Christina Dunbar-Hester on toxic infrastructure, the life of ports, and supply chain justice

"What would more sovereignty and assertion of control over these goods and processes all along the way look like?"

Christina Dunbar-Hester is a researcher and writer with expertise in the area of democratic control of technologies. She is the author of multiple award-winning books on science, technology, and society. She holds a Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University, and she is a faculty member in the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. 

I spoke to Christina about her new book, Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond. This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.

California is this place that’s associated with the whole gamut of beautiful natural landscapes, and also progressive environmental attitudes, climate action, and things like that. But as you write about, petroleum is directly and indirectly interwoven in the San Pedro Bay ports, the state of California, and obviously the entire global trade system. Why is that critical to understanding what a better trade system based on what you call transspecies supply chain justice could look like? 

You've hit on a few really worthwhile things to unpack for a moment. One: from the outside, California has this reputation for environmentalism. To some degree, that's warranted in that California sets emission standards for automobiles. It's such a big market that, to sell in the US market at all, you'll wind up having to meet the California emission standards.

California has unique challenges with air quality. The sunshine and emissions supercharge the conditions for making ozone, and the geography can trap particulates. So Greater Los Angeles, going east into the Inland Empire, has really bad air. A lot of that is freight emissions. And the Central Valley also has really bad air. Those two regions have some of the worst air in the country. That's agricultural dust, a bit of oil actually extracted, and the sunshine plus the valleys between mountains that trap air.

So, on the one hand, California has this reputation for environmentalism. But what's not clear from outside of the state, or even probably certain places in the state, is that that’s in this sort of dialectic with these sacrifice zones. Since the Clean Air Act was adopted as law of the land, they've never been in compliance with that legislation. And then the factor of California having the fifth biggest economy in the world if it were broken out as its own economy; of course that's underwritten by this history of oil production. Oil underwrites the ability to have all these other industries and trade and cheap energy. Even before the US became more of an exporter of fossil fuels, which it has become recently, it's just supercharging wealth accumulation, which gets rolled into other kinds of capital projects. In 1940, California only had about 5% of the population of the US, but it got 10% of federal investment—so it’s this engine of wealth. But fossil fuel is this substrate that underwrote a lot of that wealth accumulation. 

The port story is directly tied to that. They were initiated as the seaports meant to capitalize on the western edge of the US and the Pacific arena. But very, very quickly, they turn into petroleum handling spaces, and then that wealth gets poured back into the ports themselves. So with the ascension of trade, and particularly the 1960s onward, there's new regimes of maritime trade and way more goods moving all around the world. Those ports are positioned to import goods from Asia and also handle this volume, which is really, really significant for all of the United States economy. What I wound up doing with this book is juxtaposing that time period—the super stratospheric rise of trade in this space—with the environmental legislation which happens at about exactly the same time. So trying to look at the site as this extreme puzzle. But it's more than a local story, because those patterns exist elsewhere, too.

As you write about, wildlife management and conservation is sort of focused on maintaining the status quo of the port complex and keeping the engine running, and in some cases is actually funded by the very interests doing it. Can you say a little bit more about that?

The more I was digging, the more I would find sites like the local aquarium and this organization that does rehabilitation and rescue of birds. There's a direct line where I think a visitor at these sites might think: this is a conservation story, they're helping wildlife, and they solicit donations from the public. You wouldn't necessarily realize that a significant source of funding for these places is petroleum.

Undoubtedly these organizations are doing good for these creatures. But there's also this other layer of a conflict of interest of greenwashing. Some of that's voluntary by the organizations. One of them has a history where it was initially decided that the founder was going to take money from the petroleum industry and try to work with them. Others, it's a little bit more obscured and an artifact of legislation in California. Around 1990, after some spills, they put a tax on handling and sale of petroleum that has to be there in the event of spills. 

