By Iván-Nicholas Cisneros

All that is solid melts into air: in Abolition Democracy 11/13: Abolish Oil, there is a moment where Reinhold Martin mentions how politics of air and water, while both are enmeshed with discourses of environmental and climate justice, do so in differing ways. According to Martin, struggles concerning air, such as those of carbonization and decarbonization, are less immediately felt than those concerning water toxicity.[1] To expand on this difference regarding degrees of perceptible urgency, it is useful to consider the Lakota phrase “Water is life.” Deployed by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the phrase found empathic audiences willing to listen, demonstrate solidarity, and more importantly, voice public opposition to oil infrastructure projects capable of inflicting harm on historically dispossessed peoples. While one is yet to encounter an equivalent air-related phrase capable of mobilizing publics like the Lakota saying, paternalistic climate denialisms like James Lovelock’s pseudo-scientific 1970 Gaia Hypothesis abound.[2] Urgent in this, is the fact that while air and water-related climate activisms share the goal of rendering realizable an environmentally sound future through pursuit of ecologically sustainable ways of living on this planet, air-based climate denialisms pushing back against the scientifically grounded reality that our consumption habits are leading to unreversible carbon-based ecological devastation are part of what makes the politics of water and politics of air different.[3]

Despite this difference, how might it be possible to erase these lines of outward duality separating the politics of air and water entangled with the exigent need to abolish oil and re-imagine political ecologies of gas-guzzling networks? This relational difference between politics of water and politics of air is perhaps one concerning what is immediately visible and what is seemingly invisible – distinctions concerning visibility and invisibility of toxically polluted chemical matter, one in liquid state (water), the other in gaseous state (air). Water is life, but so too is air. In discussing oil abolition, it is elemental we rethink toxicity in the flows of air we breathe and perceive of this as symmetrically dangerous to the presence of oil-network pollutants in our waterways and fresh water supplies; this is about taking what is solidly felt as dangerous to essential elements of human life and melting it to include vectors of air. In what follows, I engage in a reflection interrogating visible and invisible boundaries of the Carbon Empire and dimensions of oil abolition work framed in respect to lines and spaces. I do so with aims of assisting in the reframing of public perception concerning the politics of air – to make perceptible the threatening presence of air toxicity and its intertwined nature within oil networks in ways we are seemingly unable to visibly absorb.

Visible and invisible battles against oil toxicity are struggles concerning lines and spaces. They may be found in two-dimensional line items of stop-work orders against environmentally catastrophic infrastructure projects, observed in linear barricades spatialized towards deterring anti-oil pipeline movements, heard, and sometimes physically felt, as a result of directional sound vectors emitted by protesting voices capable of transgressing physical barriers through auditory means. These perceptible and imperceptible components also exist elsewhere. As discussed by Martin, battles against oil toxicity are intertwined with infrastructural line and space-based politics.[4] Spatial infrastructures like highways, oil pipelines, and waterways constitute one type of line.[5] A second type is observed in land transgressed by oil infrastructures.[6] It includes territory boundary lines and property lines. The line and space question includes three other types: Du Bois’ “color line,” the Carbon Empire’s sacrifice zone “fence lines”, and “front lines” of climate change.[7] These three “intersect and diverge at specific times in specific places,” rendering particular patterns recognizable in their moments of deviation and instances of overlap.[8]

With these types of lines in mind, what if we were to consider a space that is both material and immaterial, that for all of its invisibleness, sits visibly at an interstice framed by converging and diverging vectors comprised of spatial infrastructural lines, property lines, a color line, sacrifice zone fence line, and climate change front line? To paraphrase a question proposed by Reinhold Martin, what happens when we treat air as space?[9] Further, what happens if we stop taking air for granted as a natural resource and we treat it on practical and theoretical grounds as an infrastructural line and space that is entrenched in the gas-guzzling political ecological networks of oil – like we do water. When we do so, then it is all but impossible to unsee the visible lines connecting the alarming relevance of air toxicity to conversations concerning oil abolition.

