Texas Observer: “Every so often, an alarm would sound, indicating that something, somewhere, had leaked. Some families retreated into the clubhouse until the air had cleared of the unidentified particulate matter, but most simply carried on with their picnics. “Honestly, I didn’t really think that much about whether there was any danger,” Laura remembers. “It was just normal.”
When I ask my grandfather how many of his co-workers died during his time in Deer Park, he says he doesn’t know. He remembers cases of liver cancer, lung cancer, and more. “Who knows, maybe they didn’t wear their mask all the time,” he says, with a shrug. “I couldn’t even say that [the chemicals] caused the cancer, ’cause I don’t know. But when you work around all those chemicals, and you breathe a lot of it, it’s not good.”
To outsiders, including myself, my relatives’ ambivalence towards their chemical environment may seem strange, even absurd. It wasn’t until I began to study the issue as an environmental sociology student that I learned that this confusion is not a fluke.
Of course, there is an economic incentive to ignore the threat of leakage: Wages from the petrochemical plants put food on the table. But Javier Auyero, professor of Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas, and Débora Swistun, an environmental sociologist in Buenos Aires, propose a thornier explanation. Their research examines Flammable, an aptly named Argentinian shantytown mired in the waste of the country’s largest petrochemical facility. Much like in Deer Park, residents’ concern about pollution there was frayed with doubt and denial, the researchers found. They named the phenomenon “toxic uncertainty.””