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E-book Futures after Progress : Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore

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Penilaian

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On January 1, 2016, the Baltimore Sun marked the end of the city's "deadli-est year." In 2015, Baltimore counted 344 homicides-nearly 90 percent of them caused by gun violence.1 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 presi-dent hasn't exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!"2 City, state, and national leaders had less to say when, just two years ear-lier, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a report 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.3 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.4 Nor do regulators track pollution in a manner that invites an ag-gregate analysis. Researchers from MIT came to this figure through some arduous arithmetic, combining emissions from point sources tracked in iso-lation 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.5 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.6 Their lives end sooner so as to enable futures elsewhere. But, again, you would never know this looking at official records. You might reg-ister the deaths, but not the fundamental reasons for them, nor the steely 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 ap-peared 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 conta-gious people to weapons-making that provisioned two world wars-but to-day Curtis Bay is chiefly home to fossil fuel transport, waste management, and chemical production.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

301 AHM f

Penerbit

USA : The University of Chicago Press., 2024

Deskripsi Fisik

369 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780226833606

Klasifikasi

301

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Sociology and Anthropology, Society

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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