 And so the way that differentiation is not embedded in people's biology but produced by the systems people live in. And I think that then calls upon us to consider what is justice in the social contract? Rather than assuming it's natural that some people are living in harm's way, as what are the responsibilities of societies when you've got this massive unevenness in the possibility of health and well-being? And I'll again return to it's even harder than we thought. And so you pointed to the intergenerational responsibilities. And now environmental health research makes very clear that your exposures can affect more than one generation. And what does it mean to be just to those? How do the courts respond to a kind of third generation effects? And part of that is because the newest environmental health research sheds light on endocrine disruption and disruption of the hormone system which implicates the reproductive system. And so just the intergenerational cascade of effects we now understand a lot better than we used to. And then we say, well, what are the legal and social responses to that? Thinking about how our system of justice itself reproduces the lack of accountability that produced the injustice in the first place. And there's more and more health outcomes that are connected to environmental exposures than we knew even a decade ago. Diabetes, for example, which was long treated as like a dietary disease and genetic is now they're connecting to plastics exposure. And so once you start recognizing the environmental determinants of disease it just complicates healthcare, health diagnosis, insurance, the whole thing shakes up. I think it's a lot harder for people that make their living kind of in the belly of the beast. It's harder to find opportunities to do good works. I think the most beautiful thing is people having the capacity to collectively evaluate what's going on and to imagine and plan together for increasing and equitably distributed prosperity. So it's not so much that I can imagine a world that's otherwise, but perhaps it's the teacher in me. I can imagine us doing a better job of trying to architecture that world, as you've said. I love that. Architecting, equitably distributed prosperity. I love that. Let's do it. That was beautiful. Someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? Five, four, three, two, one. What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sacian. We're on site at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting for our second partnership with them. We're on site in Vancouver, Canada doing it. We are now gonna be talking about the anthropology of environmental health and much more we have Dr. Kim Forch and joining us on the show, hi Kim. Thanks for coming on the program. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about this with you. Let's start like big picture understanding what is this, is this like humans and the way humans are in our environments, whether it be in the most primordial environments among trees and beaches and in metropolises amongst the crazinesses of potential environmental disasters. Teach us about this. Environmental anthropology has grown and diversified greatly in the last couple of decades. There was a time when it was mostly a study of how people develop ways of living with specific environments, what their food, what food practices were, how they made use of and manage natural resources. I came into the field in the early 90s when anthropology was shifting into the study of complex and urban environments, even industrial environments. So the kind of environmental anthropology I do starts at the fence line of chemical plants when they're sometimes blowing up, always routinely polluting the communities that are nearby. And so the environmental injustice movement or environmental justice movement emerged in that same period in the US and around the world. So communities organizing themselves to make sense of local pollution, respond to it. And so my research has focused on communities exposed to industrial environmental pollution, how they've responded, how the courts have responded, and importantly, how scientists have responded. And so how science has developed to try and understand the problem, how science has changed legal decisions, affected the community's ability to mobilize to improve conditions in their communities. And so there's a lot of moving parts to it and that's certainly just one thread of work in environmental anthropology writ large. But one of the key questions is, how is environmental health unequally distributed across social groups? And so it's a key site for the production of inequality, which is a long running social question that anthropologists have focused on many things come back to. So it seems as though then throughout time we have moved from these like immediate return hunter-gatherer style living to the agricultural era to now the metropolis era. And now in the metropolis era, correct me if I'm wrong, the poorest people usually take on the biggest amount of the environmental hazards that we live with, the most polluted air, the most polluted water, the most polluted environment around them. Most closest to the landfills, this type of stuff. Is this about? Yes. I mean, this is the focus of my work and of many anthropologists now. What's interesting though is that we're now realized that rural spaces are also often hyper contaminated because of agricultural pesticide use, industries in the countryside, land runoff, et cetera. And so the sense that the rural environments are pure and the urban environments are, I mean, that's gotten more complicated. And so there is a, and the traffic between industrial and rural spaces is of course part of freight traffic, for example, that moves agricultural goods into ports and cities. So it is a system of global circuits that produces and spreads pollution. But it is, you're absolutely right. It's a, not new, but it's a form of anthropology that shifted the field away from the traditional society focus, which was its signature for much of the 20th century. It does seem like it really is really close in my heart this symbiosis that humans are with their interconnectedness to not only each other, but their natural environment that they're around and that environmental anthropology from that angle being like how do the humans actually engage