A Need For an Abolitionist Strategy

This strategy was put together alongside our colleagues Dr Patrick Williams and Dr. Kavian Kulasabanathan, working with Araceli Camargo and Daniel Akinola-Odusola.

Brief History of Right To Pollute

Defining 

Pollution in English is generally defined along the lines of harmful substances introduced into the environment (compared with ‘contamination’). Ambiguity can emerge given that some substances have thresholds or ranges for which they cause harm or could be deemed to be ‘harmful’--and these thresholds and ranges can vary according to context. UK legislation defines ‘pollution’ in the Pollution Prevention and Control Act 1999, with updates in the Environment Act 2021, as:

(2) In this Act—

“activities” means activities of any nature, whether—

1. industrial or commercial or other activities, or

2. carried on on particular premises or otherwise,

and includes (with or without other activities) the depositing, keeping or disposal of any substance;

“environmental pollution” means pollution of the air, water or land which may give rise to any harm; and for the purposes of this definition (but without prejudice to its generality)—

1. “pollution” includes pollution caused by noise, heat or vibrations or any other kind of release of energy, and

2. “air” includes air within buildings and air within other natural or man-made structures above or below ground.

(3) In the definition of “environmental pollution” in subsection (2), “harm” means—

1. harm to the health of human beings or other living organisms;

2. harm to the quality of the environment, including:

   1. harm to the quality of the environment taken as a whole,

   2. harm to the quality of the air, water or land, and

   3. other impairment of, or interference with, the ecological systems of which any living organisms form part.

The Right to Pollute is a societal framing and infrastructure that sees pollution as an inevitability of society, particularly by larger, high-consuming, industrial entities such as factories, construction, and transport. The Right to Pollute is not equitable both in how these larger entities are licensed to pollute more while individuals and households are more strongly encouraged to reduce pollution, sometimes by policy and law. In this framing, if you are perceived to contribute more to society, you have more rights on how much pollution you can afford to produce.

The legal history of Right to Pollute policies relies on what is referred to as “assimilative capacity,” a scientific concept that underpins the theory that environments can handle a specific amount of contaminants before harm occurs.

Considerations For Right to Pollute Policies 

1. There is an innate understanding (or compromise) that Nature should endure a specific amount of damage before a recognition of harm is acknowledged.

2. Who is defining the meaning of “harm” in this case? It is not the Water, Air, or Land, nor is it the people that interact with them.

3. Can harm be defined or the threshold identified with accuracy? In other words, the thresholds of harm are arbitrary and driven by the cognitive framings of the scientists. Harm as a concept is quite personal and its threshold should be defined by those who the harm is being inflicted on, not the harmer.

4. Science without moral instruction can and does cause violence, as is the case of assimilative capacity. This term has been used to justify the pollution of our habitats as it gives the industry the ability to define what harm is, not the people nor the Nature they are damaging.

5. This perspective also erases the pathways of consent. The Beingness and Personhood of the habitats that are harmed are not taken into consideration. Therefore, these policies do not reflect their consent to harm as well as the consent of the People and other non–human Beings who live in the habitat. Their voices of what is “harm” are completely ignored or lost when they protest against the contamination.

Pay to Pollute

A financial settlement for pollution, whether court-mandated or out-of-court, might be less than the profits made by polluting and/or might not include a provision to stop polluting. Consequently, it is cheaper to continue making profits from pollution while paying financial penalties, in effect being an opportunity to pay in order to pollute. For example, Volkswagen’s financial viability was never in question despite having lied about emissions from their vehicles. The equations change if leaders of the polluter face personal fines or jail time–or if the financial penalties increase each time to the point that the polluter cannot afford to pay.

Carbon offsets or greenhouse gas offsets are a similar ‘pay to pollute’ principle. Whatever price an airline ticket or train ticket is, some people can afford it and some cannot. An increase in the ticket price, for offsets or a pollution clean-up fund or another mechanism, means that fewer people can afford the ticket, but many people still can. The more someone can afford to pay for a plane or train ticket, the more that person can afford to pay to pollute. Alternatives include investing in less polluting transportation over the entire life cycle alongside cultural and technological changes to support lifestyles requiring and desiring less travel, as long as the alternatives to travel do not create more life-cycle pollution.

