Boycott Civilization ~ Part 1 Cancerous Collusions
Mother/Daughter Team: Micaela Amateau Amato & Cara Judea Alhadeff
November 2022
Cara and Micaela's Collaborative Human Rights' Performance/Exhibition
Philadelphia's National Liberty Museum
International Women's Day 2018 Click the image to enlarge
The above glazed ceramic torso (by Micaela Amateau Amato) is titled Woman with Burned Head. Interior cellular damage seeps to the surface of the body, burning its way to outer skin. This is caused by petro-toxins that permeate our lives from polymers and plastics to infinitely small clusters of polluted air particles almost undetectable but more insidious, that attack the body's ability to breath and recover. Because they combine and multiply with numerous other unseen toxins, these fine atmospheric particles, tiny tar balls, are the most lethal pollutants. The accompanying analog photographic image from Gestation Project, Singles (by Cara Judea Alhadeff) is of a bed-ridden pregnant woman-with-twins lying in front of the Chevron Refinery in Richmond/SF Bay area that had caught fire, emitting toxic gases into the air and water. From the origins of our plastic-addicted convenience-culture, environmental racism saturates the narratives of the women depicted in both photograph and sculpture.
Click the image to enlarge.
“Cancerous Collusions” Presented by Micaela Amateau Amato
Cancer and the Environment Conference, September 29, 2020,
Land and Water Management and Institute of Energy and the Environment
Co-sponsored Penn State Cancer Institute and Hershey Medical School, University of Pittsburgh.
Click the image to enlarge.
During the first few weeks of Covid lockdown 2020, the average U.S. kid's screen time increased to six hours a day—a 500% increase.[1] My previous Mother Pelican installment explored the intersecting corporeal, social, and ecological impacts of global techno-euphoria.
For this month, I offer Micaela Amateau Amato's recent presentation at Pennsylvania State University's Cancer and the Environment Symposium. Amato is not only my mother, but my primary collaborator focusing on fossil-fuel addicted culture and counter-hegemonic, living-art practices. Amato's presentation on Cancerous Collusions, is the departure point for my next Mother Pelican essays on reproductive justice, petroleum parenting, and the illusion of “safety” in modernity's technocratic-industrial civilization.
The title of this conference is very reassuring, indicating, I trust, a major institutional paradigm shift.
I wasn’t supposed to be here – alive, in 2022. In 1993, I was diagnosed with an environmentally-caused
leukemia from benzene in oil paints and turpentine. After three bone marrow biopsies, I was told I had six months to two years to live and was prescribed chemotherapy by the head of hematology at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC. Refusing to passively accept this death sentence, I inquired whether I could rebuild my immune system. The physicians negated any possibility that I had agency to help heal myself: “your immune system, stress, and nutrition have nothing to do with cancer.” My daughter, Cara, was on the other phone line and heard them declare: “If you refuse to take the prescribed chemotherapy, you are playing with fire.”
Realizing I was too weak to survive the toxicity of their interferon chemotherapy[2] , I began herbal treatment with hematologists at Hoxsey Biomedical Clinic. Along with my own healing commitment, I urgently cautioned colleagues in the School of Visual Art at Penn State University where I had taught for several decades, to ban all turpentine and other poisonous solvents and sprays, and to terminate the Foundation courses’ projects where students heated sheets of plastic with hot irons to form inflatable plastic sculptures—and I attempted to transform that aspect of the curriculum as well. I worked with the College Art Association to establish new requirements for accreditation, whereby University programs across the US must ban all toxic materials from classrooms. Art faculty at Penn State have maintained a rigorous ban on toxic materials.
My platelet count was just under 2 million when I was originally given my death sentence. With diligence I have brought my count to 220,000. I maintained a mindful practice of reducing free radicals as much as possible-no foods from cans, fresh organic, local foods, no packaged or processed foods, and a strict adherence to Ayurvedic and Chi Gong practices and herbal medicinals. This includes taking Turkey Tail mushrooms[3] and wild weeds for my recent diagnosis of breast cancer.
