Baselining pollution: producing ‘natural soil’ for an environmental risk assessment exercise in Chile

ABSTRACT

Baselines are used extensively in environmental regulation and usually serve as a proxy of a certain ‘natural’ environment upon which the potential toxicity of a certain substance is assessed. However, there is nothing natural or automatic about the process via which baselines are created. Most of the time they are produced through a series of baselining practices in which heterogeneous entities are assembled in highly idiosyncratic ways, a process always crisscrossed by technical, political and ethical issues. This particular paper, based on material collected while observing an environmental risk assessment exercise carried out in an abandoned mining waste dump in northern Chile, looks at two kinds of practices that are especially salient. On the one hand, there is the recognition of a certain ‘naturalness’ of a particular piece of soil, a process in which visual valuation processes play a central role. On the other hand, there is the creation of ‘traceability,’ through which the particular extracted sample is linked to a series of entities, gaining in the process validity as representative of the ‘natural soil’ existing in this particular patch. In the conclusion, both operations will be connected with different difficulties that current environmental regulation faces in dealing with polluted sites such as the one under study.

KEYWORDS:

• Baselines
• pollution
• environmental risk assessment
• valuation
• traceability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sebastián Ureta is an associate professor at Departamento de Sociología, Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Santiago, Chile). He has a Ph.D. in Media and Communications, London School of Economics (2006). From 2012 and onwards he has been developing a research project focused on the toxic politics surrounding industrial waste in Chile, in particular the massive waste produced by the country's booming mining industry.

Notes

1 The fieldwork on which this paper is based was carried out by the author in September 2014 and consisted mainly of participant observation with a team of environmental chemists while measuring two tailing deposits in the Atacama region of Northern Chile. The names of the individuals, institutions and specific locations involved have been changed to protect their anonymity.

Additional information

Funding

This research was carried out with funding from Chile’s National Council for Science and Technology (CONICYT), Fondo de Fomento al Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico, grant number 1170153.