Theoretical inclinations like those of Latourian wicked universality are unnecessary in understanding how invisible-yet-visible examples of toxic airspaces embedded in a political ecological web of oil exist on a level analogous to that of fresh water supply contamination resulting from oil pipelines. One such example is found in the once rural, now suburban community of Fontana, California. It is a city that despite its physical distance from any recognizable infrastructures politically associated with oil, is nonetheless enmeshed in a political ecological network that begins with sites of oil extraction and terminates with toxic fine particulate matter lodged in the lungs of its black and brown working-class communities.[10]

Despite California’s environmentally progressive and strict air quality standards, the city’s air space regularly leads its county towards placement in the American Lung Association’s State of the Air report where San Bernardino County is consistently identified amongst the top ten counties containing highest levels of toxic fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution in the United States.[11] Immediately the cumulative result of toxic emissions generated by the city’s sizeable trucking and distribution warehouse industries as well as city governance initiatives building the city’s economic engine to cater to them, the city’s toxic air space is a direct result of its unfortunate interstitial location framed by infrastructural line-and-space oil guzzling politics, making this case-study on toxic air of important relevance in discussions concerning oil abolition.[12]

Infrastructural lines: the city’s airspace is bounded by interstate 15 (I-15) and interstate 10 (I-10), two of the largest highways in the United States interstate highway system. The US heavily relies on these to transport cargo arriving to the Port of Long Beach not only throughout California, but to states as far as Tennessee, Florida, and New York.[13] This makes it a strategically desired node for warehouses utilized as distribution centers for various types of goods, inclusive of clothing, electronics, and medical devices, which are redistributed in warehouses before being shipped to various regions of the U.S. in a process sustained by diesel engine semi-trucks.[14] With these warehouses come hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of PM2.5 toxic particulates and CO₂ emissions that are produced by the thousands of diesel engine semi-trucks arriving, departing, and sitting idly along the streets of the city as their drivers wait for their cargo pickup or drop-off appointment slots at these various warehouses.[15]

Boundary lines: considering the city’s airspace is geographically framed by valleys, its air space operates as an invisible container for the petro-diesel engine combustion processes attached to these semi-trucks.[16] With 90,000 square-foot warehouses being greenlight for construction right next to parks, homes, churches, as well as elementary and high schools, not only must the lines generated by rows of distribution warehouses and idle semi-trucks be considered in discussions concerning oil abolition, but so too should the linear distance spanning between these toxic air nodes and residential as well as civic property lines.[17] In doing so, it renders understandable how reimagining property air rights in respect to residents and a human right to clean air could become a vessel for pursuit of oil abolition.

Color line: this air space expands the politics of air beyond question of carbonization, decarbonization, and climate justice, it becomes a concern about environmental justice and environmental racism. Forced into a Russian-roulette game of life and death, these toxic air spaces, already linked to disproportionately high rates of asthma in children, will lead to lung cancer, shortened life-spans, and biopolitically assured death the Black and Latino/a/es/x working class communities most impacted by this air.[18] Despite the undeniable public health threat at hand, the southernmost part of the city continues to be rezoned from residential into commercial and light industrial.[19] In doing so, the interstate 10, what was once the southern-most color line during years of racial segregation, is now a sacrifice zone fence line.[20]

All the while, the city is dually becoming a climate change font line. Sitting at the foothills of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountain ranges, its air quality is not only threatened by petro-diesel reliant industries, but also by an increased intensity and frequency of wildfires pummeling these mountain ranges. Linked to climate change, the rise in wildfires is resulting in the rising presence of toxic particulates significantly worsening the city’s already compromised air.[21] Even in light of this, e-commerce warehouses continue to expand in the city as a response to an increased intensity and frequency of nationwide 1-click purchases.[22] This forces us to consider not only how Global North carbon emissions are responsible for climate crises in the Global South, but how our own consumer habits, while perhaps invisibly unbeknownst to us, are entangled in the production of toxic air visibly harming historically marginalized communities who are subsidizing our own affiliations to oil, climate change, and the Carbon Empire with their lungs, health, and lives.