Once again, I have rejected chemotherapy and radiation because of deadly side effects and my refusal to participate in the self-destructive complicity that Big Pharma induces. The interferon chemo I was originally prescribed in 1993 was soon discovered to cause other forms of cancer. I experienced first hand the impact of corporate cancer research that has irresponsibly ignored the environmental causes of cancers—focusing instead on the application of medical technologies and Big Pharma band-aid “therapies” that too often have deadly side effects.
We must challenge the extraordinary irony of iatrogenics: hospital-induced/ healthcare-induced infections, illnesses, and dis-eases. Iatrogenics are the third leading cause of death in the US.[4] The iatrogenic phenomenon represents a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. In her Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scence, Alhadeff writes: “The Stockholm Syndrome, in addition to identifying with and defending captors, is a paradoxical psychological phenomenon which displays a radically effective technique to subvert any attempts at self definition or resistance to normalizing tendencies. ...Not surprisingly, the patient diagnosed with cancer quickly learns to fear, distrust, despise their body, identifying with the disease as self, and unable to recognize the self as independent from that which destroys life. Their will to power is annihilated” (71, 75).
As with climate chaos, we are complicit in our own demise...
The Stockholm Syndrome manifests in two ways:
Through the official diagnosis we relinquish our capacity to heal ourselves; we submit our bodies to the medical establishment.
Through subsidies,[5] we relinquish our economic sovereignty. For example, people claim they cannot afford organic food or herbal medications not covered by health insurance because their tax dollars are funding hegemonic medical infrastructures.
Pharmaceutical profiteering relies on subsidies through our tax dollars that maintain the separation between the extreme wealthy and the 99%. Private insurance companies siphon tax dollars to fund the development of cancer “treatments,” and then we have to pay to receive those “treatments.” Who benefits from subsidized “treatments”? The R&D that develops those “treatments,” the insurance companies, and the institutions that administer those “treatments” (i.e. hospitals—“cathedrals of chronic disease.”[6] Hospitals are the bedrock of petro-pharma-culture).
“Cancerous Collusions” Presented by Micaela Amateau Amato
Cancer and the Environment Conference, September 29, 2020,
Land and Water Management and Institute of Energy and the Environment
Co-sponsored Penn State Cancer Institute and Hershey Medical School, University of Pittsburgh.
Click the image to enlarge.
Clearly in cahootz with Big Pharma, President Biden recently announced his “Cancer Moonshot” (reminiscent of John F. Kennedy's "Moonshot)" whereby JFK vowed to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s). Biden's goal, which he calls “a bold approach that uses all our assets as a nation” to “cut cancer death rates by at least 50% in the next 25 years,”[7]misinterprets the deadly crisis by refusing to address the intersectional root causes of cancer.
Cancers are not inevitable genetic deformations that require technological solutions. Cancers are the result of unchecked industrial civilization, aggravated by our compromised immune systems and free radicals, “forever chemicals” (chemicals that do not break down in the environment or our bodies) running unregulated throughout our poisoned environment of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, formerly called PFCs) and pesticides, mainlining poison into the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. The Environmental Working Group estimates that 200 million Americans are regularly exposed to “forever chemicals” in drinking water. Known carcinogens, PFAS are chemicals whose properties allow them to repel water and oil in products like paper packaging for fast food, nonstick frying pans, stain resistant rugs, and water-repellent sports gear (time to “get out in nature,” but stay dry while killing nature, killing ourselves).[8]
There is clearly no big money to be made in ridding cancer’s environmental roots while reckless consumerism, petro-pharma and Big Ag control our democracy. Billions of dollars slated for cancer cures would be better spent by detoxifying our homes and communities, and rebuilding a clean environment with strict enforcement and corporate/institutional accountability. Instead of fueling the fires that ravage our western states and contributing to the floods that spread toxins (from plastics and petrochemicals like formaldehyde or triclosan—permeating every aspect of our daily lives), exponentially amplifying the devastation of global climate chaos, we must confront how we are complicit with Petro-Pharma Culture. We are continuously allowing ourselves to misinterpret the converging crises that shape our lives. We are focused on the wrong disaster. Normalcy bias has distracted us long enough. We must wade through the deluge of misinformation and how we have internalized the interlocking “miasma of falsehood.”[9]
My creative work and biomedical research have focused on the interconnections between the health of our individual physical bodies and that of our local and global economic infrastructures and ecosystems. Although not a clear-cut binary, these relationships consistently either maintain our collective well-being or they perpetuate our self-destruction.
