Mourning Waste in the Anthropocene

It is a sultry afternoon in May 2019. Yosefina, an Indigenous Marind woman, returns home from a foraging expedition in the forests of lowland West Papua. She carries her three-year old child, Petrus, on her chest and bears handwoven fiber bags across her back and forehead. But today, as yesterday and the days before, the bags return empty and dangling.

Since 2008, over one million hectares of Marind’s forests have been converted to industrial oil palm plantations. Game that previously abounded across the landscape is increasingly difficult to encounter. Plants and trees that once flourished across the land have been felled to make way for cash crops, or no longer bear fruit because chemicals and diesel oil have contaminated the soil. Birds and mammals have sought refuge on higher ground, fleeing the heavy haze of smoke, smog, and ash. Pesticides have poisoned aquatic critters, including fish, turtles, and crocodiles, and Marind villagers no longer capture or consume them. Their bodies, Yosefina explains, are full of toxins, now also embedded in the bodies of Marind themselves. It is in their lungs, flesh, breastmilk, and blood.

In this remote resource frontier, the landscape and its lifeforms are the landfill. 

Waste as Word, Waste as World

Stories like Yosefina’s shape my attention to toxic waste as matter in flux. I draw on the perspectives of the Indigenous Marind People of West Papua, whom I have had the great privilege to learn from and think with over the course of the last decade. In particular, I want to unsettle conceptions of extractive frontiers like monocrop plantations as sites by arguing that they exist as productive, profitable natures for some and contaminated, more-than-human wastescapes for others. 

As a starting point, consider the etymology of the word “waste.” The term comes from the Latin “vastum,” neuter of “vastus,” meaning “empty, desolate, abandoned.” It originally described certain regions, territories, and landscapes as “wastelands.”

In one of its contemporary usages, waste refers to “material which has been used and is no longer wanted, for example when the valuable or useful part of it has been taken out.” Another definition describes it as a process of “attrition and diminishment”—to become gradually depleted, to weaken, to wear away at the strength, vigor, or life of—quite literally, to “waste away.” 

The meanings of “waste” speak not only to the toxic by-products of industrial agriculture. They also speak to the plantation itself as an example of what some scholars call a “sacrifice zone.” This term originally described landscapes rendered barren and unlivable as a result of nuclear activity. Today, it often refers to polluted or depleted territories. This is a result of extractive and environmentally damaging industries such as mining and agribusiness. In this context, they also adversely impact the health, wellbeing, and continuity of local inhabitants.

In West Papua, the plantation as “sacrifice zone” encompasses the biodiverse environments and organisms with whom communities like Marind share intimate ancestral relations of kinship. It also encompasses Indigenous Marind themselves as communities displaced, disempowered, and dispossessed by plantation developments without free, prior, or informed consent. In the process, Marind and their environments are sacrificed or rendered “collateral damage.” Métis scholar M. Murphy argues that such top-down, extractive, and capitalist governance regimes economize the value of life and dictate which lives are better left unborn. 

In everyday life, plantations embody for many Marind what Val Plumwood might call the “shadow places” of industrial capitalism. These are realms of haunting homogeneity, discipline, and deadliness, with rippling effects across human and non-human bodies, futures, and relations. In these shadow places, Marind and their forest relatives inherit the excesses of capitalism and its toxicities. This happens through the visceral immediacy of their own and others’ bodies.

In the wake of monocrop plantations, Yosefina explained to me, the wizened skin of the forest can no longer sustain its diverse plants and animals. Marind share kinship with and also depend on them for their subsistence. Human and non-human bodies, once strong and glossy, become weak and dry, as fertile soils fritter into dust. Chemicals and toxic gases emanating from the plantation penetrate these bodies as molecular dispersions of slow and immediate violence. One of them is paraquat, a quick-acting, nonselective herbicide banned in many countries due to its toxic effects. Another is glyphosate, a broad-spectrum herbicide and crop desiccant. Rising like a noxious sweat from tropical soils, toxic particle-clouds infiltrate the pores of the poor, inducing nosebleeds, cataracts, sores, ulcers, cancers, and infertility. 

The polluted wetness of rivers and soils in turn jeopardizes the living bodies and relations, present and future, mediated by their flux and flow. For instance, humans and other lifeforms absorb chemicals and unwittingly transmit them to those who touch or consume them. It is in the breastmilk of mothers, the sweat of hunters, the blood and grease of game, the flesh and scales of fish, and the shoots of budding sago palms. These troubling chemical connections crystallize into a generalized sense of vulnerability distributed across diverse sites, subjects, and substances. They are all connected to one another in interspecies, intercorporeal, and intergenerational ways.

Waste as Object of Mourning

And yet even as they and their forest kin are subject to its corrosive effects, Marind refuse to reduce toxic waste to the status of static substance alone. Instead, they insist that waste, too, has a story, an animacy, an agency, and a dignity. It is not just something to be managed or mitigated, but also something to be mourned.

As we traveled through the landscape, for instance, my Marind companions would often stop to sit down and sing to the myriad forms of waste surrounding and at times penetrating our bodies. They would sing songs of exaltation and sorrow to the greasy surface of polluted rivers. They would tell stories to decimated trees, dig their fingers and toes deep into the oil-filled soils, send prayers to the pungent smoke and haze, chant poems to the carcasses of roadkill, collect and bury the feathers of starved birds of paradise, and dance to the bodies of dead fish, drunk on pesticides and sludge. In these acts of mourning, the subjects are as much the victims of toxic violence as the source of toxicity itself. 