But what I'm really trying to draw out is that they wind up not being conflictual enterprises. It winds up that conservation sort of sits within this systemic thing that cannot be questioned, and even relies on the goodwill of the petroleum industry, or at least the cooperation and participation for the funding of the enterprise. So it becomes naturalized in this really overwhelming way, the inevitability that there will be this industrial harm and industrial accidents and there will be rescue or rehabilitation. But it's not possible to imagine a world where harm at that scale isn't a creeping possibility or spectacular possibility. There's just no way to think of life living without that either slow or spectacular violence always looming over it.

You chose four things as lenses to look at the port: cetaceans, bananas, seabirds, and otters. Why did you do it that way, and why did you choose those four?

A few reasons. One was methodological. I have tended in the past to do ethnographic research. That’s embedding with communities and talking to people and getting to a deep familiarity with belief systems and writing about that. And I think I needed a break from that work. But also I was new in a place, and I didn't feel necessarily oriented enough. I didn't know who I was responsible to in this new place. You want to do this work in a way that's careful and respectful and trusting; trust is cultivated on both sides. And so I didn't feel responsibly able or up for building long-term community relationships yet to write about this site. 

I had also been reading a lot of things in the vein of needing to broaden social and humanistic inquiry to think about multispecies lenses, and thinking about the climate and the so-called Anthropocene. The things I wound up writing about are what we would call charismatic. So they're already in news stories and they're already things that people are familiar with and know. It’s not a stretch to try to get a reader to care about the otter as a conservation story. It's definitely the case that you could write a so-called natural history of the site a bunch of different ways. And I chose to look at some things that were more familiar. My goal is to get them to leap off the page in new angles and lights than people might know before.

Three of them are animals that are found in the natural history of this place. Bananas are a way of trying to get at some of the other things in the book that are what make it not a natural history—it's also about labor and consumption. So thinking about the commodity chain of this food product and the history of refrigeration, and how it rests on the consumption of fossil fuel energy to move it and to cool it. But also it gave me a way to illuminate the patterns of goods handling in the ports. That included some automation or mechanization of labor, and then also the prehistory before it's a consumer product—the conditions of production and shipping on the origin. That's also something that I wanted to do. So it's not just about wildlife or animals in the ports, but it's really a story about how the ports and lifeforms do some dance or dialectic to move commodities in and around life.

Bananas are an interesting case study. First of all, I didn't realize that bananas needed special infrastructure at the ports—ripening rooms and things like that. Also how the increasing scale of the ports basically pushed them out. You write towards the end that maybe they'll come back, but maybe not. I really liked that as a way of highlighting that uncertainty of needing to figure out what justice and sustainability might look like.

And trade. I'm not someone who's arguing for completely local or regional supply chains, nor am I some sort of nationalist protectionist. But obviously what we're doing is unsustainable and harmful, even if there are certain beneficiaries of the system. I'm not trying to argue for some restoration to an Edenic past; that's not possible, and not realistic. But what would more sovereignty and assertion of control over these goods and processes all along the way look like? What would they look like for workers? What would they look like for consumers? What would they look like for the lifeforms that we’re enmeshed with?

It's this really familiar commodity that we might not think too much about. But it’s also really significant. Working on this book, something I read said that bananas are the most trafficked agricultural product on the ocean, which is a very strong warrant for thinking about their past, present, and future. I don't think we think of that most of the time when we're having lunch.

What is infrastructure vitalism?

That is something kind of playful, but kind of serious. It's really, really complicated, this site. Who's actually in control of it is fascinating, because there are local, regional, state, and national regulations that run through it and also that will affect this or that part of operations. Like the port was supposed to have this target for air quality or that target for water quality, or this deregulation in the transportation system will have this effect on labor. So there are lots of threads of interest groups and governments running through it. 

Local officials are always saying, “We need to modernize the port, we need to scale up operations, we need to support operations at scale.” They are doing that because entrenched interests make money off it, and because they think it's a winning economic strategy for the region to have all this goods movement and goods handling. But on some level, I also think they're not in control of it because they're responding to currents of global capital. If Los Angeles and Long Beach lose market share, then it'll go to Tacoma or it'll go to Savannah. There's an anxiety there where they're trying to chase the tail of something that's moving them in a way that they don't totally understand. I'm actually sympathetic to that. 

