In Mythologies, Roland Barthes’ mid-century essay collection of modern mythmaking, he notes that “Despite having the names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic… is in essence the stuff of alchemy.” For Barthes, the endless transformability of plastic, its ability to metamorphose into anything from sunglasses to Tupperware, upended hierarchies of matter and substance just as the medieval alchemists thought they might through the perfection of chrysopoeia. “More than a substance,” he writes, “plastic is the very idea of its endless transformation.”
Viewed from a mid-century perspective, plastic was the kind of banal magic that characterized the brave new world of consumer-driven capitalism. Barthes, an early detractor, trembled before its coming ubiquity. “The hierarchy of substances is abolished,” he wrote, “a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized.” But according to industry boosters and the growing legion of postwar consumers, plastic offered a different narrative of ordered progress. Lined up in the sanitized space of the shopping center, the grocery store, or the commercial exhibition, the pantheon of plastic objects seemed to be the stuff of a shiny new future. Science and industry, joined under the aegis of postwar capitalism, had produced what firms billed as a new form of magic—a synthesis of scientific, industrial, and economic forces that heralded a future of tremendous progress.
This is why ecological disasters such as those in East Palestine, Ohio are always so striking. When a Norfolk Southern locomotive overburdened with a toxic payload of vinyl chloride (a gaseous precursor to the plastic product polyvinyl chloride, or PVC) derailed on February 3, 2023 the resulting images of crumpled boxcars and the ominous black cloud from the ensuing controlled burn were the latest violations of the privileged metanarratives we hold about science, progress, industry, and the nature of disaster itself. Far from the ordered sterility of the industrial exhibition where Barthes encountered the plastic objects that inspired his short reflection, the world that plastic, industry, and postwar capitalism have wrought is far messier, far more disorderly, than mid-century prognosticators and proponents initially imagined. Disabused of much of the optimism of an earlier era, today’s public is left trying to square the wreckage with a broader theory of the present.
The East Palestine crisis is not unfamiliar; industrial and ecological disasters are hardly uncommon in Ohio or much of the greater Midwest. For decades, Ashtabula was home to one of the worst train accidents in American history after a bridge collapse sent a passenger train to the bottom of a ravine in 1876. Amidst the national coverage and investigations that ensued, it was discovered that poor engineering and safety precautions on the part of the railroad company and a lack of local medical facilities contributed to the deaths of 92 passengers. Several decades later, in 1940, the “Doodlebug disaster” near Cuyahoga Falls saw a passenger train and freight train collide, causing 43 fatalities. And of course, East Palestine environmentally parallels the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, which helped to galvanize the national environmental movement and direct attention to the harmful ecological effects of modern industry. That said, the East Palestine disaster is unique in several respects. The nature of the human cost will be different. Death and injury will not manifest in a great spectacle. Instead, its temporal registers will stretch out over years and decades, will be made clear only with foreshortened life expectancies, higher rates of disease, and poor environmental health indicators. The photos of the black cloud that rose over the town foregrounded the immediacy of events, but the ongoing ecological impacts of the long-lasting chemical dioxins that the controlled burn created will test our ability to recognize crisis. While most disasters, including major industrial accidents, have played out suddenly, within the window of the public’s attention span, the residents of East Palestine will experience a slow-moving tragedy that challenges our attentive capacities.
But what makes the East Palestine disaster truly distinct, beyond the temporal registers that it assumes, is the broader economic, cultural, and ideological environment that surrounds it—that is to say, not the facts of the event themselves, but how they get interpreted and interpolated. Set against the backdrop of post-industrialism, neoliberalism, and the functional failings of the state, the frameworks that used to give disaster meaning, that imbued them with a broader social and political significance, have dissolved. Where in the past a certain logic of calamity helped us situate crises within overarching narratives of societal progress, change, and development, we are now at pains to figure the East Palestine disaster into any coherent framework. What emerges is a largely partisan haggling over what East Palestine means, what history it points to or belongs within. Is it the result of the long history of deregulation and reforms far too deferential to capital—that is, a part of neoliberalism’s more than forty-year career as the reigning governing paradigm? Or is it fodder for the new culture war—proof, as Republicans would have it, that Democrats have turned their backs on the “forgotten” rural communities made up of largely white, post-industrial workforces?