with their environment that they're in is very beautiful and it feels a natural, but then there's something strange about when you move humans to these metropolises stacked up in these boxes and then having this whole process of like just there's conspicuous consumption happening, there's a bunch of mental health issues happening, we're disconnected from each other and from nature. There's so much that's happening. There's millions of people living in such close proximity to each other. I mean, the just inequality, like we were just talking about, there's so many variables that are being crunched into metropolises, even studying the environmental anthropology of what it's like to be trapped in like a whatever a 200 square meter box for a majority of your time and like never hearing the sound of birds and only hearing buses and how that affects your neurology and physiology. I mean, there's just, how do you figure out how to compute the environmental anthropological variables that actually affect our lives? Well, the panel that I was just part of was focused on the importance of much more intensified interdisciplinary collaborative research because there are lots of variables. Some of them we can get at as anthropologists focused on cultural dynamics. We primarily use qualitative methods, but that can powerfully supplement the kinds of data collected in other fields. But for the most part, we're not yet really bringing those analyses together, but you're right to understand both what health is and if you understand health is determined as much by social environment as biophysical environment, there's a lot of variables and it's of course shaped by what people think their health is, what news waves are telling them what their health is, what pharmaceuticals can research how it affects government regulation. It all is a tangle. And so understanding both what's going on, what's good governance of that phenomena. And I would argue that the governing structures that we have set up now where a department of health is separate from the department of environment, which is separate from the department of transportation and from the department of education. There's functional reasons those are separated out, but certainly that what many people call the silo effect has undercut our ability to understand environmental health. And that's one among many things anthropologists look at is what is the social formation by which we try and understand our own problems? Yeah, this is really interesting. This show is a super multidisciplinary show and so for you to also be seeing data silos and how to eliminate the walls and how to make it so that the data points can actually have pattern analysis happen across all of them to find unique insights. I love that. We talk about that a lot on the program. And so then is that then one of there's solutions for understanding the multivariability and the data points better than there's solutions for just the environmental justice in general, like why is it that the poorest people have to have the poorest, the most health hazards and the poorest health outcomes from the inequality that happens with environmental justice. I mean, you just look at all of the different slums around the world and it's just beyond comprehension, shanty towns, people just not being able to have adequate health and also therefore adequate actualization, like people bringing their best selves into the world, their unique gifts into the world in a social fabric that's conducive for that it just feels like sometimes that multi-millionaires and billionaires, I'd find themselves at the tops of these condos and out in the suburbs and mansions and then poor people are stuck in shanty towns. And so how to actually deal with making a fabric that's most conducive to the flowering of consciousness in general is a very complicated equation as well. So there's like that plus all this data. So yeah, give us these like focuses. Well, I think of, so one kind of answer is to say, I think that we need a deep historical consciousness to really understand why are certain communities predictably living in hazards way? And often it goes back to land use laws a century ago that made it impossible for certain groups to live in certain parts of a city, for example, or access loans so that they could purchase homes in a certain part of the city. And so the way legacy systems affect where people are today because it's amazing how often you get the sense that instead of compassion or a sense of political outrage, it's like, well, why don't those people move? Well, they can't move because poverty produces poverty. And so the way that in the United States, for example, you have African-American and Latinx communities most affected by environmental risk, both catastrophic, fast risk and slow risk. And you say, well, why? Well, it's not only, it's the question of why they live in those places in the first place. And then when generation after generation, they live in those places, they have different bodies. They have different health outcomes. And so the way that differentiation is not embedded in people's biology, but produced by the systems people live in. And I think that then calls upon us to consider what is justice in the social contract? Rather than assuming it's natural that some people are living in harm's way, as what are the responsibilities of societies when you've got this massive unevenness in the possibility of health and wellbeing? Yeah, this is an excellent way to put it, that as though in our most naked form that we are, we are supposed to have a path to bring our greatest gifts into the world, but there are cultural pressures that make it so that rather than being born into a social fabric that enables it, it makes it so that we're born into a social fabric that makes it even more difficult to achieve that actualization and to bring these unique potentials out into the world. And so then what then is it that, is it then like a galvanization of efforts on the scale of governments or private companies or of resource allocation non-profits? What is it that can then make it so that poverty no longer breeds poverty, but that there's avid environmental justice efforts that can happen towards people bringing their gifts forth? Well, some of it is saying no, telling industrial corporations that they can't cite and add to the burden in