The Environmental Justice Fight that Never Happened in Monsanto, Illinois: PCBs and Material Culture’s Corporate Capture

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

Abstract

St. Louis—positioned by historian Walter Johnson as the violent “heart” of America as a staging post for imperial expansion and profiting from its impoverished Black residents (Johnson, 2020), yet again, provides the substrate to reconfigure late-stage capitalism’s conditions through toxic delays and toxic unknowing. Or, better put, the city illuminates the environmental justice fights that never happened in the East St. Louis town of Monsanto, Illinois (known today as Sauget). Counter to the often-celebrated Warren County, North Carolina, the place referred to as the origin place of the environmental justice movement, East St. Louis, held the same corporate landlord, Monsanto Chemical Works (Spears, 2014). Moreover, East St. Louis produced half the supply of the nation’s toxic PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls; yet, while Warren County serves as an exemplar of EJ fights won, East St. Louis remains, unmitigated, unmediated, and mostly unknown. Situating the narratives of the battle that was never fought—from Monsanto’s founders and the regular residents of Sauget (Monsanto, Illinois), against the Black activists whose voices remain silenced and the locals whose lives and health bear the burden of the safety of others, this research explores a series of decisions made by the corporation from 1935 to 1968 to suppress any efforts to amend the environmental injustices in East Louis. One compound, PCBs, resisted and still resists today's legal fights and environmental justice positionings, which are now common to late-stage capitalism's chemical "sacrifice zones" (Lerner, 2010). As Monsanto’s corporate methods shaped and regulated Aroclor PCBs, and made them coveted as durable, modern chemical compounds, including within a nation's electric grid needs, commercial fireproofing's material desires, and housing booms building code requirements, these substances embody the issues underlying corporate power in a nation economically bound to and reliant upon the synthetic chemical industry.

Author

• Jessica Varner, University of Pennsylvania