Futures after Progress

Front matter

FUTURES AFTER PROGRESS i Chloe Ahmann

Futures after Progress

Futures after Progress

CHAPTER FIVE Tick, Tick, BOOM - 209 A Black Hole - 239 EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments 255 Notes 261 References 299 Index 321

Color illustrations follow page 174.

Futures after Progress

Cy 5

FIGURE 0.1. “Hereabouts, industry reigns supreme.” Map of the South Baltimore peninsula by Richard Q. Yardley. Published in Griffin, Gerald. 1933. “Baltimore's Spreading Suburbs VII: Toward the South.” Baltimore Sun, January 8. Readers seeking a more granular map of the peninsula, its component neighborhoods, and key landmarks should turn to the color insert in the middle of this book.

[ PREFACE ]

The Dust

On January 1, 2016, the Baltimore Sun marked the end of the city’s “deadliest year.” In 2015, Baltimore counted 344 homicides—nearly 90 percent of them caused by gun violence.’ The historically high number of deaths drew condemnation nationwide. Decrying that “too many continue to die on our streets,” the mayor fired the chief of police. Maryland’s governor called the murder rate “disgusting.” And then-presidential candidate Donald Trump blamed Barack Obama, asserting that “Our great African American president hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!””

City, state, and national leaders had less to say when, just two years earlier, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published areport quantifying the health effects of prolonged air pollution. The report indicated that, in Baltimore, deaths attributable to long-term air pollution were four times the number caused by homicide.*

You would never know this looking at official records. There is not a single death certificate in Maryland that names “air pollution” as the cause of anyone’s mortality. Such papers name the “final” health “event” (heart disease, lung cancer, chronic lower respiratory illness), not its atmospheric causes.* Nor do regulators track pollution in a manner that invites an aggregate analysis. Researchers from MIT came to this figure through some arduous arithmetic, combining emissions from point sources tracked in isolation and pollutants regulated one by one.

Even still, there is much that their numbers fail to capture: such as the fact that, within Baltimore, there are twenty-year gaps in life expectancy between neighborhoods sited just miles apart.’ In the neighborhood that I know best—a heavily industrialized peninsula on the city’s far south side called Curtis Bay—the “average” resident will die before they reach their seventies.° Their lives end sooner so as to enable futures elsewhere. But, again, you would never know this looking at official records. You might register the deaths, but not the fundamental reasons for them, nor the steely xii © PREFACE logics that make them reasonable. Not the quiet, long-term forces that bind these foreclosed futures to the stable lives and secure worlds of privileged others.

‘This book turns a sharp eye on those hazy forces, and what it takes for people living with them to build better worlds. It is set in a time still flush with industrial exposures, but firmly after the future smokestacks once appeared to promise. And it is set in Curtis Bay: a low-income, multiracial (but tensely integrated) community of about ten thousand people where I have been working since 2010, and which just years before ranked first in the United States for air pollutants released from stationary sources.” There have been many noxious projects sited here over the past two hundred years—from quarantine stations built to contain the exhalations of contagious people to weapons-making that provisioned two world wars—but today Curtis Bay is chiefly home to fossil fuel transport, waste management, and chemical production.

‘These developments are not inert. Even children understand this. I first came to Curtis Bay as a teacher of six-year-olds who surprised me by skipping recess, because they found the thick haze made it hard to breathe, which made it hard to run. They lose parents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, grandparents, and friends to respiratory illness at higher rates than almost anywhere in Maryland.’ But if you ask locals why, you will find that few reply in terms of terminal events. Instead, many shrug before gesturing toward a surface in their vicinity —a car, a windowsill, a clothesline—and postulating that it must have something to do with “the dust.”