The answer is important for the present and future of our politics. But when viewed historically, it also represents an ongoing inflection point, one that marks a transition from the secular optimism of industrialism’s past to the post-modernist confusion of deindustrialization. For more than one hundred years, industrial disasters were set against an ambient backdrop of intense industrialization and expanding state administrative capacities. During those heady days of industrial revolution, accidents and train crashes in particular were understood as what historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has called “negative indicators” of progress—lamentable manifestations of man’s otherwise awesome and progressive technological prowess. This mental maneuver squared our newfound capacity for man-made disaster with the positive side of industrial progress. It was, in short, an interpretive ideology of the Industrial Revolution, one that saw the mounting material benefits of the age as demanding a certain price, though one that was ultimately worth it. Industry provided the motive power for material benefits distributed across expanding segments of the population, while the growing administrative state chastened its worst excesses, ideally mitigating risk and adjudicating culpability when necessary.
No longer. In the years since deindustrialization usurped industrialism as the prevailing economic trend of the Midwest and neoliberalism became the governing ideological apparatus, the interpretive prism of calamity has shifted. The unrelenting air of hard-won optimism has melted away as the old balance has been upended. The resulting confusion is what makes the events of East Palestine so infuriating. There no longer appears an obviously discernable trade-off between “progress” (if there is any to be had) and its human price; no countervailing benefits accruing to those who might otherwise have to bear the costs of industrial infrastructures and the “slow violence” of modern industry. The value proposition has been scrambled, and what emerges in its place is an abiding senselessness—one that struggles to reconcile the price that a town like East Palestine must pay with its lack of indemnification. It is sacrifice without reward, penalty without recompense. Or, as Erik Baker has recently put it in n+1, industrial toxicity without industrial employment.
The East Palestine derailment can be narrated through a progression of discrete events with relatively recent provenance. Labor shortages, the immense length and bulk of the train, and lax safety regulations were likely all contributing factors to the crash. Only two Norfolk Southern employees and one trainee were on the crew managing the train pulling 141 freight cars, for example. This is part of an industry trend that, over the past six years, has seen major rail carriers slash almost one third of their workforce even as trains have gotten longer and more unwieldy. In addition, train companies are oftentimes left to make and enforce their own safety regulations. Reporting from the New York Times suggests that the increased use of detectors to warn train crews of overheating wheel bearings might have helped to avert disaster. Identifying causal factors and counterfactuals does little now to repair the damage of the crash, but it makes clear that the rail industry has stepped up a campaign of cost- and corner-cutting that has sacrificed safety on the altar of profit.
But the derailment’s preconditions, the crash itself, and the resulting conflagration over who is made to bear the costs and reap the rewards of perilous industries all belong to more longstanding trends. Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has emerged as the primary system through which we distribute risks, costs, and rewards, though not in equal measure nor even in direct relation to one another. In the economic milieu that crystallized after 1980, what economic historian Jonathan Levy calls the “Age of Chaos” of American capitalism, wealth overwhelmingly accrues not through industrial enterprise itself, nor to those who labor to make it run, but increasingly to a class of asset-owners through the appreciation of different categories of financial assets. The deindustrialization and financialization of the American economy during the 1980s turned investment in labor and fixed capital—the physical infrastructures and safety systems of railways, for example—into downgraded priorities. Instead, companies reoriented their objectives around the appreciation of financial assets, primarily their own stocks. The business proposition that the rail companies can operate on—backed by the extremely light regulatory touch of government—is one in which the human and ecological costs of divestment from infrastructures and safety precautions are disaggregated to workers and communities, while profits flow upward to those making the decisions.
The risk-world of neoliberalism is thus one in which Norfolk Southern can slash operating crews and underinvest in their safety infrastructures all while enjoying record profits. It is one in which the company can pay a pittance to the families of East Palestine affected by the disaster—those who, in a very literal sense, bore the physical and environmental costs of deregulation—after several years of stock buybacks and dividend payouts to wealthy investors. Furthermore, it is one in which the antiquated metanarratives about industrial progress seem to no longer apply. If the failings that produced earlier disasters like that in Ashtabula birthed tangible improvements, like a local hospital and a federal procedure to investigate railroad accidents, East Palestine has lacked such a pronounced and logical response. Norfolk Southern has balked at robust financial commitments to local residents affected by the disaster, while a rail safety bill lingers in Congress (as of this writing), stalled by opposition from some Senate Republicans.
