Social, technoscientific and politic struggles against PCB pollution in France: socio-history of an insoluble problem.

• In Event: Ecologies and Material Politics of the Inorganic: Rethinking/Reframing

Abstract

PCBs (polychlorobiphenyls) are one of the chemical families that have profoundly transformed the world we are living in. Environmental scientists and biologists established from the 1970s that these substances can be found throughout the surface of the Earth, including within living organisms’ fat where it accumulates. One of the main features of these major pollutants of the 20th and 21th centuries, namely their persistence in the environment, makes them an interesting object for STS: despite their gradual ban in the 1970s and 1980s, PCBs have remained the activators of a lot of knowledge production, many collective actions and development of environmental & sanitary policies. The links between these contaminants and the rise & deployment of environmental justice movement in the USA have already been studied. But there have not been long-term in-depth studies considering the simultaneous production of knowledge, rise & transformations of collective actions, construction of government tools, and development of public policies trying to define ways to live with this pollution. Additionally, this approach is interesting in the sense of studying the socio-history of an insoluble problem. Relying on the analysis of materials (archives, interviews and observations) collected from the actors who address(ed) the PCB-pollution problem (fishermen, decontamination facilities and their neighbors, scientists, environmentalist non-profits, state authorities…), I propose to report the history of social, technoscientific and political struggles that have been waged against this pollution in France since the 1970s, focusing on the characteristics and transformations of this battle which still appears to have no exit.

Author

• Aurélien Féron, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - CERMES3, Paris