ON JUNE 21 OF THIS YEAR, the Tucson Airport Remediation Project (TARP), a twenty-seven-year-old water treatment facility, was shut down. The area’s municipal water company, Tucson Water, was facing the reality that the system was soon to be overwhelmed by chemicals it was not designed to treat. The contaminants headed toward the facility were a family of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known also as “forever chemicals” because they don’t degrade or break down under natural circumstances.
The TARP system was built during the mid-1990s, a decade defined by climate denial. It was designed to treat contamination of industrial solvents discovered in the 1980s, when fossil fuel industry leadership first planted plans for that denial. The contamination itself took place between the 1940s and 1970s, during a time of mass industrial contamination, but before the atmosphere of our planet had been drastically altered—before climate change was widely known to be an existential threat. This pollution is old, nearly eighty years old, hardly a crisis that feels urgent in an era when our newsfeeds are filled with new climate catastrophes every day.
Yet, here in Tucson, deep under the record heat waves cooking the saguaros and coyotes and people, lies an aquifer existing with chronic contamination, which will require likely indefinite treatment for the original contamination that took place half a century ago. The people who live with this aquifer, a largely Mexican American community on Tucson’s south side, are also still in need of medical care and supports for the impairments and illnesses that the previously discovered contamination caused.
I have been researching this particular treatment facility and the contamination that led to it being built since 2017, and it is clear to me that the shutdown of TARP exemplifies a larger issue: the reality that treating environmental harm and its multifaceted effects on the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems is a long-term, enduring, and at times incurable process. It is a reminder that, for many ecosystems, creatures, and people on this planet, the coming decades of environmental crises will stretch not only toward death or health, but also something else—something impaired, precarious, dependent, filled with loss and struggle, requiring assistance, accommodation, and creative forms of care.
As a disabled person I recognize this as disability. Although past environmental movements in this country often focused on the protection of landscapes understood as pristine, untouched, and wild, today those fighting for the environment work with an understanding that nature has been altered and damaged in profound and serious ways. What we live with in the present and will for decades to come, even under the best-case scenarios, is mass ecological disablement of the more than human world, a disablement that is utterly entangled with the disablement of human beings. Given this, it seems vital to consider what forms of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability will require.
In 1951 Tucson became the home of Hughes Missile Systems Company (now Raytheon), a major player in postwar U.S. military industries. Hughes contracted out the newly built Air Force Plant #44 on the south side of the city and within a year was manufacturing radar noses for the Northrop F-89 Scorpion fighter interceptor aircraft to be used against North Korea. In 1952, only a year after opening, the plant began disposing large amounts of industrial solvents and heavy metals, in particular trichloroethylene (TCE)—an airplane degreaser used to clean electronics and aircraft—into large open-air pits or lagoons. These lagoons were only some of the dumping grounds. Abandoned wells, desert washes, discrete fences, and the desert floor all became sites for waste, not only by Hughes, but also by the Air National Guard and a variety of now defunct defense and electronics industries.
Over the three decades during which these lagoons were used for waste disposal, the chemicals would at times overflow and leach into the surrounding landscape, stressing and eventually killing the mesquite and cottonwood trees and other plant life in their path. Wildlife drank from the open pits and became ill and died. Tohono O’odham representatives protested the disposal of wastes from Hughes, which were flowing through desert arroyos onto O’odham land, where their cattle would drink it. From the toxic lagoons more than four thousand gallons of TCE, and a large variety of other body-harming chemicals, slowly flowed downward through fewer than a hundred feet of porous earth below, entering Tucson’s regional aquifer and filtering into the groundwater. The chemicals traveled northwesterly, entering the sand, gravel, and clay that made up the region’s geologic matter— moving with gravity underground toward the north-flowing Santa Cruz River. The river was spared the contamination, only because the contaminants reached municipal and private wells first—wells from which the people of the south side bathed and drank. The “TCE plume,” as it came to be known, eventually reached out ten square miles from south to north, and a mile and a half east to west.
Although many of those living in the area had been there for generations, many more had relocated after one of the oldest and most vibrant Mexican American neighborhoods in Tucson, La Calle, had been demolished in a racist downtown revitalization plan in the 1960s. (A typical case of environmental racism and Native dispossession through contamination, the impacts of the pollution on residents went unacknowledged for nearly thirty years—even after the area became a Superfund site in 1981.) Residents began to notice their plants would die when they’d water them. Their dogs and cats became ill. Many people were diagnosed with rare illnesses: lupus, testicular cancer, brain tumors, leukemia; babies were stillborn, or were born with congenital heart impairments or other disabilities.
Regardless, communities on the south side endured years of racist and classist accusations that their conditions were their own fault. As alarm grew and suspicion fell on the lagoons, Hughes spokespeople and the Pima County Health officials stated at public meetings that, although people in the area were disproportionately becoming sick, it was not a result of pollution, but because they were “genetically disadvantaged.” They were depicted as having made poor reproductive choices, having maintained a poor diet and lifestyle. Residents were told during meetings with city officials that they were getting sick “because of the chilies and beans they ate,” and the mostly women organizers were dismissed as “hysterical Hispanic housewives.” They were, the statements suggested, just predisposed to illness.
SUNAURA TAYLOR
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