Maintaining this system of corporate accrual and toxic accretion requires a good deal of governmental complicity. In this, firms like Norfolk Southern have found willing partners in the previous several White House administrations. Most recently, there was the Biden administration’s decision to force an unsafe labor contract on the rail workers’ union in the face of a nationwide strike—this, from the man who told labor leaders in 2021 that “I intend to be the most pro-union President leading the most pro-labor administration in American history.” More facts from the weeks immediately after the crash painted a similar picture of a Democratic administration largely unwilling to take strident regulatory steps against private industry. Biden’s about-face, coupled with the lack of urgency from regulatory agencies after the derailment, gave the impression of an administration that had disavowed its own power to regulate industry and protect citizens. The federal EPA, for example, dragged its feet for weeks after the crash while East Palestine residents were left with questions about proper recourse and whether or not they should evacuate. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg similarly demurred over East Palestine. As his conservative detractors were quick to point out, it took Buttigieg three weeks to arrive on the scene of the crash and, once there, spoke with the empty reassurance of a career technocrat rather than an emboldened regulator. Whereas past politicians have leveraged ecological crises to bolster their political standing and mount calls for reform, Buttigieg, a future presidential hopeful, displayed a lack of the reformist zeal of previous generations who built durable electoral constituencies from their willingness to chasten industry’s worst excesses and codify protections for citizens.
With governing out of the question, more cynical actors can treat the East Palestine disaster how they treat most things: as politics—not the sort defined by the cumbersome logistics of governance but the kind that operates as pure spectacle. Within this “hall of mirrors” realm of public performance, positions on East Palestine and critiques leveled against the opposition party can be entirely severed from any coherent ideology. Thus, we were treated to House Republicans like Lauren Boebert and Elise Stephanik decrying the toxic fallout in East Palestine while co-sponsoring an omnibus bill in April that would loosen waste regulations across other industries and make toxic exposures from industrial activity much more likely. Similarly, in late February, the Republican-led House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee similarly voted to overturn a Biden policy that expanded the scope of the Clean Water Act to include a wider array of waterways. This, despite the fact that in doing so they would eliminate protections for many waterways and bodies that were polluted around East Palestine.
Beyond the environmental dimension, it’s hard to imagine Republicans backing the sort of labor agreement that might curtail rampant understaffing and overwork of employees. When it comes to passing a rail safety bill in Congress, several prominent Senate Republicans including Ted Cruz have decried regulatory proposals as overburdensome. Instead of an opportunity for legislating, then, many prominent conservative figures have treated the disaster as further evidence of a Democratic betrayal of “forgotten” heartland Americans at the expense of their purported obsession with race and identity politics. “If this had happened to the rich or the ‘favored poor,’ it would be the lead of every news channel in the world,” Tucker Carlson told his national television audience, ignoring all readily available evidence to the contrary.
This all brings us to where we are now: months later, few changes to speak of, and a rural Ohio community wondering whether they can sell their homes, let their children play outside, or use the water from local wells. When all is said and done, when every payout has been made and response teams leave for the final time, will the toxic disaster register inside the halls of Norfolk Southern’s Atlanta headquarters as a failure of their responsibility to their workers or the communities through which they send their trains? Or will the crash, and everything that came after, exist as a dollar amount in the negative column of a ledger book? Will it have moved the political needle at all, inspiring more strident regulation of toxic industries and greater protections for those on their receiving ends? As coverage subsides and East Palestine is added to the growing list of industrial ecological disasters, the feeling that this has and will happen again gives the impression that what occurred in East Palestine is not so much an aberration as it is the result of a morally blind political-economic system operating as it was meant to.
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This essay appears in print in Cleveland Review of Books, Vol. 01.
Dante LaRiccia
Dante LaRiccia is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, where he studies the environmental history of the modern United States. A contributing writer to the Cleveland Review of Books, he writes frequently on the contemporary politics and political economy of the Anthropocene.