“Dust” is a perceptive name for the conditions of life and death in late industrial Baltimore.* In the 1950s and 1960s, when union jobs in manufacturing provided stable livelihoods for one-third of Baltimore’s workforce, residents would point to the red debris that coated their belongings and assert it was “the color of money.” Today, when local industry continues to pollute but automation means that it employs less than 3 percent of workers citywide, the dust is a sign that places like Curtis Bay are “neglected” and “forgotten.”"° Most residents these days scrape by in a postindustrial economy composed of low-wage jobs in food service, logistics, and health

* When I began this work, greater Curtis Bay was roughly 52 percent White, 38 percent Black, and 10 percent Hispanic or Latino, according to the US Census. I include these figures because race matters in Baltimore, given histories of racialized discrimination that meaningfully shape life outcomes. But I consign them to a note because this book treats racialization and demographic change with a finer grain than such snapshots allow, following the movement of people in and out of categories as well as places over two long centuries—through which race itself has been a fickle concept.

THE DUST > xiii

FIGURE 0.2. “The color of money.” A Baltimore woman wipes soot from the roof of her car in a photo dated July 8, 1967. Baltimore Sun archive.

care, and old-timers will tell you that the haze has thinned with the attrition of industrial lifeways. It has. But still, all manner of things hang in the air. Fumes from tanker trucks that fill up at the region’s oil terminals. Soot from coal piles that tower high above the local park. Emissions from a medical waste incinerator that burns biohazard bags from beyond both state and national borders. And clouds from chemical plants whose managers stave off inquiring minds with platitudes like, “Chloe, everything we make is dust.” It sounds gentle. And perhaps it feels that way next to the bang of a gunshot. While gun violence happens ina flash, the dust moves cryptically until it settles and amasses, only belatedly announcing the danger in the air—a displacement in time that Rob Nixon shows can make it hard to recognize a harm as violence." Belatedly: sometimes hours after an exposure; sometimes years after a factory shuts down; too murky to pin on any single actor; too distributed to point to as a cause. And too dubious, according to those same plant managers who, when they are not busy spitting platitudes, are throwing up their hands about how hard it is to know and, so, to act on air pollution. Not because they doubt the fact of it but because there is “so much” of it, far too much to “wrap your brain around,” one boss told me xiv < PREFACE

FIGURE 0.3. “Everything we make is dust.” Emissions from a local chemical plant. Photo by the Goldman Environmental Prize, 2015.

on a sweltering spring day, as he explained why regulations should focus on pollutants (molecular entities) not pollution (lived conditions). He said this as he gestured toward the irreducible haze of harmful air as if it were the essence of uncertainty. As if this air were not the clear sign of a problem.

Tucked into this man’s evasion is a presumption about what kind of certainty should count when it comes to making change. This book shows that presumption has a history. And it has challengers, including youth in Curtis Bay who have fought off new polluters on the grounds the dust is evidence enough. They understand the dust is not just what remains in the aftermath of violence. It is the mark of violence present and ongoing, and this much is clear without molecular accounting. They also understand that minimizing it can lead to quite explosive harms. In December 2021, as I worked on revisions to this book, a fireball escaped from a poorly vented tunnel at the area coal pier, sparking a blast that could be felt from miles away. The origin? Soot accrued on surfaces combined with methane gas, and bang: the dust blew up.” It was a grave reminder that what is ambient is not always gentle, and what is slow and enigmatic can move fast. Given the normalcy of the conditions that ignited the event, it was also proof that disastrous potential can grow with the everydayness of a problem. Finally, it was an expression of the fact that the residues of past extraction exert their force on futures,

THE DUST > xv though precisely how is hard to say for now.” Locals wonder if the dust that coated cars and speckled skin that day will coalesce into a health “event,” which might only then be legible as “cause.”"*

‘The coal pier disaster underscores how hard it is to make the dust political —how hard it is to hold the creeping, cryptic fullness of a problem at the center of one’s vision. We know this. Generations of careful work by critical thinkers from all over the world have shown that “staying with the small cause” (the gunshot, the chemical) is constitutive of modern knowledge.’ What we know less about—and what recent struggles in Curtis Bay invite us to consider—is how other kinds of knowing might rearrange this common sense. This has never been more urgent. As rivers dry and tempests brew and temperatures rise, as life spans shrink and corporate bosses call it all uncertainty, we need to recognize that claim as a deferral. There are some kinds of certainty we ought not be content to wait for.

