Extra Credit Opportunity - Friday 10/14
Friday, October 14th at 3:15 pm:
Brett Walker
Regents Professor, Department of History and Philosophy
Montana State University, Bozeman
"THE TOXIC ARCHIPELAGO: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan"
Wilson 301
Co-Sponsored by Science, Technology, and Society (STS)
Brett Walker’s lecture, “The Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan,” explores startling case studies of industrial pollution – such as killer pollution caused by chlorinated hydrocarbon and organophosphate insecticide saturations; horrific poisonings from copper, zinc, and lead mines; monstrous birth deformities caused by methyl-mercury effluent; and debilitating lung disease from asbestos – to demonstrate that industrial toxins that flow through engineered Earth and its technological and ecological systems render useless academic ruminations on the differences between wilderness areas and cities, organic and inorganic, nonhuman and human, biology and technology, or even nature and artifice. Industrial toxins, when finding their way to human bodies, reject such boundaries – even placental boundaries – and so it makes sense that we should, too, when tracing them.
Everything on Earth, living or otherwise, is integrated into one interconnected, buffer-less web that is neither artifice nor nature. Some agencies are naturally occurring, others are anthropogenic: both remain relevant to understanding how industrial toxins function, sicken bodies, and cause pain. Walker argues that with the birth of the Industrial Age came the advent of Homo sapiens industrialis, a new breed of human utterly penetrated, engulfed, and transformed, often at the molecular level, by the engineering, industrializing, and poisoning of the environment in and around them. “The Toxic Archipelago” is the story of Japan’s place in this human transformation.