particular communities. And it's repeatedly communities that have compound disadvantage. They already have very high pollution levels and yet a facility is permitted to come in and add to it. And there's just been recent coverage by the Guardian in Louisiana between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which is a string of chemical facilities. And I don't quite understand why, but there's all these new facilities coming in. And so, and this is literally the belt where the chemical plants are built on the foundations of the old plantation economies. And so you can literally see the reproduction of injustice. And so questions of, should you disallow companies from citing bait because there's historic injustice in a region, that would be a new question for governance that we've barely taken on. But to complicate it even further, many of the regions that are most affected by the kinds of things I study, industrial facilities are also at great risk because of climate deregulation. So Houston, for example, one of the cities I study has now catastrophic rain events that affect the chemical plants because they lose power. Their cooling systems go down. They start, you know, emitting both routine. Sometimes they catch on fire. And so the way that if we thought we had a governance problem before, we now really have a problem because you've got risk compounding risk, compounding historic disadvantage. So it really is a potted, a boil, a perfect storm, however you wanna think about it. And we have a lot of science telling us that the problem exists, that it's unevenly distributed. We need to do a lot more research to understand it well. But I think the bigger challenge is not the science, but actually being creative about how we govern ourselves where these inequalities and injustices aren't exacerbated as we deal with changing, changes brought by something like climate change. You give the solution of doing something to prevent the further exacerbation of injustices. This is crucial. Another way seems as though that there is, like grassroots efforts, I mean grassroots efforts to prevent the further injustices from happening. There's also just awakening in general that happens, that can be catalyzed. I mean this is something we talk about a lot on the program is that the more that people awaken to the nature of this reality, the more that they are less likely to do injustice upon others. And does that resonate with you, this idea that we are all one? Well it certainly resonates with me and the teacher in me where I think that one of my goals as a university teacher is just to make sure that these very, very rich stories are in people's imaginations because I think a lot of the injustices we're talking about people don't know about. They don't, our standard educational approach doesn't get at the multiple drivers of this kind of reproduced injustice. And so I think these, they're sad stories, but stories that are good to think with about why systems fail, about what makes a community, what gives a community well-being. And there's gonna be hard choices. And just an example, if you've got a community in a high risk zone either because of industrial facility or increased risk of flooding, and they're tied to that, they've lived there for generations, but they're at increasing risk. So are they asked to move? Are they told to move? Are they moved as a community? Are they moved as individuals? Do you need the whole community to agree to make the move? And all of these questions are happening at sites around the world now. And we are really fumbling in the dark because we've generally leaned towards saying, people have a right to stay in place. That's been the progressive position. And there's many reasons for that. Dislocated people, usually it's compounded harm. On the other hand, when you use what is the governance responsibility when people, we know that people, it's not a 500 year storm, but a three year cycle of extreme weather events, for example. So really the kind of way we've thought about even treating people right and taking good care of communities, a lot of our paradigms are really exhausted. And we're gonna need people from, with a lot of different sets of eyes and skill sets, across disciplines, across generation, across social classes and groups, to come together to imagine any different way to do things. And I think anthropology is a key resource, in part because it's the founding of the discipline, values variation in thought and sees variation in thought as a social resource and not as a problem. And so I think that's one part of imagining otherwise and building a different society that anthropology can help with. So this big picture idea is that we have, as we've moved into different circumstances of living and birthing children into the world, that there has been environmental justices that have changed over time, where it's like there's a certain amount of potential for a child to bring themselves fully into the world, given a certain birthing context and given it a completely different one. We can label that as an injustice that the social fabric is not conducive to that child's actualization, whether it be some sort of a problem with their own, like a public health issue in that region, whether it be just any sort of environmental health concern regarding, I like this idea, just this ability, like anthropological gift actualization. So we want the social fabric to be able to unleash people's gifts uniquely into the world as optimally as possible and design around that and eliminate as much of the environmental injustices as possible and make it as conducive towards the actualized processes. And I'll again return to it's even harder than we thought. And so you pointed to the intergenerational responsibilities and now environmental health research makes very clear that your exposures can affect more than one generation and what does it mean to be just to those? How do the courts respond to a kind of third generation effects? And part of that is because the newest environmental health research sheds light on endocrine disruption and disruption of the hormone system which implicates the reproductive system. And so just the intergenerational cascade of effects, we now understand a lot better than we used to. And then we say, well, what are the legal and social responses to that? How did the