‘There are ways of making change right now, within the muddle.

‘The campaign that taught me this, and that gradually claims the narrative reins in this analysis, emerged in Curtis Bay around the specter of another smokestack: a development that, if built, would have been the nation’s largest trash incinerator, euphemistically called the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project. The dust was everywhere in talk about this plant, and it became a way of making claims about the future, even as it persisted as a sign of futures past and too far gone.“ Would residents accept another toxic imposition? Could they reasonably desire something else? Some looked around and shrugged they could have gotten worse. Others hoped they might reprise the “good old days,” when the dark clouds signaled a complex prosperity. But the youth whose organizing won the day have taken on an atmosphere—an air, a mood—to insist that other ways of living here are possible.” For a time, the Fairfield Project coalesced a range of diffuse and enigmatic matters long at work in this part of the city. Debates about the plant were therefore never only that. They were debates about how to relate to the future from a present marked by doubt, experiments in hoping after former futures faltered.

‘The Fairfield Project was exceptional in its capacity to bring things to a head, and it serves as a point of convergence in this book. But I begin with the dust—and specifically with its failure to galvanize the same reaction as gunfire— because it suggests that some forms of violence are so radically distributed across time and space that they are hard to pin down as problems. Air pollution is one. Climate change is another. It is an open question how anthropologists, trained to learn in place and in the present tense, should approach these distributed conditions." The question is especially vexing

XVi < PREFACE because these conditions are not shared evenly. It is not everywhere that people breathe the thick exhaust produced from Fordism: that intensely American factory form, with its attendant promises of social progress.

But they do in Curtis Bay. As I show in the coming pages, Curtis Bay has been an infrastructural space for the past two hundred years—a vital cog in many vast machines—an¢d it holds their material remains. It is a six-squaremile site that has been terraformed to provide for the futurity of others. It has quite literally built the American dreamscape, even as so few here get to live that dreamscape out. And so, if we want to grasp the creeping, cryptic fullness of the problems industrial capitalism has left us all to grapple with, it is precisely the kind of place that should be at the center of our vision.’ You will soon learn that one cannot tell the story of this small peninsula without also telling the story of Baltimore City, American empire, or the multinational corporation. Nor could residents debate the incinerator without implicating all of them.

Every particle here is both vast and eminently local; at once present, prospective, and historical. Together they compose a place that is just as multi-scalar, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot might say: simultaneously a tiny, isolated peninsula and anything but.”° Read in this light, South Baltimore appears as both object and method for an environmental anthropology equipped to take on the distributed dilemmas of our time. The dust should therefore caution against any reading of this book as a bounded study of South Baltimore. It is a study from it."

I also begin with the dust because of its opacity. Readers seeking clarity on the chemical composition of the dust will not find it in these pages. You will find chemicals, but no attempt at parceling the sky in quite this way. One reason is that residents do not have access to this knowledge. There are snapshots, taken from single smokestacks and at single moments, but no catalog that adds up to the totality of the past five generations. The polluters there today are not the same as fifty years ago, and history suggests there will be different ones tomorrow. The records that we have are incomplete, as corporations only track what laws dictate they must restrict, and those laws concern a tiny fraction of the chemicals on market. And all of this assumes that corporations are fastidious, which you will learn is very far from true. There is, in short, no smoking gun that sets up a clean case. If gun violence suggests a palpable relationship between cause and effect, then the dust evokes a more ambiguous world. An ethnography true to this world must sit with uncertainty, not offer refuge from it.

I could try to piece together all the chemicals we know about into a catalog that holds those corporate bosses to account, and indeed I see real value in that work.” But it is not my work. I do not want to build a whole

You can’t see it. But it’s there.

A poison. Floating in the air.

And into our eyes, lungs — into our lives.

FIGURE 0.4. “There’s something in the ai Better Air Coalition, 1976. Smaller text reads, “You can’t see it. But it’s there. A poison. Floating in the air. And into our eyes, lung Enoch Pratt Free Library, Maryland Department, VF, Air Pollution.