See one UK survey https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123416000727 

The Need

Based on the past studies, we have identified the following list of needs within the environmental justice movement.

1. The majority of the justice is centred around lawsuits which financially compensate communities affected, however the communities are still left with the poor health effects. Therefore, there is a need to look beyond lawsuits and into health reparation, health justice, and legal mechanisms for pollution prevention. What this looks like should be community specific, here are some examples:

1. Actions that prevent pollution to avoid adverse health impacts

2. Health centres that specialise in air pollution effects

3. Specialised research centres that look at healing techniques for those affected by air pollution. 

4. Community led educational learning programmes on data, effects of air pollution, and key vocabulary related to clean air policies. 

2. The centering on lawsuits rather than health justice, means that communities that live within proximity of an industrial site experience disproportionate levels of cardiovascular, respiratory, and educational disorders, as well as cancers, while lacking mechanisms to prevent pollution.. 

3. Whilst there is a lot of information on how air pollution creates disease, we are missing information on how air pollution reduces quality of life on a day-to-day basis. This includes identifying symptoms such as headaches, nausea, fatigue, nose bleeds which can reduce a person’s quality of life. Preventing them from engaging with family, friends and community, requiring more sick days which can affect household income, and generally feeling like home is a place of stress. 

1. Symptoms are the only way that the lived experience is affected. We must also consider how people are affected by not being able to go outside, feeling unsafe in their home, worrying about the health of their loved ones, experiencing ecological death and changes to places that are ancestral, feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness.  

2. Mental burden: 

4. Currently in the UK the focus on clean air has been at the individual level (car use, type of car, cookers, and heating devices), this has erased the responsibility of industrial polluters

1. There are multiple top-down factors that contribute to individual choices, such as income, housing quality,  living near roads vs green areas, owning or affording a flat, proximity to resources, and policies. Therefore, only focusing on individual choices creates more health and environmental inequities.

2. This project will therefore focus on industrial polluters, who are systemically creating environmental and health injustices.

5. Whilst there are great air pollution monitoring devices that are free and available to communities, there is still a need for more robust infrastructure at a community level. This is to prevent communities being gaslit, contributing to the momentum of environmental and health justice, and preventing industrial polluters from lying about the effects of air pollution. 

1. Data literacy

2. Data collection methods that are cheap to free and backed up by science

3. Science and community collaborations to create justice based data analysis.

4. Community driven policy infrastructure 

5. Environmental justice literacy to enable 

A Need for an Abolitionist Strategy

The contamination of our air from industry is seen as a necessary output for economic growth, which we are told we need in order to provide society with necessary resources such as jobs, technology, comfort, and convenience. Due to this perceived value, industry is legally allowed to contaminate our air. To get to this point there needs to be systemic support. For example, the High Speed 2 (HS2) train is a high-speed railway line which is under construction in England, it has been given a narrative, driven by the government of environmental friendliness as it aims to be net zero and could reduce the need for air travel. However, on the ground it is a different reality, the construction itself, just like any other industrial project will create widespread contamination of air and water. Furthermore, many conservationists have highlighted the death of multiple significant habitats that deserve to live in their own right and are also necessary to help regulate planetary systems. 

Governmental policy has turned to science to create thresholds for legally permissible amounts of contamination. This is called assimilative capacity, formally defined as the theory that  “environments can handle a specific amount of contamination before harm is caused”.  There is a final factor to consider, culturally we have come to accept that natural environments should be a resource for human use and exploitation. This perspective is rooted in supremacy narratives that put humans at the top of the “totem pole” rather than seeing more-than-human beings as Kin.  

How governments arrive at air pollution policies and contamination allowances are dependent on science, governmental policies, and narratives that are culturally acceptable. It is also important to consider that currently policies and laws that protect polluters are all done without community consent. Therefore, in order for us to access  air that is nourishing and clean, we have to employ an abolitionist strategy. 

