Imperial Fluorine: Documenting the Circulation of Forever Chemicals

• In Event: Residues, Traces, and Debris: Inhabiting the Toxic Remains of Empire

Abstract

This paper elaborates the political aesthetics of Forever and Forever and Forever, an experimental documentary film I am currently directing, which explores the relationship between chemical and colonial violence through PFAS, “forever chemicals.” Drawing on the work of Max Libroion, M Murphy, and others, it argues that the isolation and recombination of the element fluorine serves an allegory for the toxicity of late-stage American Empire. Like fossil fuels, fluorine was mined, processed, and released into the environment in the twentieth century through a constellation of colonial and imperial relations. Fluorine, the most volatile element, was deemed the “tiger” of chemistry by the scientists who attempted to isolate it in the nineteenth century. During the Manhattan Project, scientists turned Fluorine’s unique volatility into an asset, fusing it with carbon to create one of the strongest chemical bonds on earth—one that lasts “forever.” After the war, 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota engineered an industrial process to mass produced and disseminate PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” across the world, and by the 1990s they were in the blood of every human on the planet. One primary mode of dissemination was through US military bases, where PFAS was released into the environment through firefighting foam. How do we start to untangle the legacies of contamination and reckoning around PFAS that connect white, suburban environments in places like Minnesota to US imperial legacies in places like Guam and Puerto Rico? As the extent of the global PFAS catastrophe comes into view, this paper contemplates the out-of-placeness of fluorine as the residue of an imperial system that is coming to terms with its own endurance, its capacity to last “forever,” at the same time it faces decline. In exploring the friction between these two realities of permanence and loss, the paper (and film) take inspiration from James Baldwin’s famous lines, “For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.” Ultimately, it asks how we might make new worlds from the forever we now inhabit.

Author

• Morgan Adamson, Macalester College