Legacy as a Way to Understand Residues in Temporality

• In Event: Residues: Rethinking Chemical Environments - I

Abstract

This communication will focus on the path-dependence and persistence of residues, as matter out of time. More so than kindred concepts like temporality or history, legacy gives emphasis to the residual. Residues are what remain behind and remind us that with chemicals as with residues of the industrial age more generally, the past is always with us. The prior activities of human societies, whether two thousand years ago or two days ago, generate chemical residues that end up somewhere else, whether in water, air, on land, or in bodies. These activities concern not only materials but regulatory systems, which usually change by addition or modification, dragging administrative organizations and legal precedents interminably forward. Three examples illustrate how legacies emerge and endure, often complicating the present. First we look at how the community of a former asbestos production plant in Ambler, Pennsylvania is coming to terms with the economic and environmental consequences of its past. Our second example focuses on legacies that become embedded in administrative law by analyzing the complex and contradictory attempts to control chemicals through environmental regulation. The attempts by the EPA to implement of the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976) foundered in part on the glacial pace of targeting chemicals of concern and developing judicially robust rules. The challenge of environmental waste provides a third, and especially important, example of how unmanageable the past often proves to be. In all three, we are attentive to the ways in which legacy threatens to become destiny.

Authors

• Angela Creager, Princeton University

• Soraya Boudia, University Paris Descartes

• Jody A Roberts, Science History Institute