endocrine system get? Implicated. Implicated. Certain chemicals disrupt the way the endocrine system works and some of the research knows at an incredibly fine level of detail, like if a fetus is exposed in a couple of days and in the 10th week, then there's likely to be certain kind of cascading effects. And so the idea that even before a child is born that you've got environmental health effects, but it even goes farther behind that. The panel I was on this morning, one of the researchers spoke about the crisis or perceived crisis infertility rates and pointed to what they think is about a 10% of couples in China dealing with infertility. And so it's also the conditions in which people even have a choice about having children. Based on what is implicating the endocrine system and causing the downfall of the crisis? When you've got really acute exposures like in factories, there's a very clear connection between exposures and fertility. So what chemicals do we know? A whole lot of them. Sweet of things? Yeah. One of the chemicals that's gotten, or a chemical class that's gotten a lot of attention is BPAs, which is absolutely ubiquitous. It's in the lining of cans, it's in plastic bottles, it's in receipts, the kind of coating on receipts. You can taste something that does not taste like water when you drink water that has been in a plastic bottle that's like in the sun or it's been in the bottle for like six months or a year before you drink it. Like you can taste something that's not just water. Like it tastes like it's absorbed some of the plastic. And if you think about it, we've done, at best, a mediocre job regulating hazardous chemicals that come from what the regulatory regime calls a point source, a factory, amidst a certain pollution. What you're talking about is ubiquitous everywhere, creeping under the doorstep, but to be fair, I mean, this was the focus of Rachel Carson's work in the Herb Book, Silent Spring, which was published in 1962. So it's not entirely new knowledge for sure. I think really we haven't developed a governing response to it. So it's like as we've industrialized, many people have had issues with working inside of factories and having exposure to certain classes of chemicals, but then also there's just on a mass population scale, those that have progressed to, let's say, just advancing the countries into whatever first world countries that they're exposed to BPA and other forms of exposure to endocrine system implication that then costings like infertility. This is all very interesting because there's so many downstream effects that it's hard to measure longitudinally over like 50 years, what it does. I mean, we were just talking about this earlier this episode, just people being jammed into little boxes on top of each other in metropolises. Well, when you don't get that much natural light, when you're not getting that much exposure to fresh air, when you're not getting that much exercise, you're not getting enough sleep because there's just economic machinery pressuring you all the time, you're far away from your family, you're far away from raising children, all this type of stuff. There's many downstream implications that happen, including the onset of cancer and cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's and all these other things that are very difficult to measure this, the intricacy of the nuanced multivariability, yet it's quite physiologically evident on a moment-to-moment basis when you actually feel like you're divinely at your peak state of performance versus feels like me inhaling the cars exhaust on the street in a breath of air feels like it actually sheds minutes off of downstream my life versus indigeneity, people that are still living in complete symbiosis with nature. They have just a much more cohesive understanding of the interconnectedness of everything plus their environmental anthropological awareness level must be like a 90 on a scale of zero to 100 and ours in metropolis feels like it's 20 or 30. It's disastrous, it feels disastrous. There certainly is what some people have called a cultural disconnect where people in urban environments don't know where their food comes from, don't know where their power, their electric power comes from, don't know where their waste goes and the kind of systems thinking that is needed, you can see how it's been structurally undercut by the way we've organized our governments and organized our educational curriculum for example, but it's also beyond what any individual could make sense of on their own so it's not a matter of getting rid of the silos we certainly need people that specialize in transportation infrastructure or cell biology or so it's a challenge of thinking about the whole but also really learning to leverage very diverse forms of expertise in concert and I think it's the in concert that is really the kind of next generation of challenge and there's a lot of things working against that, things, the rush to kind of make knowledge proprietary, put it behind, paywalls, even among academics there is an enormous pressure to kind of demonstrate individual accomplishment that works against very widely acknowledged need to work across disciplines with the communities that we study and so there is a change in the way we approach knowledge production, a change in the way we use knowledge, one of my own current projects is focused on how cities around the world, we're working in about 12 cities are trying to understand their air pollution problem, building monitors, outfitting citizens with monitors, what all they're doing and then how they're trying to move that knowledge into the governing system. Great, yeah that visualization component is so crucial for them to see their air pollution levels. And in some places the structure of city governance and its history makes a difference in kind of how things move and you easily see that some places are more data rich than others, there also can be a real investment in data almost as a diversion, get more data, get more data and it distracts from actually doing anything with it. So data is not always a solution but trying to, and again understanding variation, none of the cities we look at because we have five cities in India, in the US, we've looked at Beijing, none of them get it right entirely but by understanding comparatively you have a better sense