So the argument about infrastructural vitalism is a claim that they're subject to almost an animistic belief that they have to keep this stuff alive and stirring and moving and growing. Language like, “Trade is the lifeblood of America,” or “The 710 freeway is the spine of Southern California.” It looks at those somatic and economic metaphors and takes them seriously, as there’s a real emphasis on corporeal health or sanguinity that they're trying to manage. The argument is that, in focusing so myopically on the infrastructure and keeping it humming and keeping it fed and happy, they're losing the plot with a wider range of lively and ecological relations that are being harmed and being maimed and being killed because they're pursuing life for the infrastructure. 

While it's not one of the four areas that you explicitly focus on, the military looms large and is a consistent undercurrent throughout the entire book in myriad ways. What role has the military-industrial complex played in producing the violence and the harm in the San Pedro Bay ports?

A huge one. Even though the Navy mostly pulled out of San Pedro Bay in the 90’s, there's still military fueling and there's a weapon station. Also, in the neighborhood of San Pedro—which is part of LA—there's a huge battleship museum called the Battleship Iowa. People go and take pictures; it's a tourist destination. Cruise ships dock there. I think if you're docked for the afternoon, you might go to this battleship.

So there's this militarism that suffuses the entire site. And California being the western edge of the continent and the endpoint of Manifest Destiny, except then looking westward over the Pacific and the US empire and its claiming of territories and testing of weapons and all these things. California is really the base—in all senses—for a lot of that activity. 

Another thing to uncover here is the relationship between fuel, goods movement, planning of logistics, even having a certain predictable order of maritime operations. The security of commercial shipping is underwritten by an international order that is in the background: military preparedness and willingness to engage actors who violate that agreed-upon order. I was actually just reading someone who was arguing for more foregrounding of the military of the sea, saying, “Do you like Walmart? You should love the US Navy.”

That’s outside the scope of the book. But to the extent that the topic is the shifting land and water of this bay, the way that the land has been managed and the oil has been managed and hardened into refineries and docks and stuff, all of that is—even after the Navy has mostly consolidated itself in San Diego—a literal concretized infrastructural support for the US military, which is still the biggest consumer of fossil fuel on on the planet. All of that geopolitical security order is running through this site in ways that wouldn't be necessarily immediately apparent, I think.

In the book, you talk a lot about logistics, specifically the way that the “annihilative power of logistics” enables the damage and growth of the port. Do you think large-scale, highly complex logistics—the likes of which are on display here—could be harnessed for positive ends, or is this inherently a destructive force?

I think that's a wonderful question, and I don't have a simple answer. I will say that I'm interested in denaturalizing this to think about how it could be otherwise. And I think there is something potentially anti-democratic—maybe inherently anti-democratic—about certain scale and complexity of operations. You're inviting, and maybe underwriting by necessity, technocratic relations that aren't as amenable to democratic governance. That's as far as I would go.

But I'm certainly inviting this whole system to be thought of as up for grabs to be made to be more democratic and less violent. And I do think that the scale of complexity probably requires a command structure that might have antipathy towards more democratic governance and sovereignty than I would like to see brought to bear here. I'm generally comfortable saying, at a certain point, scale becomes its own force, and if we care about less violent and more democratic systems, that's something we should think about.

You write, “given that a port is not a destination but a site to hand off goods, it is well positioned to connect goods to struggle, not only sever them.” Can you say more about that?

