NEIL OVERY: We could be turning earth into an environmental ‘sacrifice zone’

In July 2022 Chilean feminist campaigning group Women of Quintero-Puchuncaví — Sacrifice Zone in Resistance (Muzosare), celebrated the announcement of the closure of a huge copper smelter in central Chile. The closure came after a decade-long fight by Muzosare and allied groups against the continued operation of the smelter, which had been shown to be causing sickness among the thousands of people who lived near it.

Quintero-Puchuncaví is one of five locations in Chile that activist groups such as Muzosare have specifically identified as “sacrifice zones”. They use the term to describe how the burden of environmental harms falls disproportionally on local residents and their environment, which are “sacrificed” for the alleged “greater good”. This being the produce of various industrial complexes linked to extraction, refining, manufacturing, energy generation and petrochemical production. 

The use of the concept of sacrifice zones has proven extremely useful to local community members and activists fighting environmental harms caused by polluting industries in Chile, as it has captured the attention of various stakeholders, including the media. It has been equally useful to activists and community members in the US fighting against polluting industries. For example, activists have used the concept in their fight against strip-mining in West Virginia and along the Texas and Louisiana petrochemical corridor.

The concept of a sacrifice zone was first used in the farming sector to describe areas of land that had in effect been destroyed by heavy grazing and trampling by cattle. However, it was not until the 1970s that the concept gained traction in reference to wider environmental harms linked to coal extraction, nuclear weapons testing and waste disposal, in the US in particular.

By the 1990s the concept was beginning to be linked to the emerging discourse of environmental racism. During this period, again largely in the US, activists and scholars began to argue that environmental harms are disproportionally imposed on low-income communities, predominantly made up of minority groups. This linkage critically strengthened the concept of sacrifice zones by adding race and class analysis.

The relevance of this concept to SA is obvious, as there are multiple sites in the country where communities are “sacrificed” to the alleged greater good of industrial development. There is no doubt, for example, that large areas of Mpumalanga are sacrifice zones where various toxic pollutants such as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate from coal-fired power stations and coal mining cause death and illness among thousands of local residents, as well as more generalised environmental damage such as chronic water pollution.

Research undertaken in 2016 by an atmospheric scientist for the Centre for Environmental Rights found that pollution from 14 industrial facilities (of which 12 were Eskom coal-fired power stations) in Mpumalanga’s Highveld Priority Area caused 305-650 early deaths in 2016 alone. Research in 2018 found that Mpumalanga was home to the world’s highest concentration of nitrogen oxide, an air pollutant that causes respiratory problems, lung damage and disease. In this sense, the bodies of those harmed by this toxicity can also be considered sacrifice zones. 

Similar problems exist in the industrial basin in the south of Durban, which is home to two oil refineries and various other chemical industries. The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance has spent nearly 30 years fighting air pollution, mainly in the form of particulate matter and sulphur dioxide, which has been proven to cause various health problems, especially in adolescents, among the many thousands of people who live in the area.   

The nuclear waste site at Vaalputs in the Northern Cape is also a sacrifice zone. Opened by the apartheid government in 1986 without any consultation, the site has twice had its operating licence suspended, once in 1997 when waste drums were found to have been leaking for several years, and once in 2012 when radioactive dose limits were exceeded. The present government intends developing the site to take other extremely dangerous high-level waste.

These three locations are perfect examples of sacrifice zones. They are areas where local people shoulder the burden of environmental pollution and, in common with similar areas in other parts of the world, they are also deeply racialised and class-based, being home predominantly to low-income black, coloured or Indian South Africans. It can be argued that in SA the ongoing legacies of apartheid, such as racialised spatial planning, have made the contrast between those living in, and those living outside sacrifice zones even more stark than elsewhere in the world.

Given the relevance of the concept of sacrifice zones to SA it is time that it gained more traction here as a mechanism by which communities and activists can highlight the injustices being ruthlessly perpetrated on some communities in the alleged wider interests of society. In addition, it can be used to strengthen campaigns against proposed developments such as the Musina Makhado Special Economic Zone in Limpopo, which if given the green light will plunge many more South Africans into a sacrifice zone as residents endure the extremely toxic pollutants coming from the proposed ferrochrome, ferromanganese, pig iron, stainless steel, lime and titanium dioxide plants, as well as from an on-site power station.

The ultimate strength of the concept is that it is relational. As Ryan Juskus from the University of Notre Dame in the US argues, in revealing the inhabited places of extraction, production, consumption and waste, it “morally ties together consumers with the lands and peoples with whom they are connected through chains of supply and disposal”. It demands of us all that we question who and what is being sacrificed, and for what reasons.

These questions are of fundamental importance to the deepening climate crisis, for are we not rapidly turning our planet into a sacrifice zone that may at some future point no longer be able to support human life?

• Dr Overy, a freelance researcher, writer and photographer, is a research associate at Environmental Humanities South, University of Cape Town.