Metallic Ecologies and Toxic Forms of Life

• In Event: Ecosystems, Ecology, and the Boundaries of Life

Abstract

The city of La Oroya is laden with lead. Located in Peru’s central Andes, heavy metals from the city’s polymetallic smelter pervade its ecological surrounds and permeate the bodies of its 33,000 residents. The gravity of the city’s toxicity has made it an emblematic site for environmental health activism to dispute the ethics of harm underpinning Peru’s neoliberal extractive economy. Lead now also weighs heavily on the social body: the city’s now-infamous contamination has maligned the dignity many Oroyans felt as residents of Peru’s metallurgic capital and threatens the future viability of the smelter and life itself in La Oroya. As an Oroyan woman stated matter-of-factly: “If you don’t have lead, you are not Oroyan.” This paper examines how La Oroya’s smelter, and the incorporations of minerals its emissions entail, constitute an intimate toxic ecosystem for cultivating life alongside inevitable harm. For while smelting incarnates deadly assemblages of matter and meaning, Oroyans point to how lead also brings about life in presumed spaces of social, ecological, and corporeal death. Metallic ecologies thus constitute collective modalities of endurance within the material constraints of neoliberal regimes of extractive capitalism. How then do socio-ecological systems forged through toxic matter offer a challenge, or necessary corrective, to the politics of health and environmental rights that circulate the world today? What ecosystems warrant shelter from toxic exposures, while other socio-material relations toxic to life remain unseen or unaddressed?

Author

• Stefanie Graeter, UC Irvine