As an anthropologist engaged in both environmental health debates and movements and the intersecting disciplines of environmental anthropology, medical anthropology, political ecology, and science and technology studies, boundary-talk has always attracted my attention, as has the out-of-bounds thinking and practice needed to effectively couple science and advocacy and make science advocacy work. I attend here to what sociologist Phil Brown calls “boundary movements” (Brown 2007), for it captures the boundary crossing tendency of activists and researchers working on contemporary environmental health and anti-toxics politics.

Boundary Movements

Environmental health problems are no doubt complex, both from the standpoints of science and community advocacy, and citizen response to these issues can manifest in “boundary movements” (Brown 2007) set in motion by complex citizens and scientists with converging and diverging backgrounds, agendas, identities, and life experiences, who form alliances and organize to mitigate bodily distress, social inequality, and environmental injustice. These forms of citizen action are “hybrid movements that blur the boundaries between lay and expert forms of knowledge and between activists and the state” (Brown et al 2004: 31), all of which inspires such citizen groups to “challenge the definitions of acceptable scientific practices and products” (2004: 32).

Engaging “boundaries” is more than a nuanced way of theorizing environmental health movements and citizen alliance networks. For example, movement across physical space—moving out of a toxic waste zone, for example—can reduce one’s exposure to harmful toxic substances. At the same time, moving across disciplinary space can, and commonly does, result in meaningful exposure to new epistemologies and practices, knew angles of understanding, and even new conceptions of the boundaries of lay and expert of science (Gieyrn 1983). Such boundary crossing is a common feature of contemporary environmental health movements (Brown 2007), and what follows is a snapshot of my experience navigating a particular environmental health boundary movement and action, an experience which ultimately was one of witnessing the triumph of science advocacy over special interest politics.

TCE Science and Advocacy

For the past five years, I have been involved with a group of community leaders and scientists fighting for better protection and better toxicological risk assessments for a cancer-causing toxic substance—trichloroethylene (TCE). TCE first entered public debate as the culprit toxin involved in the Woburn, Massachusetts cancer cluster of childhood leukemia cases which was the subject of the 1998 film A Civil Action starring John Travolta. TCE is a chlorinated solvent used primarily for metal degreasing and is a widespread groundwater contaminant found at military bases and industrial sites throughout the country. In addition to cancer, TCE causes harmful effects to the central nervous system, kidney, liver, immune system, male reproductive system and the developing fetus. The last EPA risk assessment for TCE was 24 years ago, in 1987. That assessment classified TCE as a “probable” human carcinogen. In a 2001 draft assessment, the EPA determined TCE was 5 to 65 times more toxic than previously estimated, resulting in TCE being re-classified as “highly likely” to cause human cancer.

Citizens fighting for better protection from this harmful toxic substance have, until recently, been stonewalled by the powerful influence of chemical industries in general, and the US Departments of Defense and Energy in particular, two federal agencies that together are responsible for nearly 750 hazardous waste sites containing TCE. Not to mention the political blockades set up by the Bush Administration, which forced the EPA to stall its TCE risk assessment and strategically silence established TCE science in 2007 by issuing a rule exempting the military and certain industries from laws that would put a limit on air emissions of TCE and other halogenated solvents, an exemption which was challenged in court by the Natural Resource Defense Council and other environmental groups (Sass 2011). In 2009, President Obama agreed to reconsider the Bush-era air emission exemptions and the outcome of that process is still pending, although a 2009 draft TCE assessment report did classify TCE as carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure, based mainly on its high risk of causing kidney cancers, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and liver cancer.

Signs of Success

The TCE activists’ network I have been a part of for the last five years is made up of community leaders, academics, scientists and political officials. Our primary goal has been to prod the EPA to update their toxicological profile for TCE to better reflect the growth of TCE science over the past two decades. We wrote a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson which was signed by nearly 40 citizens representing communities across the US with water and/or air contaminated with TCE or similar toxic substances. The letter urged the EPA to finalize their TCE assessment and issue the updated version to establish more protective clean-up standards and TCE exposure limits nationwide. The letter was sent on September 26, 2011 and two days later, on September 28, 2011, the EPA took an important step towards TCE regulation and policy by releasing the finalized toxicological assessment for TCE reflecting the scientific findings of the National Academy of Sciences, which was largely responsible for updating the most recent science on the human health risks of TCE exposure.

So, what does “boundary movement” thinking have to do with this case example of anti-toxics activism and toxics science advocacy? Confronted with this heady question, I am reminded of what Sylvia Noble Tesh stated in her Uncertain Hazards: “In the end, movements are what they are. What they are, of course, can never be entirely apparent” (2000: 137). Boundary movements, in this sense, are not self-evident, they are open to discussion even if activist engaged in these movements are settled on their politics and reasons for advocacy involvement. Boundary thinking and studies call for flexible visioning. “[W]e must be more flexible in defining a social movement and its development” (Brown 2007: 99). My involvement in TCE activism has reminded me that this species of advocacy is somehow informed by an ethics of openness and boundary-diluting practice. Citizens, scientists and regulators can break boundaries—personal, epistemic—to better regulate toxic substances, especially when their alliance embraces a kind of “desperate optimism,” as Bourdieu (2003) would have it.

Recommendations and Re-imaginations

Citizens engaged in toxics activism have made similar impacts on the regulation and governance of toxic substances and exposures (Brown and Mikkelsen 1990; Szasz 1994). Upon reflecting on my own involvement in TCE activism over the past five years, I have arrived at several basic recommendations for advancing this sub-focus of environmental health movements. Informed by recent discussions on the “re-imagining” of the boundaries of science and politics to improve the generation, transmission, and use of knowledge in contemporary environmental policy (Ascher, Steelman, and Healy 2010), I conclude with the following recommendations which may apply to activists and scholars engaged with or from communities impacted by TCE contamination or other toxic substances.

First, we need greater support of partnerships between scientists and nonscientists in the generation, transmission and use of different, yet compatible, ways of knowing and understanding. Second, while these partnerships can lead to the further support of “citizen science” (Irwin 1995) efforts, they ought to also be considered knowledge sharing partnerships aimed at revealing the uncertainties and exaggerated privilege of science. Third, we need to find creative ways to use the experiential social knowledge generated from these alliances and partnerships to defend the integrity of community action, scientific practice, and transdisciplinarity. The growth of citizen-science alliances to combat environmental health threats can further inspire the growth of inter and trans disciplinary research and action, a shift that exacerbates or at least plants the seed for the further politicization of disciplines, especially those like anthropology that generally advocate for or empathize with citizens managing to live with the health risks of corporate environmental plunder and escalating worldwide “ecocrises” (Singer 2009). Finally, for such “boundary movements” to prosper and have a meaningful social impact, we need to augment funding opportunities to enhance the documentation and study of public-preference knowledge to better understand the trajectory or prospects of contemporary environmental health and anti-toxics advocacy.

Peter C Little is an anthropologist working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. He also teaches as an adjunct professor in the department of anthropology at Oregon State University. He can be contacted at peter.little[at]noaa.gov.