Respatializing Toxic Harm: The Case Against Sacrifice Zones

ABSTRACT Describing heavily polluted areas as “sacrifice zones” has become commonplace in recent decades, as diverse groups resist their unwitting exposure to destructive and toxic industrial, municipal, and military activities. However, pollutants tend to seep, spill, leak, and drift from wherever they are concentrated, defying any notion of physical containment within a specific area. Accordingly, this work considers various cases of what we call fugitive pollution to interrogate the assumptions of relative containment and (in)security that the concept of sacrifice zones implies. Although we are sympathetic to the concept's affective appeal, we conclude that its reliance on shaky notions of spatial fixity, boundaries, and protection undermines the project of supplanting colonial racial capitalism with convivial socio‐ecological relations. We, in turn, explore disablement as a potential heuristic alternative to “sacrifice zones” to respatialize conceptual articulations of environmental harm from geographical sites to individual yet interconnected bodies.