Abstract
In an attempt to disprove the toxicity of the incinerator ash that the international shipping company Coastal Carriers was attempting to dump in the city of Gonaïves, Haiti in January 1988, company president John Patrick Dowd stuffed a handful of the ash in his mouth. To the group of environmental activists, dock workers and local press who were gathered for this demonstration, he called out, ‘See, it's edible! No danger … That's how worried I am about its toxicity’ (p. 83). The absurdity yet vividness of this scene is just one of many ways that Simone Müller expertly depicts the bizarre, complex story of the Khian Sea, a ship that wandered endlessly across the globe looking for a place to dump its cargo of incinerator ash. The ash was once municipal waste from the city of Philadelphia, burned with the intention of transporting it to the Bahamas to be used as fill for land reclamation (p. 39). Yet when Bahamian officials refused the Khian Sea's entry at the last minute (p. 45), this kick-started a hazardous waste odyssey that would last 2 years (16 if you count the time it took for part of the ash disposed of in Haiti to make its way back to the United States). After being rejected by numerous countries, all the while becoming an international symbol for the growing global problem of hazardous waste, the ship's ash ultimately ended up almost exactly where it started in Pennsylvania. But along its journey, it ‘left traces all around the globe’ (p. 156): traces in the physical form of unloaded ash, in the emergence of an international governance system around hazardous waste, in the environmental justice networks that had formed to protest this toxic ship, in local and national political repercussions, and in the lives of everyone who had become entangled in the Khian Sea's journey.
The Toxic Ship guides the reader from the origins of hazardous waste as an intimately domestic issue to its global reaches. Through extremely thorough historical research and engaging prose, thick with keen observations and maritime metaphors, Müller portrays the gripping narrative of the Khian Sea's voyage. Chapter 1 offers an insightful urban and social history of Philadelphia, explaining how a long history of waste mismanagement snowballed into a local waste crisis. It also introduces the difficulties that came with developing a national regulatory system of waste management and environmental protection – a system that was sure not to please everyone. Chapter 2 details how and why it was decided initially to dump the incinerator ash in the Caribbean, addressing the deeper undercurrents of colonialism and postwar development ideas that came with this decision. In Chapter 3, the perspective is shifted to the rise of resistance movements in the Caribbean (especially Panama and Haiti) against the dumping of the incinerator ash. Chapter 4 dives into the scientific debates underpinning different arguments about the toxicity of the Khian Sea's ash, indicating more broadly how notions of risk and toxicity were discursively constructed and often took advantage of grey areas not yet conclusively investigated by fields like environmental toxicology. Chapter 5 zooms in on a meeting in July 1988 of the House Government Operations Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources Subcommittee. Endless disagreements over notions like ‘prior informed consent’ reflect a larger debate in the field of environmental policy in the 1980s over ‘the trade-offs between environmental protection and economic growth’ (pp. 105, 108). Chapter 6 zooms out to the international regulatory arena, explaining how the Basel Convention (1989) and Bamako Convention (1991) ultimately came into being and particularly emphasising the critical role of Greenpeace's activism in fostering these negotiations and pushing for justice on the part of Global South countries. Chapter 7 rounds off the story by coming full circle; the ash that was partially dumped in Gonaïves ultimately made its way back to the United States. Here, Müller also challenges the argument that the Basel Convention can be considered a ‘watershed’ agreement, rather detailing how national debates over its implementation led to its impact being somewhat anticlimactic. The historical narrative concludes with insightful reflections on the ‘mutability and mobility’ of hazardous waste in the last decades, and how to live with toxic legacies inherited from the past (pp. 159, 166).
Despite the potential for the dizzying array of companies, governmental departments, conventions, activist groups, scientific entities and individuals involved in the Khian Sea controversy to make this ‘story of ambiguities’ (p. 159) a confusing one, The Toxic Ship manages to tell a clear, concise tale. It does so by taking care to approach what is essentially one story from several thematic perspectives: a water's history beginning with the protection of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers and ending with the probably illegal dumping of the remainder of the Khian Sea's ash somewhere in the Indian Ocean, the urban and social history of key localities like Philadelphia and Gonaïves, the scientific history of legislation around hazardous waste, a regulatory perspective analysing the development of international agreements like the Basel and Bamako conventions, and an environmental justice perspective on the deeply historical power imbalances between the Global North and Global South. In doing so, Müller elucidates a deep understanding of the multiplicity of global forces that influenced the mysterious journey of the Khian Sea. All the while, the materiality and tangibility of the toxic ash is a recurring theme that continuously grounds the story and reminds the reader of its residue across the globe, a stark reminder of the many more hidden and uncovered legacies of hazardous waste that remain.
Comprehensive as this historical narrative is, an aspect of its analysis I find to be somewhat wanting is how Müller approaches the perceived irony found when juxtaposing the actions of Philadelphia's first African American mayor Wilson Goode and the fact that Philadelphia is a city with a large African American population with the fact that the toxic waste was being dumped in ‘ethnically similar places in the Caribbean and West Africa’ (p. 162). This supposed irony is implied several times (pp. 21, 146, 162) rather than outright explained, but I assume it poses a question along the lines of: should there have been more solidarity between these ‘ethnically similar’ groups? An opportunity was missed here, in my view, to dig deeper into existing discussions about the tension between systemic racism in the United States and global systems of racism between the global North and global South. While Müller's research unearthed evidence that activists from the greater Caribbean stated their disappointment at the lack of an ‘ethnic alliance’ with Philadelphia, there remains room for a less simplified analysis concerning the solidarity between non-white people from such economically, culturally and politically different national contexts. Scholars of global environmental justice history like David Naguib Pellow, or even more public contemporary debates about identification and solidarity between groups across the globe, have done the important work of exploring the entangled relationship between the hierarchy of nation-states (particularly US imperialism), extraction and racial and class hierarchies in the context of a global capitalist system. 1 Including such debates would have provided the basis for a more nuanced analysis – rather than an open-ended question – about the complexity of environmental racism from a global perspective.
This aside, The Toxic Ship is a powerful addition to the growing body of scholarship working at the critical intersection of environmental and maritime history. It certainly also belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the globalising environmental movement at the end of the twentieth century, the history of maritime laws and conventions, the global waste trade, (inter)national systems of environmental governance, global activist networks, environmental justice and neocolonialism in the late twentieth century.