Singing, storying, dancing, and chanting for Marind matters because it marks a recognition that waste has not always been, nor need be, a harmful substance. Rather, the matter that is waste harms only when it loses its capacity to nurture more-than-human life under capitalist regimes. In the process, waste becomes an unwitting agent of destruction and loss.

Particles of matter, for instance, comprise smoke and haze. These once belonged to and enlivened relating, respiring, and reproducing beings. Diesel oil, meanwhile, embodies the remains of myriad long-deceased trees, crustaceans, fish, and countless other ancient creatures from eons past. Paraquat and glyphosate might burn the lungs and kill the soil—but they are in essence a combination of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, oxygen. Such molecules are not necessarily injurious in and of themselves. They only become so through their human-fueled transformation into deadly compounds. 

Marind villagers’ acknowledgement of waste’s prior lives and afterlives echoes the reflections of Zoe Todd, a Red River Métis scholar of discard studies. The aftermath of an oil spill prompted her to reflect on how it ravaged life across her home river and country, amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory. The rage, anger, and hatred this disaster first triggered later moved her to consider the ontology of oil itself. This oil, she writes, is “the remnants of long-gone dinosaurs and the flora and fauna of millions of years ago. The machinations of human political-ideological entanglements that deem it appropriate to carry this oil through pipelines running along vital waterways… make this oily progeny a weapon against fish, humans, water and more-than-human worlds.”

Waste as Relation and Recognition

To mourn waste, then, is to recognize waste as a relation between agentive matter in flux—soils, birds, breasts, wombs, trees, particles, skins, atmospheres, wetness, feathers, rivers, and more. In a world of unevenly distributed toxic ecologies, it is a way of acknowledging waste’s ambiguity as matter that is at once vibrant and violent, lively and lethal, agentive and attritive. It is a substance with which we must learn to live and become. One that, in spite of its harmful effects, merits reckoning, reclamation, and repair—in sum, waste as a matter of both concern and of care.

There are emerging instances in the mourning of other-than-human beings. In August 2019, for example, Iceland held a funeral and erected a bronze plaque on the barren terrain once covered by Okjökull—the nation’s first glacier lost to climate change. By memorializing a fallen glacier, the funeral sought to emphasize what is disappearing—or dying—the world over as a result of anthropogenic activity.

When it comes to mourning waste, however, things get tricky. Waste is not necessarily charismatic, compelling, or conservation-worthy like a glacier, river, or endangered species may be. And yet, it, too, is a result of anthropogenic activity. It, too, as Okjökull’s funerary plaque reads, asks that we “acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.”

If it is possible to mourn waste, to what extent is healing also possible? When it comes to the toxic ecologies of industrial monocrops, the promise of remedy remains dubious. The effects on bodies and landscapes are latent yet already impact the wellbeing of both. Transmitted across more-than-human generations of skin and of wetness, toxicity in the present is also toxicity in a future that, in a sense, has already happened.

Perhaps we need to think more creatively, capaciously, and critically about what it means to be and become-with waste in an epoch where the ethical stakes of what matter matters are heightened. Realities of non-innocence, impurity, and complicity haunt this unevenly shared world. Such thinking highlights how the features of matter in flux matter as much as the fact of the flux itself. It invites us to consider mattering-in-flux as deadly and diminishing, but also potentially generative of new kinds of relations with waste as “kin,” “progeny,” and as an unsettling yet here-to-say “companion being.”

For Marind communities, mourning waste is a way of feeling one’s way in, through, and beyond the consequential loss of more-than-human communities. It is rooted in an acknowledgement that waste was something else before it became waste—elsewhere, in other forms, and with other effects. It brings us to ask: what kinds of earthly matter matters in an epoch where industrial activities are undermining conditions of life at a planetary scale? How is the world in this matter and how is this matter in the world? How does it constitute its forms, functions, and afterlives? What is life when matter can die, be killed, or be mourned? What emergent politics of more-than-human cohabiting are possible in worlds of matter that are always already non-innocent and impure?

Asking such questions might not offer resolution and answers to the rude reality of toxic living, but it is nonetheless an active disposition—a “staying with the trouble” of impurity that does something with and of that impurity. 

Yosefina, alongside many other Marind villagers, are well aware that mourning alone is not sufficient to achieve the urgent social change needed to halt the ecological unravelings that are making wastescapes out of lifeworlds. But these mournings are nonetheless vital in resisting the trivialization of other-than-human animacy and the regimes of violence that naturalize other-than-human destruction.

Marind’s various modes of mourning waste are at once modest and resilient, poetic and political. They invite us to consider what rituals we might enact in our own everyday lives to better recognize, relate, and respect the matter that shapes our ecological and everyday environments. They draw in human and other-than-human wetness, wisdoms, and worlds. And they continue to sprout from the soil, enduring even as the soil is exhausted and dying.

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Featured image: Forests decimated to make way for monocrop concessions in rural Merauke. Photo by author, 2016.

Author’s Note: Pseudonyms have been used for all persons and places.

Sophie Chao is lecturer in anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on capitalism, colonialism, ecology, health, and justice in the Pacific. She is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Her last contribution to Edge Effects was “The Palate Politics of Eating Kangaroo” (April 2022). Website. Contact.