance, you might say the repeated downplaying of Black women’s pain by white doctors is a kind of slow violence. It makes sense to me that over time, repeated instances of unconsciously downplaying Black women’s pain become visible in something like the high rate of Black mortality in childbirth, three times that of white women.
TH:
Or in later diagnoses of cancer, often after repeated complaints about aches and pains, resulting in higher mortality rates for that disease, too, among Black women.
JG:
And that itself is a kind of slow violence too, no?
PART 4: SLOW PROGRESS
EV:
You know, looking at Kim’s work, I think I can see how it’s pretty directly engaging with slow violence, whether she’s doing it intentionally or not. The very function of the smog collectors is that the particulate matter that creates the image is accumulated over time – and slowly. It’s a visual depiction of something that’s really difficult to illustrate.
TH:
That’s exactly right. It addresses one of the problems Nixon’s preoccupied with in his book: how do we make the invisible visible?
EV:
How do we create stories and images that do justice to the elusive effects of long-term, lasting damage?
TH:
For me, there’s one Smog Collectors series that really illustrates that for me. It’s a series of plates — you know, like, commemorative plates?
EV:
You mean the kind displayed in the china cabinets of grandmothers across America?
TH:
Yes. Well, Kim made a series of these plates with the faces of political figures across the post-war landscape. Most are American Presidents, but she’s also done Macron, Merkel, Putin.
KA:
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to be in this show at the Chicago Expo, because I had done world leaders in smog. So their images were in smog, the portraits, and then their quotes were from these climate summits, like some nugget they did, right? Like Macron’s, you know, there’s no planet B, right?
EV:
And what’s the deal with the shading on these? Some of the portraits are way darker than others.
TH:
Yes, that’s one of the things I really like about this series: Kim left the plates out according to how many pollutants had been released into the air during that leader’s tenure.
EV:
Ouch. I love that. It is a really interesting approach, right? You might look at them first and go, well, former President Trump’s plate is really dark, and therefore to a viewer, really visible – but that actually speaks to something really ironic about the presence. It’s a presence we’d rather not see. Not because of persona or politics but because of the quality of the air that it represents.
TH:
So while Kim’s work does primarily focus on post-war America, this series creates a really concrete sense of history. An understanding of a violence executed across time.
EV:
And again, the symbolism of the plate, of ingestion.
TH:
You know, these plates bring up a major issue for me. Whenever we talk about this stuff, whenever I’m thinking about environmental humanities, when I’m reading about climate change and solutions, there’s this kind of central problem that I really struggle with. We know that the vast majority of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions comes from a small number of sources — from industry, and from a few specific companies in particular. And we know that, while we can agitate all we want, we really need governmental intervention in the form of regulation and legislation to stop this. It’s really disheartening.
EV:
But I also think you can’t discount what you said before — that we can agitate all we want. Because that’s the kernel that really starts this process, right? Every movement in the world started with a small group of dedicated individuals, whether that’s Rachel Carson writing Silent Spring to raise awareness about pesticides or the Impressionists forming the Anonymous Society in response to their rejection from the Beaux-Arts Salon.
TH:
Kim said something similar.
KA:
Eisenhower talks about the plumes of industry as a majestic thing, these things coming out of industry, out of the stacks and factories. So because of the time period that I’ve grown up, I’ve gone from pollution being like a thing we celebrated to… Think just in my own lifetime, all those decades, how that changed. Right? So that is a point of hopefulness, I think. Like, these changes do not take place in a day. And I think our impatience sometimes pushes us to feel nothing’s happening.
TH:
Progress always feels obvious and like a given after the fact, right? It’s easy to discount all the progress we’ve already made — but sixty years ago, rivers were full of trash. Litter lined highways. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland literally caught on fire more than a dozen times!
KA:
Because I have seen, starting in the early 80s, right, doing environmental work, I’ve seen how this goes. I did always along the way think that these things were going to be changed by individuals and the communities around those individuals, is how I always pictured it.
EV:
Right. We can’t let ourselves live in the certainty and nihilistic solace of cynicism, as much as we might like to. Instead, we have to believe in our ability to make change — even when it seems impossible, as it sometimes does today. In her book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit argues against defeatism and for hope:
ML as RS:
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.”
TH:
And it’s important to recognize that the people we’re trying to influence, they’re individuals too — their minds are capable of changing, just like ours.
KA:
And the thing I started to really feel is, my wish to put more pressure on leadership and the leaders we pick. We can do all we want individually and in communities, I don’t want to negate how strong a neighborhood can be. But they’re individuals too. They need to play their role as an individual too. I just got to the point where I felt, it can’t be all only us doing it.
TH:
I see that principle in Kim’s work. As I told her at the time, I see that strategy of influencing the individual in her vehicle emissions Smog Collectors pieces, but I also see it in the exhibition she was part of recently at the United Nations. Reaching individual people where they are — including UN employees and visitors, who might well have the ability to impact real change.
EV:
It’s about holding our elected officials accountable — and holding ourselves accountable, too. Not just in terms of living climate-friendly lives, by biking and walking more, by composting, by, I don’t know, investing in solar panels. But also by refusing to give in to cynicism. By continuing to push for change on a broader level.
KA:
I have to say that I do think we’re at this just messy moment where there are solutions there. I think individuals really want to play their role. I think there starts to be an understanding that leadership and the way we vote is imperative to how this future is going to go.
TH: Because the solutions are there. We just have to make them happen.
OUTRO
TH:
The other day, writing this very script on the sixth floor of the library on campus, I pulled off my headphones in frustration and heard, over the sound of the air conditioning, a faint, high-pitched buzzing. Coming out my writing trance, I looked up and out the window, realizing I was level with the height of the enormous willow oak outside. All around the upper branches of the tree swarmed hundreds or maybe thousands of cicadas, their bodies largely a blur, giving the tree the illusion of vibrating.
You know, cicadas emerge in Tennessee every 13 years, and at the beginning of the summer, they were pretty much deafening. The sound of cicadas, both on campus and in my neighborhood, is deafening. When I tried to record the highway noise on a dog walk the other night, all you could hear was the cicadas. That ambient noise of climate change – it was drowned out by persevering nature. At least for a couple of weeks.
But even without the noise, the cars and the noise and the exhaust remain: and so does the haze and pollution they create. What’s in the air around us may eventually even affect these cicadas. Cicada patterns are notoriously hard to study since, depending on the brood, there are either thirteen or seventeen years between each emergence. We may not know for many generations how climate change is affecting their habits — slow violence, indeed. But we know that cicadas are emerging earlier every cycle, indicating that their internal clocks are being disrupted by climate change.
Cicadas feed on the xylem tissue of trees, which pulls water and nutrients from the ground into the tree — a kind of environmental straw. Over time, poor air quality and other aspects of climate change may well impact the cicadas’ nutrients. And who knows, maybe one day, there will even be a world where the cicadas don’t emerge. When they go really and fully quiet.