Another world is possible (an abolitionist strategy considerations) 

Abolishing at its core is the official ending of an event, law, policy, or even state of mind. There is also a political element to the word, that has its roots in the Black and Indigenous Abolition movements which ended chattel slavery in what is illegitimately known as the Americas. The contemporary abolitionist movement refers to the dismantling of the ‘prison-industrial complex’ (PIC) - comprising “overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems” (Critical Resistance, 2023). PIC abolition is centrally concerned with breaking cycles of violence, making legible where carcerality acts and is reproduced in proposed solutions to violence. Crucially, though, PIC abolition commits to being in perpetual practice of “rehears[ing] the social order coming into being” (Wilson Gilmore & Gilroy, 2020). 

According to the World Health Organisation there are no safe levels of air pollution. Given this fact, we as citizens and scientists can no longer show a permissiveness or a tolerance to air pollution. Therefore, in the context of this project abolition means the end of “Right to Pollute Policies”. We would also like to introduce one more factor to the abolition conversation, which is the spiritual. For many of us on this project, we belong to Peoples and communities that have been historically marginalised by systems of supremacy that lead to experiencing air pollution at a disproportionate rate. Therefore many of us carry a deeply rooted and even Ancestral need to abolish what has harmed us for generations. 

Many would think that science has to be politically neutral and therefore has no utility within a political space. However, science is a human cognitive output and like all other outputs it is intrinsically rooted in culture. For example, in western European culture, humans are put at the top of the cognition scale, therefore it has taken western science until quite recently to recognise that other beings such as trees and plants have complex intelligence. In contrast, many cultures of Turtle Island do not centre the human and long recognised not only the intelligence of more than human Kin, but also their wisdom and intelligence. We cannot separate science from culture. Additionally, science is a tool, one that allows us to systematically observe the world, so we can turn this into information for complex problem solving. 

Therefore, for this project we are going to use abolition as our strategy to create a scientific design that contributes to the abolition work being conducted by communities all over the world.  Abolition is a strategy that requires big mental shifts starting from knowledge roots, narratives, and moving towards cultural shifts that end with changes in the law. This requires time and certain considerations. Here we identify three, there are of course many more depending on your community and perceptions. 

Considerations

• 1. A Change of Mind

  It is now a widespread philosophy that Nature and its resources exist for human consumption and “progress”. It is seen as culturally acceptable that we must tolerate certain levels of harm as the reward is human progress and economic success. However, we know that harms like air pollution are putting everyone’s health at risk. We are living with higher rates of asthma, obesity, hypertension, dementia, and cancers all which have a link to air pollution and other contaminants.  

  To create an abolitionist strategy we must change our cognitive framing, where we see ourselves as separate and superior to Nature. We must also see beyond the creation of extractive economies and centre human health and dignity over profits. 

• 2. In Real Time

  One of the main challenges for communities confronting industrial polluters is finding data that tells the story of their day to day lived experience. Air pollution through its impact on health, immediately (first contact symptoms) and chronically (development of mental and physical sickness), the right to pollute enables the theft of lifetime - both in quantity and quality - from communities. This is why time-sensitive interventions are necessary now. Traditional legal approaches seek to gather ‘evidence’ - where what counts as valid evidence is severely limited - to work towards a hypothetical ruling in the future that may or may not happen. These alone are insufficient, as the cessation of the right to pollute must now - every day that it does not, is time stolen, and lives shortened.

  Therefore through this project we need to include the following questions; 

  1. What does it feel like to experience air pollution on a day to day basis?

  2. What if feels like to lose the ability to interact with their neighbourhood due to stench or fear of contamination?

  3. What if feels to lose Ancestral habitats due to contamination, what does that do to the body and mind?

  4. What air pollution feels like at first contact; itchy eyes, sore throat, nausea, chest tightness and so on. 

  There are three points of importance to further consider 

  1. Industrial polluters and even agencies set up to protect people (DEFRA, Environmental agency, Public Health England, councils) claim that “first contact” symptomology does not constitute poor health and often people are ignored.  This allows for the polluter to continue unchallenged. Therefore a clear definition of “poor health” should be established through this project to cover this part of the lived experience. 