Pamphlet published by the into our lives xviii < PREFACE composed of these component parts. I want to hold a problem-space adjacent to our “chemical regime of living,” which M. Murphy shows loses the atmosphere in its attempts to know the molecule, and doles out solutions that repeat this core misrecognition.” Ifit seems something is missing in an ethnography of the industrial surround that does not apprehend pollution in this way —the way that regulators know it— perhaps we need to ask about that nagging feeling. One core argument of this book is that working toward that kind of certainty is what got us in this mess, this air. That progress toward ever more granular modes of reckoning environmental damage is not itself progress toward environmental justice.

Instead, I want to take residents deadly serious in their insistence that “the dust” is where one ought to start a proper postmortem accounting of the industrial age. Not so much a reckoning of industry, which the dust suggests is very much still with us, but of the kind of certainties that industry once promised. Crystalline and comprehensive knowledge of the world, let loose from the stickiness of place. Steady movement toward a “good-andgetting-better life,” as a structuring “expectation of modernity” (if rarely a lived condition). Forever growth, but at nobody's cost.

If this book tracks the making of an ambiguous environment, then, it also asks how people plant their feet from within the haze kicked up by an aging industrial order: how they cobble together futures after progress loses its solidity. And from here, a quiet space suspended between worlds, it makes clear that the end of that hope need not be the end of hope as such.

I guess what I’m saying is that the future changes.

Angel, thirty-four-year-old White resident of Curtis Bay!

Angel brushed dust from her stoop with a few napkins from the diner and invited me to sit, apologizing “for the mess.” We opened our Styrofoam boxes and ate while her kids played. Maresa, Angel’s oldest, hung back while the three boys ran ahead, racing after lights fixed on the coal pier. It was an impossible target, but they seemed to take some pleasure in the chase.

Angel sighed. Kids are always chasing dreams.* She kicked a can and poppeda french fry in her mouth. “When we were teenagers, we used to sit here all the time and talk about how Donald Trump was supposed to take over our neighborhood.”

I must have looked incredulous because she nodded as she continued: “It was some kind of rumor. He was supposed to tear down all the factories and build up condos on the water. So for many years—and I still hear it— people have said he’s going to build up Curtis Bay. And we were going to become Curtis on the Bay.””

I think I laughed. It was early 2016, when Trump was in the business of taking over land, not civic institutions, but still the thought of gilded condos on this coast felt out of place. Besides the coal piles that blocked our view of the water and coated every surface with their ominous debris, Angel and I sat amid the quiet fallout of a few American projects: a landfill nearing capacity, several hazardous dumps, a crop of petrochemical plants, some scrapyards, a defunct military depot, a graveyard for old ships, a medical waste incinerator. Even the graveyard lacked the kind of past that might attract a spectacle. It was the silent resting place not for famous boats, but for

* Luse italics when I am paraphrasing an interlocutor. Quotation marks denote direct quotes or very close approximations.

those that “lived a life ofanonymous toil” until they sputtered to their end, right here, and stayed.° So I snickered at the image of this particular revival, bankrolled by this unlikely hero.

I did not realize, then, that Angel’s story was not about Trump. It was about the mess of want and mourning weighing down the dream of what “we were going to become,” for the “we” who “used to sit here all the time.” It was not about a speculator so much as it was the modest visioning of kids raised at the end of a world and trying hard to conjure futures in its wake.

Because I missed the point, I followed up on the wrong story. A few months after my stoop-side meal with Angel and before Trump’s electoral win, I read about a kindred dream in Gary, Indiana. “It was 1993,” reporters set the scene, “and the New York mogul” was promising to turn a spate of shuttered factories into a shoreside “Shangri-La” —to make the wasteland “great.” What followed was, we now know, fairly patterned: a big pitch, a big deal, a letdown, a lawsuit. Today, Gary has two garish gaming boats and three decades of hard feelings to show for the whole thing. Reporters call it a “cautionary tale.”* The caution? Don’t trust a charlatan. But also, check your sense of reasonable desire if you come from a place like Gary, Indiana. ‘The moral? The future is a losing bet in these United States.