In the simplest terms, a lot of our goods come with, but are also essentially alienated from, histories of struggle. Whether there's contestation over extraction of a resource, whether it's metal or clearcutting a forest or working in a sweatshop, there's struggle in the prehistory before it's a consumer good. But the port as it currently exists is a place to hand off the good. If the good has made it to the port, it often means it's been violently severed from its origin. And so the concept of transspecies supply chain justice is about: what if we actually thought about these things as connected all the way across and thought about local sovereignty flowing through and accompanying goods and processes all the way along? That's not a fancy way of saying fair trade or something. But what we think of as certified Fair Trade might be one component of it. The point is a lot of things that we consume have these violent origins that have been mystified—and often violent post-use lives, too—and thinking about this as a place to animate and have connections made between origins and supply chains and handoffs as a goal.

As you write about, ports as this site of interconnection of so many different things and at different scales is both a challenge and an opportunity—especially nowadays with how globalized everything is. How do you think we can make those connections across space and time through the lens of the port? Have you seen any good examples of that in practice?

There's a really neat site that documents ports as a site of struggle, Contested Ports. And here’s an LA-specific example. One of the first steps is to bring forward and document this site that's ticking along in the background, but is a space that’s made to be forgotten and invisibilized. Drawing something that's invisible out of the shadows and naming it, and naming the dynamics that it perpetuates and engenders.

There are different levels. In Greater LA, making the port accountable to residents and, moving into the Inland Empire, making this shipping and distribution infrastructure accountable to the people who live there and who are breathing toxic air and being subjected to this sacrifice zone so that the economy can function as it has. That would be one place to assert accountability. But that's still a very local project, and I am interested in the ways that this really connects.

There are some interesting things where the ports themselves are signing memoranda of agreement with each other and competing on the basis of greenness or something. It's very easy to be cynical about this, but global shipping is a huge, huge polluter, and I think that there are industry forces, as well as local ones, trying to force this to be cleaner.

I would also like to see a scale that's not pushing past planetary boundaries. And most of all, I would like to see the sovereignty of the people who make goods or have the places where they live be the sites of extraction. In that sense, the port is the place where it hands off and the supply chain is more of the action as things move along. There are calls to audit these and make them more transparent, but I think the profit system is always going to be working very, very strongly against that. Therefore, the economic system and the violent superpower in the room have to be rethought. I assume you and I would agree, just tinkering with the supply chain and shining some sunlight on it [laughs] is probably not as far as we would want to go. But, at the very least, these are really important sites.

My answer, honestly, is something more like degrowth—not pursuing growth for growth's sake. This may be wildly impractical, but I would love it if Los Angeles said, “We've been pursuing year-over-year growth in container shipping for decades. We're going to next set our sights on winding some of that down. We're going to call it a successful year if there's 3% less volume every year for 10 years; we're going to plan for that.” To me, that would be a meaningful local development and also it would be something that starts to unwind this unsustainable system. I don't have a lot of hope of that happening. What they're actually arguing for is zero-emission freight, but still more of it. To me, that's not going to work out as they hope.

You wrote in the concluding chapter about imagining a port in San Pedro Bay that could “allow many worlds to transit through it” that are “infrastructurally accommodated.” Can you explain that?

That’s riffing on the Zapatismo slogan. I’m thinking about it as a place where goods can flow, people can live, plants and animals can live. So it's not that single-minded pursuit of profit and global security that's achieved through violent energy extraction and pollution and severing people and natural systems from places. That's what's traveling through the port now, and that's annihilative. Doing things in a way that's more responsible and at scales that have accountability being possible.

So it's not an argument against trade of some kind; it's an argument against the systems that we have that are basically run on exploitation—ineluctably so. Reimagining the site as one for recreation, and use of the coastline in many modern and more traditional ways, and to have accountable ways of doing things both locally and further afield built in. It might still be a port, but it might not only be a port. And it would hopefully not be an absolutely mind-blowingly toxic mess, which it currently is. 

The coastline now is also vulnerable to flooding. We're going to have storm surges and such as sea level rises. This coastal area, as toxic as it is now, if that all became flooded that would result in really bad poisons getting pushed inland and contaminating all kinds of things, and then also back out into the sea. So there are all these reasons to unwind the scale of harm here, to both live with it better now and think of the future that's coming or is upon us.