of what are the variables, what are the moments of opportunity or intervention. I mean I think that's again what anthropologists are strong, we can make a strong contribution bringing that comparative knowledge into the mix of trying to imagine both what's going on in the world in a different way of organizing it. Yeah, there's two points there that are so big. The first one is when you push the edge of knowledge are you trying to immediately create intellectual property and hold onto it yourself to try and profiteer on it or reshape rules and regulations or are you trying to democratize, you like make a tool and then democratize it to the world and let hundreds of thousands of scientists continue pushing the edge with it which actually enables eradication of suffering at unprecedented rates plus expansion of human potential faster as well. And I mean that's becoming very clear. And then this other point that you brought up was if you do things like take something as complex as the air pollution and visualize it or if you take something as complex as inequality and also begin to visualize it make it so that like rich people can't just silo themselves off and try and escape off to the next celestial bodies but rather have to actually focus on solving the SDGs and solving the most complex issues that literally disrupt the lives of the people that make less than $2.50 a day on a normal basis around the planet because their health and wellness, I mean at the end of the day do we want a revolution to happen? Do we want rampant inequality to continue? The answer is absolutely not but the solutions that have to come into place are ones that require us to do things like visualize the problems, implement the solutions and then to do things like just on a global level just how can we collaborate better around these biggest pressing challenges? I mean you gave this example about chemical plant disasters you give this example about asthma rates I mean like when we have this phrase in NIMBY it's not in my backyard so I don't give a fuck about it I mean that's literally the worst frame of mind to have you are not separate from other people this is all one planetary organism that we're all a part of and to understand that when someone suffers it doesn't actually increase the pie in your directional favor it actually makes it worse these are your brothers and sisters across the planet that it's our collective responsibility to make it so that they can bring their unique gifts into the world and unleash them like that seems like the root problem would you say that like one of the root problems of our issues that we have like the most you know the most upstream problem of what we face is our tendency to feel separate from each other and separate from nature rather than interconnected? That's certainly a root problem and I think that a global capitalist economic system not only engenders that kind of sense of separate success but rewards and encourages it and so the question of how do we create economic prosperity through a different system that wouldn't you know at the outset presume that or have inequality as a rootinized something that's produced by the system it's just like you can know a factory emits routine everyday pollutants a system a capitalist system produces inequality just something the system does and so I think we're gonna have to go back to really basic questions about how we organize the production of our societies what the kind of ends are and I think that not all people are gonna be persuaded by the empirical documentation of injustice or inequality because that's a question for societal deliberation and so again I mean how do we what do you do if you're at the table so to speak with people who have naturalized inequality as kind of part of the nature of things and I think this is we need a system that allows us to kind of work through that and certainly empirically you can say that everybody starts social that everyone depends on the social fabric to be what they are even if they're the wealthiest people in the world and so there is a way that we can bring analysis into the equation but there is just greed and just political persuasion over system so that people maintain control is an intransigent problem that I would argue is getting worse not easier to deal with. This may be the greatest issue of our time is figuring out how to catalyze feelings of interconnectedness, of unconditional love, of deep presence with each other. That being this most upstream root issue would solve all of the downstream symptoms that sometimes we just go and target solving symptoms. And one example of that from my research that is useful to think about is we pay a lot of attention to catastrophic disasters, people in acute need after a flood or a storm or an earthquake and I think that it's easy to think of it as that's one those are exceptional events not normal events and they can distract attention from the everyday structural violence that happens because people don't have access to clean water or to a healthy food supply or to avenues of governance where they can change their own situation and so we need to be careful that in attention to suffering that it's not seen as exceptional and disaster's a funny word I tend to insist that disaster can be fast and slow because you can have disasters that are not on the surface, they're very quiet. Like this one, this is a slow disaster that we're talking about that's forming. And disaster can be distracting because people think disaster is kind of end, it's like when the fire trucks go home it's over but what does it mean to remain responsible for a disaster in the really long term because people don't recover communities in the social fabric has changed forever and especially if they face more acute disaster more recurrently which is happening but it's harder to recover if the base you're building from is incredibly precarious. And I will also another favorite argument of mine is one way to reduce the precarity is to invest in our educational system so that people can understand the complex systems that are compounding disadvantage and creating harm because it's not surprising that the increase in the meanness in the inattention lack of care for other people corresponds with a divestment from public education. And so there is something about understanding where people are at that