  2. Due to the variance in lived experience each person in the community will experience the physical and mental effects of air pollution differently. For example, a person living in the neighbourhood who is also a truck driver could be exposed to other stressors that are amplified through air pollution. Oftentimes individuals are told that a polluter is under the “legal permissible limit”, therefore they cannot be stopped and worse their symptoms cannot be related to the air pollution as it is under a limit. Therefore, this project should include an updated definition of “susceptibility” and the need for agencies to hold polluters accountable regardless of “permissible exposure” as those are just guidelines not policies. 

  3. Finally, we should bring forward how the mental stress being experienced daily amplifies the physical symptoms.

• 3. We are Kin (imagining another world)

  Framing it in an abolitionist framework, we have to centre different epistemologies, which can seed worlds outside  supremacy. Many people are led to believe that we need to have contamination in order to survive as a human species. It is the collateral damage for “progress” which includes roads, science, medicine, ect. This of course is not true, as how can poison be a route to survival. This myth serves to conserve and grow oppressive capitalist systems.
  

  There are many societies across the world and human history that have not abided by supremacy and in fact centre Kinship. This requires seeing all beings as having life, autonomy, and imagination. In practice this means that there is no human centred hierarchy, instead there is reciprocity and symbiosis between all beings. In this context, worlds are created where Water, Air, and Land are not there for human consumption or survival, instead they are our creators, to be conserved and be in service of. For example, what if we could drink water from any stream and in turn all contributed to the health of every water source in our neighbourhood? Or what if we all had access to food and medicine gardens that also contributed to the regulation of neighbouring ecological systems?

• 4. A Change in Governance

  In order to abolish Right to Pollute policies we need to consider how we want to be governed. The Zapatistas, who are a movement of Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas, have a way of governing called “leading through obedience”. In other words, their governance structures are there to obey the will of all living beings. This requires humility, deep listening, and autonomy. We should ponder what type of governance both support Right to Pollute policies and what structures would support Right to Life policies. 

  This orientation to governance also demands us to ask - is the state a sufficient container to support Right to Life policies that enable such ‘leading through obedience’? If the state is, in Dean Spade’s words, a “technology for extraction”, an abolitionist approach questions the ultimate liberatory potential of the state, certainly in its current form. 

  Whilst we may not have the answers straight away, we should consider further questions

  1. What “Right to Life” policies really means within the violence of the state?

  2. How are we redistributing the resources currently upholding the corporate Right to Pollute towards policies and practices that uphold the Right to Life? 

  3. Who decides how this happens, through what mechanism? If the state - whether national or local government - continues to steward this process?

  4. What processes, mental frameworks, and methods are needed to hold the imaginations and needs of various communities as they transition to a governance structure that can uphold “Right to Life” policies?

• 5. Air should be Air

  We understand that, in order to re-establish “Air”, we need to ask for more than clean air, we need to consider that “Air” has had its beingness taken away. Meaning that they cannot act autonomously, they have been depleted of their original nourishment, and of course Air is sick due to contamination. In order for us to have “Air”, it will also include the abolition of war, prisons, capitalism, imperialism, supremacy over Land and Peoples. As all of these factors directly contribute to the pollution and dehumanisation of Air. 

  Additionally, we recognise that our advocacy for “Air” is a Liberatory pathway, leading us to a Kinship with Land - a Rematriation. 

  Kin-Centric 

• 5. Health Justice

  Part of the abolition strategy is that we are seeking health justice. This can include the following: (more integrated to other types of knowledge)

  1. Community health centres that highlight and support air pollution prevention. 

  2. Community health centres that focus on air pollution recovery 

  3. Community centres where people can learn about advocacy and create their own library of knowledge. This is to build community resilience, create mental support pathways, and build up knowledges. 

  4. Research centres dedicated to understanding the healing pathways for air pollution poor health outcomes. 

  5. An integrated approach