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Water is life, but so too is air. Pursuing a full-scale environmentally reconstructive response to our exigent climate crisis through oil abolition must be capable of tackling oil and carbon’s expansive visible and invisible empire. Moreover, this is an existential war, that in confronting the visible and invisible infrastructures of oil, gas-guzzling industries, and the injustices associated with these, like consideration of differences between politics of water and air, warrants consideration of visible and invisible climate and environmental justice color lines, fence lines, and front lines inside and outside of our own geopolitical border lines.[23] The explosive proliferation of warehouse distribution centers in predominantly Black and Brown Fontana is but one example where treating air as a spatial medium comprised of invisible as well as visible lines helps to blur, at least in part, relational differences between air and water to climate and environmental justice struggles associated with abolition of oil.

In other words, abolishing oil also means abolishing toxic air space.

Notes

[1] Bernard Harcourt, et al. “Abolition 11/13: Abolish Oil.” Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Columbia University Seminar. New York, 11 Mar 2021. Seminar.

[2] Leah Aronowsky, “Gas Guzzling Gaia,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 47 no. 2, (Winter 2021): 307.

[3] Aronowsky, 309.

[4] Bernard Harcourt, et al.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Reinhold Martin, “Abolish Oil,” Places Journal, June 2020. Accessed 12 Mar 2021; Reinhold Martin, “Addendum on Oil Abolition: Fence Lines, Front Lines, and Color Lines,” Abolition Democracy 11/13 (Mar 2021). [web]

[8] Reinhold Martin, “Abolish Oil,” Places Journal, June 2020. Accessed 12 Mar 2021; Reinhold Martin, “Addendum on Oil Abolition: Fence Lines, Front Lines, and Color Lines,” Abolition Democracy 11/13 (Mar 2021). [web]

[9] The original question proposed by Reinhold Martin: “so what happens when we substitute air… when what we used to call space, we now call air?” in Harcourt, Bernard, et al.

[10] Paloma Esquivel, “When your house is surrounded by massive warehouses,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), Oct. 27, 2019; “E-commerce pollution is choking Southern California communities,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA) May 5, 2021.

[11] “Fontana has dirtiest air in the Southland,” Redlands Daily Facts (Redlands, CA) Jan. 5, 2008; “State of the Air” American Lung Association (Washington, D.C., 2021), 18, 53-55; Toxic fine particulate matter consists of toxic air particles that are 2.5 microns or less in diameter, (PM2. 5), see more: “State of the Air,” 11.

[12] Tony Briscoe, “Fontana Settles with California Attorney General over alleged environmental violations,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA) Apr. 19, 2022.

[13] Maanvi Sing, “Pollution everywhere: how one-click shopping is creating Amazon warehouse towns,” The Guardian (New York, NY) Dec. 11, 2021.

[14] Olivia Solon and April Glaser, “Treated like sacrifices: Families breathe toxic fumes from California’s warehouse hub,” NBC News, Apr. 27 2021.

[15] “Seeking environmental justice in California’s ‘diesel death zones’,” The Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, Jan. 22, 2020. [web]

[16] Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso Books, 1990), 379.

[17] Avi Asher-Schapiro, “World’s biggest Amazon warehouse raises fears over toxic air,” Thomas Reuters Foundation News (New York, NY) Aug 8, 2022.

[18] “State of the Air,” 22-27.

[19] Orlando, Mayorquin, “When Residential Neighborhoods are Rezoned for Warehouses,” KCET Public Media Group of Southern California (Burbank, CA) May 2, 2022.

[20] Cathy Gudis, et al. “The Empire of Logistics: Goods Movement in Southern California,” KCET Public Media Group of Southern California (Burbank, CA) May 2, 2022.

[21] “California Prepares for Increased Wildfire Risk to Air Quality from Climate Change” United States Environmental Protection Agency. 15 Mar 2022. [web]

[22] Ibid.

[23] Climate change affects communities in different ways, many times along racial and class lines. See more: Edgar Sandoval, “In San Antonio, the Poor Live on Their Own Islands of Heat,” The New York Times (New York, NY) Jul. 26, 2022.