On Not Seeing Like a State: Ignorance Production at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management

• In Event: Institutions and Ignorance: New Directions in the Political Economy of Science

Abstract

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management lists 440 parcels on its hazardous site list. These are sites that the agency has determined are known or suspected of containing chemical or other environmental hazards and that pose or may pose a risk to the environment and human health. Evidence dredged from historical manufacturing directories with the aid of new computational techniques reveals 6,651 sites of industrial production that have operated in Rhode Island over the past six decades, between 1953 and 2015. About 97% of these industrialized lands are former or “relic” manufacturing sites, occupied by other, non-industrial uses today. So while industry has all but left the state, many of the hazardous materials those processes would have generated likely remain behind, unacknowledged, unmonitored, unstudied. Building on research from the rapidly growing field of Ignorance Studies, this paper attempts to make sense of the vast knowledge gap that exists between what state agencies know or think they know about contaminated lands in their jurisdiction, and the historical record of potentially contaminated sites. It focuses on transactions for land conducted through private real estate markets. I follow the regulatory and legal processes through which former industrial sites are bought and sold and the semi-private knowledge about the presence or absence of contaminated soil and water that is produced through EPA-mandated Phase I and Phase II site assessment practices.

Author

• Scott Frickel, Brown University