I could write a version of that story that lets a reader sit in the space of knowing better, snickering at the prospect of a Baltimore revived. It would conform to a certain picture of postindustrial landscapes as emblems of the past, as spaces out of time.’ All the makings for that tale exist in Curtis Bay. This is the end of the line for discarded goods, sewage, ships, artillery, stable work, trajectories like progress, and a range of other Fordist fantasies. Toxic exposure has also meant the “erosion of human potential,” in the form of lives cut short and reproductive futures frayed.’ Things creak to their unspectacular conclusion on this small peninsula; it would seem to be an ending in itself. At least, it would seem to be a cautionary tale about chasing that twentieth-century dream of perpetual motion: the kind of place that critical theorists have in mind when they instruct us to “abandon the illusion of a future,” a modernist fantasy that only ever produced exploitation.

Now, it is true the future can be cruel. In the United States, its brutal pull was particularly marked in factory towns, where generations sacrificed their health to fuel the march ahead—perhaps nowhere more than here, in Curtis Bay.

‘This peninsula has long been organized by efforts to govern the uncertain future. When immigrants flocked to the nineteenth-century city, this place served as a quarantine zone where public health officials separated sickly foreign bodies from the downtown population. Later, workers here built ships and stockpiled weapons to arm soldiers bound for war, and defense experts used this place to stage supplies for a potential World War III. Today, South Baltimore is a low-income, multiracial community that hosts chemical production, fuel transport, and much of the city’s waste.

One thing these disparate efforts share is a propensity to foment local harms in service of a broader future stability—of progress—be it by protecting public health, promoting national security, or providing for a functioning state. Their cumulative effect has been a history of chemical exposure that cuts life short for residents who suffer heart disease, lung cancer, asthma, chronic bronchitis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) at elevated rates.” Poverty wages and poor health care make these conditions hard to treat. The Baltimore City Health Department reports that 5o percent of the deaths in this community are “avertable.”"° So if one wanted to prosecute the future, then this would seem to be a winning case.

Icould write a book like that—enroll in a project of devaluing futurity so much that one might sell it off for pennies to a grifter who says that things “cannot get any worse.” And Angel must have worried that I might, because, before we left, she held my gaze and said: Listen. “I doubt that Donald Trump is going to save the day.”

“But you never know. I wouldn't mind if someone came and cleaned up Curtis Bay.”

‘This is not a book about Trump. He is, as ever, a distraction. This is a book about the kind of future-making that coheres on the edges of grand narratives: the kind I missed in Angel’s memory that day. When I say future, I mean a sense of what is possible, worth hoping for, worth working toward, more than I mean some time off in the distance. I mean the future as a political object, and that means that abandoning it has enormous stakes.’ ‘That includes abandoning it to the sort of career speculators tasked with managing the future as a resource—statisticians and statesmen, tycoons and technocrats—who drive so many narratives about the world to come. ‘These characters have done enormous harm in Curtis Bay. What they have not done, though, is exhaust the future as a field of practice. Not even here. ‘This much is clear when one looks past the futurists and thinks, instead, from a set of speculative lifeworlds taking hold in their peripheral vision that are tentative, intimate, and everyday.

‘That these lifeworlds spring from a site more often figured as a relic does not mean they are outmoded. It means that they are prescient: little windows into the shape that hope takes on unstable ground, in an environment wrought by the brash confidence of prior expectations.

