{"id":69585,"date":"2017-01-04T09:53:44","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T14:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=69585"},"modified":"2017-01-06T13:54:08","modified_gmt":"2017-01-06T18:54:08","slug":"how-stories-of-extreme-pollution-may-undermine-environmentalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2017\/01\/04\/how-stories-of-extreme-pollution-may-undermine-environmentalism\/","title":{"rendered":"How Stories of Extreme Pollution May Undermine Environmentalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Work in Progress<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Why do people sometimes resist remediation of pollution in their own backyards? Conventional academic wisdom suggests that it is\u00a0because they are afraid of losing their jobs, but my recent research<\/a> in La Oroya, Peru, questions this dominant framework.<\/p>\n

Photo by Pamela Neumann.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Since 1922, La Oroya has been home to three refineries for processing lead, copper, and zinc, and\u00a0a lead smelter owned until recently by a company called Doe Run Peru.\u00a0In the late ’90s, several scientific studies<\/a>\u00a0demonstrated dangerously high lead levels among the town\u2019s children.<\/p>\n

The findings\u00a0drew extensive attention from the media,<\/a>\u00a0but not the kind that some residents appreciated.\u00a0Tania, a local schoolteacher told me, \u201cIn the media there are these ideas that we are nothing but a bunch of slow, sick, contaminated people, but they don\u2019t pay any attention to how some students are very high performing.\u201d Elena, a 45-year old shop owner, agreed, saying: \u201cOf course there are sick children everywhere, slow children, just like in your country [referring to the United States]. But we have children who are doing well, we have professionals, professors.\u201d<\/p>\n

School teachers and principals took pride in the achievements of their students, which they felt were ignored in the rush to paint La Oroya as nothing more than a town full of \u201cmongolicos\u201d (a local term for people who have Down\u2019s syndrome or are disabled). In seeking to defend their town\u2019s identity against a barrage of negative media coverage, some residents denied that the contamination was a problem at all. \u201cLook at all the awards we\u2019ve won,\u201d one principal told me, pointing to a row of trophies on the wall. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t have done this if the contamination was really a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response to the media portrayals, many residents\u00a0became reluctant to protest against the pervasive lead contamination because doing so affirmed negative stories\u00a0about their town\u2019s identity.\u00a0Residents weren’t protective of their jobs, they were protective of their town and of their own reputation as “normal” and “good,” not a place full of “mongolicos.”<\/p>\n

These findings suggest that heavy-handed exposes of polluted cities and towns might do harm as well as good. Environmental activists might be better served to find a balance between condemning pollution\u00a0and uplifting the places and people who are its victims.<\/p>\n

Pamela Neumann, PhD<\/a><\/em>\u00a0is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University.\u00a0A longer version of this post can be found at Work in Progress<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Work in Progress. Why do people sometimes resist remediation of pollution in their own backyards? Conventional academic wisdom suggests that it is\u00a0because they are afraid of losing their jobs, but my recent research in La Oroya, Peru, questions this dominant framework. Since 1922, La Oroya has been home to three refineries for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":69587,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12508,329,2123,283,1969,76],"class_list":["post-69585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-activismsocial-movements","tag-emotion","tag-environmentnature","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-stigma","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2016\/11\/7.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69585"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69679,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69585\/revisions\/69679"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}