12.3

12.3 …

subtext: Chester, PA is a city with a long history of industrial manufacturing. Once a thriving community in the mid 20th Century, the flight of white residents and the shift away from manufactured human labor within the US left the city mostly Black, mostly low income. The structural violence of capital abandonment, white disinvestment, and financial dependence on polluting industry within Chester sustains itself as it has the nation’s largest incinerator across the street from people’s homes. The effects of incineration have been linked to significant chronic health diseases. The environmental racism of the zoning and policies that have sustained the known harmful impacts of incineration is best highlighted through following PA Route 352 just four miles north to Swarthmore, PA. In this small Borough the average life expectancy is 81.6 years, the population is  82.5% White, and the average income of a household is over $107,000; compared to Chester, where the average income is $32,000, and the population is  68.92% Black. The spatial injustice of exposure to environmental hazards is not solely an environmental issue, but is the totality of all injustice as it mediates, intersects, involves, and delineates. 

art description: The procession of Paw Paw tree branch and leaves from the origination of PA Route 352 in the Swarthmore, PA area until it arrives at the start of Swarthmore College, where the visions of garbage bags accumulate further down the road, to represent how there is a policy within Delaware County where all citizens have to send their trash to the Covanta Incinerator. Additional to these visuals is the use of coal along railroad tracks that are also responsible for mass emissions of fossil fuels and other pollutants, which symbolize the incremental accumulation of hazards and injustices on the city. As the second panel reveals itself, the forced distribution of trash to incineration becomes harmful emissions as PA Route 352 arrives closer to Chester. The emitting stacks are forced to intersect with the Zero Waste Hierarchy, which seeks to completely invert the waste system to be prefigurative and center the reduction of production to have less things to waste.