“Productive Crossings”: Transnational Activism in a Shrinking World

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

New histories of environmental activism have increasingly focused on international connections between social movements. Sensitive to what Anna Tsing and colleagues, writing in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), call “productive crossings,” that is, how disciplines, identities, and strategies are entangled in productive ways, these three papers explore global connections among anti-toxics movements and campaigns. While pollution resulting from international military ventures and chemical enterprises is deeply embedded in the history of imperialism, the planetary impact of this form of extraction stepped up after World War II and again after 1970. The extraction resulting from these ventures has often been the health of people in local communities surrounding hazardous facilities, people who are, more often than not, made vulnerable by race, caste, economic, or other disadvantaged status. In this panel, scholars from the United States, the Netherlands, and Germany examine how an increasingly shrinking and interdependent world made traffic in chemical contamination and hazardous waste genuinely transnational issues. Concerns about chemical contamination spread widely and made cross-boundary contact between people in localities facing pollution both necessary and, at times, quite effective. Translocal environmental justice efforts have prodded national states and leveraged international regulatory bodies to increase oversight and win improvements in local conditions that without international collaborative pressure would have been unlikely. Slowly but inexorably, the backyard that once spurred people into action became the whole planet, and the scale of environmental activism changed too.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• “Ban the Burn:” The Trans-Local Struggle against Ocean Incineration - Dario Fazzi, Leiden University and Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, the Netherlands

• Global Ties: Cross-Boundary Environmental Justice Campaigns - Ellen Griffith Spears, University of Alabama

• Return to Sender? On the Challenges of Making Transnational Environmental Justice Work - Simone M. Müller, DFG Heisenberg Professor for Global Environmental History and Environmental Humanities at the University of Augsburg, Germany

Chair

• David Kinkela, State University of New York at Fredonia