Rethinking Post-Disaster Recovery

Socio-Anthropological Perspectives on Repairing Environments

Laura Centemeri, Sezin Topçu, J. Peter Burgess, Laura Centemeri, Sezin Topçu, J. Peter Burgess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000478563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sullo sviluppo globale

This book presents an original interdisciplinary approach to the study of the so-called 'recovery phase' in disaster management, centred on the notion of repairing.

The volume advances thinking on disaster recovery that goes beyond institutional and managerial challenges, descriptions and analyses. It encourages socially, politically and ethically engaged questioning of what it means to recover after disaster. At the centre of this analysis, contributions examine the diversity of processes of repairing through which recovery can take place, and the varied meanings actors attribute to repair at different times and scales of such processes. It also analyses the multiple arenas (juridical, expert, political) in which actors struggle to make sense of the "what-ness" of a disaster and the paths for recovery. These struggles are interlinked with interest-based and power-based struggles which maintain structural inequality and exploitation, existing social hierarchies and established forms of marginality. The work uses case studies from all over the world, cutting-edge theoretical discussions and original empirical research to put critical and interpretative approaches in social sciences into dialogue, opening the venue for innovative approaches in the study of environmental disasters.

This book will be of much interest to students of disaster management, sociology, anthropology, law and philosophy.

Part I

Repairing slow disasters

1

The economy of compensation and struggle for reparation

The case of Formosa Plastics in Taiwan

Paul Jobin

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184782-3

On Sunday, 7 April 2019, at 2 pm, in the vicinity of a petrochemical complex on the west coast of central Taiwan, a blast shattered the windows of houses and cracked or displaced brick walls. The explosion was heard within a perimeter of six kilometres around the site. In the days that followed, tons of clams, shrimp, mullet and perch died. One year later, those who suffered losses were still waiting to be paid compensation. This kind of explosion has been recurrent since the zone’s start of operations some 20 years ago. In the meantime, the fence-line populations have been struck by a high rate of cancer mortality. Despite a solid corpus of epidemiological and environmental studies showing evidence of adverse health effects for the neighbouring townships, the state has failed to implement policies that would stop or reduce chronic pollution and enforce stricter safety controls. Left with no other option, a group of 30 families have launched a lawsuit seeking damages. The petrochemical complex is owned by the Formosa Plastics Group (FPG), one of the ten largest chemical companies in the world (Tullo 2019).

The firm has also been under legal attack in the United States for the marine pollution from plastic pellets discharged by its plants near Houston, Texas. In a recent court decision, federal judges described the company as a ‘serial offender’ (Collier 2019). Another lawsuit is in preparation to prevent the construction of a new complex, in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’, that is set to become the US’s biggest plastic producer. Although the communities around the site are already overexposed to toxicants, Formosa Plastics has asked permission to release double the legal amount of air pollutants there; the plant is, moreover, expected to emit a staggering level of greenhouse gases (Mitchell 2019; Einhorn and Carroll 2019; McConnaughey 2020).

Formosa Plastics is just one amongst many petrochemical firms that have been the source of a multi-scale disaster. At the global level, the petrochemical industry bears a large share of the responsibility for the climate crisis and the million tons of plastic waste that have turned our epoch into a ‘Plasticene’, the plastic facet of the Anthropocene (Reed 2015; Haram et al. 2020). Far from stopping this worldwide disaster, and despite a continuous increase in sales, the petrochemical industry instead laments the diminution of its profit margin (Tullo 2019). Worse, since the late 1970s, the petrochemical industry has pursued intensive lobbying to deny global warming (Oreskes and Conway 2010; Rich 2019; see also Michaels 2008). At the same time, along with claiming to invest in the production of ‘more sustainable plastics’ (IEA 2018), the major firms have launched green-washing programmes, ostensibly to ‘end plastic waste’ (Brown 2019), or to develop organic vegetables and environmental education (as in the case of Formosa Plastics). But behind this facade, the petrochemical industry has demonstrated its willingness to carry on with business as usual (Lerner 2019; Hamilton et al. 2019).

