Falling most obviously within traditional understandings of toxicity, here a cemetery groundskeeper wearing a protective suit and mask sprays pesticides to keep unwanted weeds in check. The cultivation of a certain kind of “Nature” is common in what are known as garden or lawn cemeteries. It is estimated that most of the approximately 115,000 active cemeteries in the United States (U.S. Geological Survey 2015) are kept verdant through regular applications of biocides. Grasses are especially susceptible to fungal attack when they are kept short, often necessitating cemeteries to ramp up the use of pesticides to maintain certain “lively, but not too lively” appearances. This kind of intervention not only perpetuates a harm to environmental health, but represents a falling out of relations with more-than-human networks of responsibility (Gilio-Whitaker 2019).
Explicit relations between chemicals and the human also takes on new meaning in regards to embalming; a process too graphic and ethically dubious to show in a setting such as this photo essay. In this visual absence, how can we think through these processes (workers and pesticides; the chemically preserved dead) together? The logic of embalming wholly rejects decay, seeing it as a process of ruination and erasure of the self. As Philip Olson has argued, the embalmed body is a product of industrial art to which new matter is added and from which unwanted, useless, or obstructive matter is removed in the aim of hiding and rendering absent the material signs of death (Olson 2016). This involves draining blood and vital organs from the body and replacing them with a fluid that contains over forty known toxins, including formaldehyde (which is classified as a known carcinogen) This procedure affords temporary protection against the ravages of decay by killing bacteria and denaturing the cells on which they feed, delaying the exuberance of nonhuman actors that co-habitated with the living body and ultimately denying the “multiplicities of our own materiality” (Bennett 2009). In this instance, chemical toxicity functions to enforce dualistic segregation of the human from the natural, a separation that reveals forms of human exceptionalism that profoundly shape dominant practices of self, commodity, materiality, and death.
Falling most obviously within traditional understandings of toxicity, here a cemetery groundskeeper wearing a protective suit and mask sprays pesticides to keep unwanted weeds in check. The cultivation of a certain kind of “Nature” is common in what are known as garden or lawn cemeteries. It is estimated that most of the approximately 115,000 active cemeteries in the United States (U.S. Geological Survey 2015) are kept verdant through regular applications of biocides. Grasses are especially susceptible to fungal attack when they are kept short, often necessitating cemeteries to ramp up the use of pesticides to maintain certain “lively, but not too lively” appearances. This kind of intervention not only perpetuates a harm to environmental health, but represents a falling out of relations with more-than-human networks of responsibility (Gilio-Whitaker 2019).
Explicit relations between chemicals and the human also takes on new meaning in regards to embalming; a process too graphic and ethically dubious to show in a setting such as this photo essay. In this visual absence, how can we think through these processes (workers and pesticides; the chemically preserved dead) together? The logic of embalming wholly rejects decay, seeing it as a process of ruination and erasure of the self. As Philip Olson has argued, the embalmed body is a product of industrial art to which new matter is added and from which unwanted, useless, or obstructive matter is removed in the aim of hiding and rendering absent the material signs of death (Olson 2016). This involves draining blood and vital organs from the body and replacing them with a fluid that contains over forty known toxins, including formaldehyde (which is classified as a known carcinogen) This procedure affords temporary protection against the ravages of decay by killing bacteria and denaturing the cells on which they feed, delaying the exuberance of nonhuman actors that co-habitated with the living body and ultimately denying the “multiplicities of our own materiality” (Bennett 2009). In this instance, chemical toxicity functions to enforce dualistic segregation of the human from the natural, a separation that reveals forms of human exceptionalism that profoundly shape dominant practices of self, commodity, materiality, and death.