Conceptualizing places of environmental devastation: Towards a political geography of “health and environmental emergency regions”

Abstract

The text presented below is divided into three parts. The first provides an account of an ongoing conceptual debate. We briefly consider four concepts. We create a conversation between “sacrifice zones,” “environmental hells” and “Health and Enviromental Emergency Regions” (resas), which are currently in tension in Mexico as distinct approaches to the regional designation of environmental problems, their causes, effects and possible responses. The fourth concept is ours, “landscapes of disappearance,” which describes productions of space by territorial authorities that allow them to ignore the consequences of or evade responsibility for the creation of places of environmental devastation. Our review is guided by the political relevance of problematizing, in one way or another, the territories in which their inhabitants live, suffer and oppose serious conditions of contamination and morbidity. The second part situates our reading of these concepts in the context of a core area of the Toltec Region—composed of the municipalities of Atitalaquia, Atotonilco de Tula, Apaxco and Tula de Allende—located in the Mezquital Valley, which concentrates in its territory extractive and industrial activities with a considerable ecological footprint, such as a thermoelectric plant, a refinery, seven cement plants, countless lime kilns, as well as some agrochemical factories. Here we propose a brief contextualization, at a general level, and then focus on the social and ecological harms that has accompanied capitalist development in the region and the mobilizations of organizations in response to it. Finally, we close the text with a series of conclusions about the need to consider concepts for what they imply politically, and for how they position possible subjects of action. We are concerned about what our concepts imply about the spaces of the political and the way in which they make visible the capacities of critical subjects active in these spaces. In relation to the three concepts with which we open the text (“sacrifice zones,” “environmental hells” and “Health and Enviromental Emergency Regions”” [resas]), we promote a way of relating to theoretical productions as tools of politicization around the problems that arise in the regions.