Prior expectations: let me sketch the “progress” that produced this environment and the “after” this book takes as its context. In these pages, progress names a grammar that organized the rise of industrial capitalism, even as it disorganized so many people’s lives. It is, by many counts, a global tale, but one I tell from the United States.” Here, progress specifically named two coupled promises. First, that one could expect ever-sharper knowledge of the future; this is progress in its technocratic guise. Second, that one could expect steady movement toward the good life; this is progress as a Fordist aspiration. Not everyone was wrapped into the “we” of these two paths. ‘They were raced, classed, and spatialized in ways this book explores. But progress was as much a structuring grammar for those it favored as for those it structured into early death. This much we can see from Curtis Bay. Yet it is hard to grasp if one adopts the futurist’s position because, as I will show, future-making in the United States has long hinged on managing doubt through dissociative projects that close themselves off from the mess of life as it is lived. The early chapters of this book track how producing sharper knowledge of the world to come has meant producing grave uncertainties about the air in sites like this.

Progress: it has given us the dust and disavowed the same.

Enter the “after,” less of progress as a lived condition than as an orienting premise whose contradictions can no longer be contained. Most of this book unfolds in this precarious present where, to borrow words from Zoé Wool and Julie Livingston, the formerly “durable, knowable, fecund” has given way to shaky ground, and the “instability of meaning” is endemic." It is a present unhinged from prior certainties, but not unhinged from futures.’ People talk about the future all the time in Curtis Bay. Over the years, I have met people there who cower in the face of cataclysmic hypotheticals, people who pine to revive what felt like better days “again,” people who hope against all odds that they can change South Baltimore. When the Fairfield Project wafted in, it kindled other futures still. I watched some locals court the plant in the hope it would bring back a whitewashed past, even “clean up” Curtis Bay—a hope that Angel, a White woman, had alluded to. And I worked with a multiracial group of youth who organized against the plant and for a future of environmental justice.

None of these were endings. They were prospective efforts percolating in the aftermath of industry, signs of life and hope in spite of damage. All of them were aspirations after progress. Indeed, if progress implies a steadfast march ahead, fueled by brusque conviction in one’s direction, then Angel's words were more equivocal: “You never know.” There is a different grammar of futurity emerging in this afterworld, where hope has dropped into a small-s speculative space. This is hope in the key of doubt, or, futurity recast in the subjunctive.”

‘The “subjunctive” is a big word for a modest proposition. That proposition is that conjecture has become a mode of life in late industrial Baltimore. I use the big word because it is, for better or for worse, the name for our most speculative grammar. We speak in the subjunctive mood to register uncertainty while voicing suppositions of all kinds—wants, predictions, hypotheticals, and so on. Consider the hedge built into the subjunctive verb form that begins this sentence: “Were I to get a job, I would crawl my way back to the middle class.” Often, English speakers tuck this hedge behind an “if” as in: “Ifyou build it (a condo, an incinerator, a just and vibrant vision), they will come.” More ambivalent than progress and even than futurity, the subjunctive concedes a speaker’s doubts about a given situation. But then it squeezes life into an actionable premise—a world “as if” —to focus on."*

‘The subjunctive is thus speculative in both senses of the term: it enables daily acts of visioning life as it might be, not merely as it is; and it works through praxes of self-conscious guesswork. The latter make the former possible. Put differently, the subjunctive tethers how we know to how we hope, through quiet premises that steady one’s terrain where knowledge has no solid ground.” In this book, such premises are not merely the building blocks of language. They are presumptions about the shape of reasonable desire in the moment between worlds.”°

‘They are, in short, the building blocks of politics.

Troot this claim in a late industrial place where doubt is the condition of, not the exception to, so many people's lives, and where many consequently live this grammar. But it may be true wherever people hope and plan in full view of uncertainty.”' About the path that lies ahead. About the substance of the dust. About how to plant one’s feet after old trajectories have capsized and produced irresolution. About how to live with the gnawing, unshakeable uncertainty that lingers at the end of things— progress among them.

Progress, you might recall, was an orienting premise, too: a common sense that commandeered an era. Whatever will come next is only just emerging, and many premises are inchoate at once.? Slowing down and taking stock before one calcifies into a normal is therefore an ethnographic task of paramount political importance. It matters which hopes set the boundaries of the sensible and which get cast off as the stuff ofidle dreams.” It matters whose hopes appear reasonable—and we might even ask if reasonable is what we want to be, as we set off from this world and work to seed a better one.