At the local level, petrochemical plants are regularly subject to recurrent explosions. Furthermore, they discharge a long list of toxic by-products with all kinds of adverse effects for both ecosystems and public health. This ‘chronic technical disaster’ (Couch and Kroll-Smith 1985; Zavestoski et al. 2002) constitutes a ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) for fence-line communities, which are – not coincidentally – disadvantaged in terms of social and economic capital (Davies 2019). Quantitative studies have highlighted the burden for public health, in particular amongst communities on the fence-line of petrochemical plants (e.g. Lin et al. 2017; Jephcote and Mah 2019). Qualitative studies have further emphasized the problems of epistemic injustice, and the importance of lay knowledge to redress the lacunae from ‘undone science’ (Allen et al. 2017; Ottinger 2013; cf. Frickel et al. 2010; Hess 2016).

A majority of these case studies are located in the US, starting with Louisiana’s chemical corridor, the infamous ‘Cancer Alley’ (Allen 2003; Lerner 2005; Ottinger 2013; Davies 2019). But recent research has extended further over a greater variety of cultural and economic contexts, from the mobilized fence-line communities of Italy, France and Taiwan (Allen 2011; Allen et al. 2017; Ho 2014; Grano 2015), to the more compliant population of China (Mah and Wang 2019).

Through the class action launched by the communities bordering Formosa Plastics’ petrochemical zone in Taiwan, this chapter focuses on the ambiguous role of money in disputes over the recognition of the damage to the environment and the public health. By ‘money’, I mean the funds either requested or effectively paid in compensation or punitive damages. As the editors of this book note in their introduction, reparation is associated with a juridical repertoire, which performs what they call an ‘accusatory function’ vis-à-vis an injustice. In the plural form, ‘reparations’ denotes compensation for war damage, slavery, genocide and other transformational happenings. In toxic torts and other civil actions, ‘damages’ is another word for compensation, as if such payment might offset the actual damage incurred. In different legal environments, class actions and other forms of collective lawsuits have indeed been a salient expression of challenging industrial polluters (George 2001; Allen 2011; Jobin and Tseng 2014; Marichalar 2019), even in countries lacking an independent judiciary system, such as China (van Rooij 2010; Stern 2013).

The communities that are ready to take the risk of filing a case require support from lawyers and citizen groups, and considerable patience as lawsuits can last a very long time. Moreover, many plaintiffs might die before the ruling is reached, the judges might dismiss the case or the amounts of compensation might ultimately be very low. This moral cost for the victims is often quite heavy. More problematically, even if the suit ends with a positive decision for the plaintiffs, the whole effort might be in vain if it does not compel the petrochemical firm in question to take serious measures to stop its chronic pollution and prevent recurrent explosions (a common hazard within the industry).

Further complicating matters is the widespread practice of regular company payments to nearby residents, as a sort of nuisance fee. As van Rooij et al. (2012) have shown in the case of China, the resultant economic dependency between the polluters and fence-line communities often creates what they call a ‘compensation trap’: the distribution of money becomes a social habit that tends to normalize the pollution, thus allowing companies to postpone efforts to prevent it. In other words, reparation does not repair the environment in the various meanings of repair as defined by the editors in the introduction to this volume – rather, it implies a tacit agreement to pursue business as usual. This mechanism also applies to the case of Taiwan, despite its radically different political context – democratic, as opposed to China’s authoritarianism.

However, since civil actions necessarily involve the question of compensation, it is essential to examine the nature of compensation itself. Although the compensation trap is likely to continue as long as the plant is operational, what we might call the ‘economy of compensation’ does not necessarily dampen the various expressions of critique. I therefore consider compensation in dialectical terms and posit that, despite procedural slowness and uncertain outcomes, class actions can offer an opportunity to redefine the meaning of compensation for industrial damage.

This chapter is mainly based on a four-year research project conducted in Taiwan (2016 through 2019), which included observation of court hearings, in-depth interviews and group meetings with the plaintiffs, their lawyers and local sources.

Environmental justice and money

Oil and its related industries hold a central role in the monetary flow of contemporary capitalism. Mitchell (2011) has demonstrated how this ‘fuel economy’ and its ‘fuel money’ have weakened unions of Western democracies and strengthened authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. In a similar way, oil refineries and petro-chemical firms make regular payments to the population surrounding their plants, in order to undermine opposition to their persistent pollution.