engenders the compassion that you're saying is so important. We've been now toying around with this. What could possibly be more important than having the children when they're born into the world have a deep feelings of interconnectedness, unconditional love, presence and having children in school do things like collectively do project-based learning around solving the sustainable development goals. I mean if you can mix together feelings of deep interconnectedness with feelings of trying to tackle the biggest challenges that humanity faces like together, it makes it so that all of the things downstream get solved by that most upstream thing of education. But you also gave this really interesting example it started making me want to actually analyze where the fault is because how do you take billions of people that now live in metropolis as in trying to prescribe variables to the weight of the prescribed weights to the people that have the greatest amount of influence over the sufferings that are being catalyzed by the issues at hand. And so like, I mean just, I mean examples are like, like are you really trying to reshape rules and regulations with your wealth to try and propagate your own advantages or are you trying to really understand how you can contribute to the collectives flourishing? And like why not make it more transparent if someone's buying a fifth yacht or a 10th house or a fifth watch or if they're investing money into something that's destroying the environments or indigenous people's lives or reshaping rules and regulations by hiring lobbyists like just like some serious consequences need to be, I mean, we don't want to inflict we're pacifists we don't want to inflict harm onto people but some very serious psychedelics need to be administered into those people's lives. Psychopath delics would be good but one of the questions I have my students debate is whether corporate negligence that leads to harm to workers or communities if people should go to jail for that. I mean we send people to jail really quickly for the kinds of misconduct that poorer people often get kind of caught doing but we rarely, rarely hold corporate CEOs responsible and they make an argument that how could they have known this plant halfway around the world in India was an operating at maximum and in the case where I started my research career which was a chemical plant disaster in India that was owned by an American company Union Carbide and for literally 30 years there was a tug of war over getting the CEO of Union Carbide at the time held criminally accountable in India and the US wouldn't extradite it. Wow. And some people said you can't blame one person for the many and there were many many things that contributed to the disaster happening but it started with plant design which was clearly the responsibility of the parent company in the US had to do with not training workers enough during a time when they were planning to shut the plant down but whose decision was that? And so the question of where do you locate responsibility in these complex systems? Geez. It's in many places but elites are often protected from that responsibility. And so that- Epstein didn't kill himself. Yeah, please continue. But so thinking about how our system of justice itself reproduces the lack of accountability that produced the injustice in the first place. And I think that some of that is the force of law needs to be implemented not restrained. I mean one thing that I harp on is we so often focus on the abuses of law and there are many at the same time there are hugely risky and harmful activities that the law basically doesn't touch and let's go on unregulated. And so we've got both going on at the same time. What an insane example of like trying to like extradite someone that could be viewed as completely at- Responsible. Held responsible for the death of how many? It's debated but 10,000 is a good number to work with. Of deaths? You, yep. There were at least 3,500 in the 24 hours or in the immediate aftermath. Some people argue that there were 10,000 then. It was of course hard to keep up when you had massive body burnings and things. Which chemical plant explosion was this? Union carbide plant in Bhopal, India. And this is the story gets- Union carbide plant in Bhopal. Yes, and it's a very complicated story because it was a plant set up to make pesticides hoping to make India food self-sufficient. So the way trying to do things that are good have these kind of underbelly. But even from the beginning they built the plant with too much capacity because they wanted to corner the market. One reason, you had so much capacity and thus the amount of chemical release when things went badly was huge. 40 tons of toxic gas were released in one night in that city. There was no planning. So people didn't know how to evacuate. They of course didn't trust public authorities as it often happens in disaster scenarios. And what you still see is when you see catastrophic events like this, people acting as though it's a complete surprise. We didn't see this coming even though you've got communities living on the fence line of factories. And it's really counterintuitive to think that you wouldn't have problems in these facilities given their technical complexity. Given the fact that they're not regulated, there was a small, small pesticide, not a pesticide fertilizer facility in Texas that blew up, I believe in 2014 in West Texas, not a complicated production facility but really a mixing facility. When it blew up, it took out essentially the whole town, a middle school across the street. That was, it was after hours so there weren't kids in the school. But in some of the after math reporting, a regulator had not been on site at that facility in like a decade. And so the idea that we're regulating, even when you've got really, and this high risk things being stored. And in this case, it was ammonium nitrate fertilizer which was used in the Oklahoma bombing, the Texas city disaster in the 40s that took out Texas city. It was an ammonium nitrate fertilizer explosion. So again, it's not, we shouldn't be surprised when these things blow. And we need to build our societies either where we design away from the risk. And one of the really exciting areas of work is green chemistry, where you design the products and chemical processes we need but with chemicals