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Chapter 1 Permeable Bodies and Environmental Delineation
Margaret Lock
The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. (Carson 1962, 197)
Traumatised environments
A group of experts speaking at an International Geological Congress in late August 2016 declared that the geological epoch known as the Holocene through which humans have lived during the past 11,000 years and longer has been eclipsed. We are now living in the Anthropocene, an era characterised by cumulative destructive human activity on earth itself, much of it seemingly irreversible. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty highlights the peculiarity of this new epoch: ‘the Anthropocene spells the collapse of the Kantian distinction between natural history and human history’ (Chakrabarty 2009). He bases this assertion on abundant evidence that, in contrast to previous epochs, humans are the primary force transforming the globe today, with enormous effects on human health and wellbeing. Conferences about the Anthropocene started to take place long before its formal declaration, and between 2013 and 2015, 27 had already occurred.
Numerous mineral compounds, including more than 500 million metric tonnes of pure aluminium, have been manufactured since the Second World War, much of which has sedimented into earth’s layers. Even more striking are ‘mineraloids’ – glass and plastics – 300 million tonnes of which are made annually and are present everywhere on the earth’s crust and in all the oceans. As each couple of minutes pass, Coca-Cola produces 9,000 new plastic bottles. Concrete, a rock of our own making, encases much of the globe. Our chemical footprint has accumulated worldwide as toxic waste, principally in the form of CO2, nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel fuel.
Environment – nature – is exhibiting all the signs of stress, trauma, toxicity and abuse usually associated with suffering human bodies – the ‘ruins of capitalism’, as Anna Tsing puts it, are all too evident in vast swaths of the globe (Tsing 2015). But geologists need hard evidence of an irreversible transition in order to identify a new epoch. Their decisions are pegged to a so-called ‘golden spike’ – a marker that appears in ice-cores, the oceans, lake sediments, and soils, where recognisable fossilised strata appear that can be hammered, sampled, and/or dug up. Such changes are known as a ‘time-rock unit’. Following much debate, the International Union of Geological Sciences agreed that July 1945 constituted such a spike – the day when the first nuclear device was exploded, leaving rare isotopes of plutonium distributed all over the globe, including Antarctica and Greenland (Biello 2015).
For more than a decade we have been living with another fundamental change known as the ‘post-genomic’ era. The human genome is no longer recognised unequivocally as the driving force of life, but rather as ‘reactive’ to environments external and internal to the body (Gilbert 2003). In other words, the very ‘nature’ of what it is to be human has been revised on the basis of knowledge, largely brought to light when mapping the human genome, with enormous consequences for understanding human development, health, ill-health, and possibly our very survival.
Anthropocenic destruction of the environment and its impact on human wellbeing is not distributed equally worldwide; its effects are scalar. Readily apparent in places such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, where children as young as eight spend their days breathing in toxic fumes produced by leather tanning, in other geographical locations, closer investigation is required to discern how individual genomes everywhere are responding to environmental stimuli affecting health and wellbeing. In April 2017, Greenpeace reported that research has shown that plastic ingested by fish is liable to end up on our dinner plates; plastic pollution in our oceans is now so widespread, it is becoming part of the food chain everywhere.
Behavioural epigenetics
In what follows, I first set out the surprising findings that emerged when mapping the human genome. These discoveries encouraged a burgeoning of research in the field known today as ‘behavioural epigenetics’, a discipline anchored by the impact of environmental variables external and internal to the body on human development throughout the life course, from the moment of conception on. The idea of ‘environment’ is apparently self-evident, so much so that Raymond Williams gave it no entry in Keywords (Williams 1983), although he describes nature, often associated with environment, as ‘perhaps the most complex word in the English language’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest definition of the word ‘environment’ appears in the mid-eighteenth century as ‘that which environs’ and also as ‘the objects or the region that surrounds anything’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Contemporary dictionaries include the following meanings: ‘The aggregate of surrounding things, conditions, or influences; milieu, the air, water, minerals, organisms, and all other external factors surrounding and affecting a given organism at any time and, further, the social and cultural forces that shape the life of a person or a population.’ Clearly, if the notion of environment is central to any given scientific endeavour, it requires delineation, demarcation and/or contouring at the outset.
Epigenetics is being heralded as a scientific discipline that may well transcend the reductionism associated with many investigations carried out in the field of molecular genetics. However, several social scientists have expressed concern about the apparent neo-reductionism evident in the majority of projects currently being conducted under the umbrella of environmental epigenetics (Lock 2013a, 2013b; Niewöhner 2011; Richardson 2015). Several of the illustrative examples presented in this paper make it clear that a tendency exists on the part of epigeneticists to systematically scale down and miniaturise what is delineated as environment in their research projects. This practice enables standardisation of methodologies, and makes it possible to carry out all-important replication studies. The result is that economic and socio-political variables that contribute in profound ways to health and illness are set to one side. This is in no way to deny the importance of the molecularlised findings as such, but to suggest that if the implications of these rich insights emerging in epigenetics are to be fully grasped, then limiting accounts to the effects of proximate variables on human bodies falls short.
Epigenetics is slowly exposing certain of the molecular pathways both external and internal to the body by means of which depredating situations literally transform individual genomes; findings such as these are regarded by many scientists and non-scientists as ‘hard’ data, tout court, and such molecular profiles will almost certainly become the first line of evidence to assist in decision making in the courts and by policy makers in connection with neglect, abuse and other forms of violence. The cases discussed below make clear how important it is that documentation of bodily epigenetic changes not be limited to proximate variables. On the contrary, when it comes to medical care, policy making and legal cases, economic and socio-political