A number of historical and sociological studies on chemical plants have shown the pernicious role of such patronage payments. For example, the Japanese chemical factory that provoked the infamous Minamata disease in the 1950s had been the source of recurrent fish loss long before that disaster. As early as the 1920s, the company established the habit of paying what it called a sympathy payment (mimaikin) to evade responsibility and compel the fishermen’s submission; this practice set a standard for the later treatment of Minamata disease victims (George 2001: 72–73). As analyzed by Ottinger (2013), programmes of corporate social responsibility in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ can be seen as the last avatar of such ‘chemical patronage’.

In their study of a case of industrial pollution in rural China, van Rooij et al. (2012) have conducted a fine-grained analysis of the compensation trap. They show that citizen grievances and demands are shaped by compensation rather than the control or prevention of pollution. Eventually, compensation becomes a licence to pollute, and the polluter labels the victims as greedy opportunists, thus adding insult to injury. Mah and Wang’s (2019) interviews with workers and inhabitants of fence-line communities in the petrochemical area of Nanjing find similar results; the authors emphasize that uneven and generally low compensation bears witness to neglect, not only by petrochemical enterprises, but also by the Chinese state. Although these conclusions can apply to Taiwan as well as to many cases around the world, I think we need to further understand the role of money in issues of environmental damage. The economy of compensation, as I use the term, includes resistance to the fuel economy and its compensation trap and further considers the cultural meanings of money.

The victims of public health hazards entertain different expectations when confronted with reparation schemes, such as insurance systems or lawsuits (Barbot and Dodier 2015). Heterodox economists have described the ‘languages of valuation’ through which vulnerable communities denounce the incommensurability of environmental damage (Martínez Alier 2002; Anguelovski and Martínez Alier 2014). Temper and Martinez-Alier (2013: 85–86) posit a clear-cut distinction between those who are ‘fighting for higher compensation and those who refuse to give their land at any price’. Comparing litigations over two oil spill cases, in France and the US, Fourcade (2011) shows how different cultural perceptions of ‘nature’ resulted in different legal valuations of the disaster. Centemeri (2015: 307) further argues that, in these disputes, the focus is most often on ‘how to commensurate, but not whether to commensurate’, but for those who lost what she calls a ‘dwelled-in environment’, the damage means a radical incommensurable loss. As Chateauraynaud and Debaz (2017: 597) define incommensurability, the loss has no equivalent measure, for it ‘emerges from the comparison of heterogeneous orders of magnitude and valuation’.

Communities that are victims of environmental damage may nevertheless be right to seek compensation. Some indigenous cultures do not exclude monetary payments in compensation for a crime or an offense (Hu 2012; Guo 2011; 2014). However, it is not money in the Western sense, i.e, commensurable on a universal scale and convertible at variable rates set by global financial markets. Moreover, in Taiwan and China, money is not necessarily tainted with modern utilitarianism but involves all sorts of social interactions and intergenerational transmissions, such as the red envelopes offered at weddings, white envelopes at funerals and paper money burnt for the dead (Martin 2015).

Departing from early analyses by Marx and Simmel, the sociology of money in modern Western cultures has also shown that allocations of money often mingle with intimacy, affective investments and a large range of symbolic meanings (Zelizer 1994; Bandelj et al. 2017). Ng and He (2017) further show that compared to the US, where the commensuration of ‘blood money’ (e.g. damages for the loss of a parent) is largely determined by a legal and technical discourse, in China, the judges and the litigants attach more importance to the moral meaning of compensation. These analyses encourage us to suspend our own moral judgements about money and consider how the victims of industrial harm themselves perceive it. In other words, they invite us to look at demands for justice and compensation as two sides of the same coin.

Furthermore, in collective lawsuits, unless the case is filed in a criminal court, civil actions over toxic torts necessarily target the payment of compensation or punitive damages. It may thus be counterproductive, both for mobilizing and for seeking a remedial policy, to divide the movements of victims into two clearly distinct groups: those seeking compensation (who ‘are in it for the money’), and those indifferent or radically opposed to it (who ‘won’t accept it at any price’).

In this chapter, I therefore reconsider how problems of commensurability and incommensurability are entangled...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• List of Figures Page
• List of Contributors Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• Introduction: Recovery, resilience and repairing: for a non-reductionist approach to the complexity of post-disaster situations
• Part I Repairing slow disasters
• Part II Everyday life, justice and memories in recovery after disasters
• Part III The role of law in repairing environments
• Index