where the structure of the chemical itself is not dangerous. So you're not trying to stop things from leaking from the plant. You're trying to design at the front end. And that's really exciting and important work. Most upstream is using green chemicals that could never even cause some sort of massive explosions and killing. I couldn't believe it when you said the numbers were 3,500 at least in the India explosion. That was mind blowing when you said that to me because most people don't think of drastic things like that, causing that much damage. Who's held responsible? How can we mitigate it? You went to the most upstream issue. That's a great one of green chemicals. Another one is like, why are people able to reshape rules and regulations in the favors of avoiding sentences, jail sentences? Or this is a big deal. How do you hold people that are adding zeros to the end of their paychecks that are causing environmental issues and public health issues for other people's lives in the process of adding those zeros to their paychecks? How do you hold them completely responsible? Well, one of the reasons they're not held responsible is because that whole system is seen as kind of natural. Rich people will be rich people. The rich people will have power. They'll influence our political system. And again, an important role of a field like anthropology is we may not have the answers, like how do you fix that? But we can say it doesn't have to be like that. There's a lot of different ways to organize social life in different historical periods and different geographic contexts. And so to denaturalize a system that's so productive of harm is a first step. And I would say this happens at the kind of educational moment way upstream, where the sense that kind of the way things are just have to be. And that sounds ridiculous that any that that would really shape what's possible in a society, but it does. And if you, and I think it's more likely that you'll naturalize the status quo if you don't have educational spaces where people can learn to kind of see in the crevices, see the system patterns, see comparatively. And so it's critical to have that kind of deliberative space in societies. Yeah, the hardcore focus on upstream solving these big challenges is crucial. What was the anthropology of environmental health regarding asthma? Well, asthma rates have skyrocketed in the last number of decades. Some of that's probably a matter of data collection reporting, but asthma isn't as difficult to diagnose as something like autism where you, there's a lot of debates over do the rising rates, or is it just because they're, what they're counting as autism is different. There's clearly been rises in autism too, but asthma is simple comparatively. There is a lot of different kinds of asthma, but you've got soaring rates. And even in the early 90s, there was often a sense it was really treated as an in body disease. You sort of had asthma and you took care of the individual child rather than say, how are ambient conditions like air pollution producing asthmatic conditions? And I think the World Health Organization really started highlighting air quality as a driver of health in the last decade. I mean, because it really dealt with infectious disease before that. And so imagine what a kind of phase transition, an organization like the World Health Organization has to go through to move from infectious disease to air pollution as a driver of morbidity. And there's more and more health outcomes that are connected to environmental exposures than we knew even a decade ago. Diabetes, for example, which was long treated as like a dietary disease and genetic is now they're connecting to plastics exposure. And so once you start recognizing the environmental determinants of disease, it just complicates healthcare, health diagnosis, insurance. The whole thing shakes up. Environmental determinants of disease, interesting. So the World Health Organization only recently 10 years ago put air quality index as a... I wouldn't say it. I don't know when they first did it, but they first started giving real visibility to it and have done, and it's moved the dial. I mean, I think it's changed the discussion because a lot of everyday pollution was seen as just a necessary effect of industrialization and economic prosperity. The idea that the smell of pollution is the smell of money. And I think that even now, though, you have governments arguing that pollution levels don't... They pushed back against the claim that they have deep health outcomes, which are counterintuitive against the science, but there is a deep sense. And some people, I think, genuinely believe that economic development is a more basic mode to prosperity than environmental health is secondary to that. I think that's shifting, but it's still a challenge. Yeah, just a big question on that front in general is just what are we building? What are we building? So many people talk about an artificial general intelligence or digital superintelligence. That's what people are talking about now. That's what we're building. Well, I think that the promise of AI likely extends what it can do for us. On the other hand, I think that the complexity of the problems we've been talking about are going to be data intensive. Like, we're going to have to have massive investments in data infrastructure and data practices and data expertise in order to have any sense. Not only if we don't want to just characterize problems, we want to change them. And I'll give you just an example that's not even planetary in scope, but it's although it's happening all over. So city governments, including Vancouver, are making decisions about whether to allow ride sharing that Uber, should Uber be allowed to come to town? I was super surprised when there was no Uber lift here. And there are massive advantages, particularly in some places. For example, in Indian cities, ride sharing, there's an Indian company called Ola, has given, and Uber is there, have given women increased mobility that seems safe because you can be tracked on your phone, you don't wonder where you're going. So there's many advantages. On the other hand, there's clearly many disadvantages. You displace other transportation providers. The increase in density in vehicles in Indian cities in the same timeframe that you had the development of ride sharing is impressive. So there's just vehicle density and associated air pollution. There's the fair labor for the drivers. I always talk to my Lyft and Uber drivers and often it's not a good, secure way to make a living. It's often they feel duped into it. The other kinds of transport providers get dislocated. So it perturbates the whole city for this to happen. And city officials have the responsibility to say we're going to let them come or not. And they might just say no because the transportation sector is highly organized and say no, but it's even more than that. But to say how do you assess whether this is equitably distributed advantage to this city? What kind of data would you need? And you would need qualitative data about transportation options and the quality of a certain kinds of job. You would need lots of quantitative data about vehicle density and pollution levels and health outcomes from that. And somehow that needs to be aggregated and not overly determined in advance by corporate interests that would benefit from a certain decision. And so just imagining that one single decision that cities already are trying to make is just incredibly complicated. And I think there's a hundred decisions like that that governing officials need to make daily. And so building the infrastructure, the workflows, the expertise, the sensibilities of what's fair and right. I mean, there's just a mangle of things that need to happen together. Yeah, inclusive stakeholders is a very interesting one. So when a new technology gets deployed into a city can it be that there's a social fabric and the social contract that's actually designed where it's not just the investors and the employees of the company that get the most but also the workers that are doing like a gig economy or the customers of that service and the community that that company's located can each gain ownership of that flourishing because they're all technically a part of it. There's stuff like that that's really interesting. There's also just, I think really, again, just going to the most upstream issue just catalyzing feelings of deep interconnectedness, presence, love at young ages, solving these big challenges, getting kids involved in solving these big challenges in like project-based learning environments. I also think don't, I mean, I think it starts there but I also think it's really important that people in various roles in our society, a city engineer that's helping decide if you put in a new metro line, someone that works for a corporation that makes chemicals, people can make a difference by having strong analytic capabilities, a really robust ethical imagination where we don't need to tell them this is wrong, this is not wrong, people need ethical freedom but they need to go into that with a strong understanding of what the implications of their actions are. And so the idea that a certain kind of transportation option has these cascading effects on other people both and going forward inter-generationally. And so that line between how do you mandate compassion is a real paradox but one that I think that we can better, much better prepare people for than we are now. It's like a marriage of both doing it at that grassroots as the child's born into the world and designing the social fabric that way but also like very top-down like have government officials and big owners of corporate companies to have them also dose into these feelings of interconnectedness and have them also partake in that designing and architecting of that next world. I wanna ask you about your own personal experiences with deep feelings of interconnectedness or unity or oneness. How have you connected to those feelings? I think I have a deep sense that my role in the world as a professional, as a researcher and teacher and just as a citizen, I'm a parent that you have responsibilities for people beyond your close circle and that you are responsible for it all, so to speak. And so the sense of putting in a good day's work to kind of keep the world afloat. I think I was deeply socialized towards that and not in a kind of politically, radically family but a sense that you did write to your neighbors, you were mindful of downstream consequences. And so I think it, being a teacher's a good profession because it's a slow route to care and change but it does feel like a route that works, that's important. I think it's a lot harder for people that make their living kind of in the belly of the beast. It's harder to find opportunities to do good works. And so, and I don't think it makes sense to kind of blame them individually. It's like, how do we produce systems where people don't have everyday options to exercise ethical commitment in a kind of systems level way? Yeah, we are all responsible for the outcome of this world and treating it like that's part of all of our unique blueprints as we're birthed into the world is paramount. And we are responsible for each other in this planet as stewards and the future of the environment of it and the next generations of it. The last question that I wanna ask you is, what do you think is the most beautiful thing? Wow, the most beautiful thing. I think the most beautiful thing is people having the capacity to collectively evaluate what's going on and to imagine and plan together for increasing and equitably distributed prosperity. So it's not so much that I can imagine a world that's otherwise, but perhaps it's the teacher in me. I can imagine us doing a better job trying to architecture that world, as you've said. I love that. Architecting equitably distributed prosperity. I love that. Let's do it. That was beautiful. Kim, thanks so much for coming onto the show. Really appreciate you. Thank you, great questions. Thank you, this was super fun. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. Let us know what you're thinking. Check out the links in the bio below to Kim's work. Also check out the links in the bio below to the American Anthropological Association. Support them. And support the other artists, the entrepreneurs, the leaders around the world that you believe in. Support them and help them grow. You can find all of our links below to our show. You can support us on PayPal, Patreon, Cryptocurrency. You can design cool merch and get paid all those links below. And go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon. That's a wrap.