Voices of families living near unsealed deadly methane leaks, victims of military toxic burn pits and Camp Lejeune, generations of citizens poisoned by lead water pipes in Flint, Michigan and infrastructural failures in Jackson, Mississippi, cry out to be heard—now.
Let us listen and take collective action.
Portraits of Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stephen Hawking by
Micaela Amateau Amato for
Zazu Dreams. Click the image to enlarge.
It is obvious that we need to aggressively counter the malfeasant twin specter of Big Agriculture and Big Pharma by utilizing indigenous Earth-based / biocentric technologies that establish eco-regenerative cross-sector systems such as circular materials management or redesigning our urban centers to make healthy cities with edible weed walkways to school and parks that are not laden with water-guzzling grasses and cancer-causing pesticides. As Stephen Hawking has stated, “everything we need to know is already within us, waiting to be realized.” We already know which industrial chemicals and petroleum plastics must immediately be banned.
In April 1964, Rachel Carson was murdered by pesticides and the tyranny of chemical companies. Carson, author of Silent Spring, a groundbreaking exposé of the agriculture industry, died of breast cancer caused by the very megalithic greed and indifference she was publicly exposing. Because corporations in the United States claim personhood (human being) and because those researchers, scientists, business people know the harm their products and business practices are causing (premeditated), I emphasize murder: the "unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another." As with tobacco production, researchers have known for decades that their products were not only unsafe, but actually poisoning life on earth—ranging from endocrine disruptors to microplastics, anasthesia/biohazards disposal, thermohaline air circulation, and SuperFund sites. The emergency has exceeded us. We must take immediate collective action to uproot the unconscionable entangled environmental causes of cancers and ecological collapse.
[2] Amost thirty years after my mother was told she would be “playing with fire” if she refused to take interferon, Nature.com published: “Interferon-γ (IFNγ) is a cytokine with limited evidence of benefit in cancer clinical trials to date,” April, 2022.
[4] Ronald Grisanti, “Iatrogenic Disease: The 3rd Most Fatal Disease in the USA,” accessed April 9, 2015.
Morgan, Robert, ed. The Iatrogenic Handbook: A Critical Look at Research and Practice in the Helping Professions. Toronto: IPI Publishing Limited, 1983.
For my undergraduate thesis presented two years after my mother's diagnosis and refusal to participate in the Western medical establishment, I wrote “Beyond Diagnostic Anonymity: The Discursive Body and Medicalized Identities” in which I discuss the iatrogenics phenomenon as a form of corporeal colonization.
[5] “Economic policy seeks to subsidize the spread of industrialization and fossil fuel addiction. Thus fertilizers are subsidized in industrial agriculture and exports are subsidized in global food systems. Petrochemicals are subsidized; coal and oil are subsidized. Besides the direct financial subsidies are indirect subsidies such as funding the construction of the massive infrastructure for the fossil fuel economy, such as highways. ...Socially, ecologically, and economically high-cost systems of food production, energy production, and transportation are made artificially cheap. Subsidies for globalized, industrialized food make local, organic food appear more expensive; subsidies for private cars and air travel make train travel appear more expensive; subsides to supermarkets make local shops appear more expensive. These economic distortions lead to social and cultural distortions” (Vandana Shiva's Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in the Age of Climate Crisis, 138-9).
[6] Cohen was the 2015 MacArthur Foundation recipient and founder of Health Care Without Harm. “Gary Cohen: MacArthur ‘Genius’ Cleans Up Polluting Health Sector,” Steve Curwood, Living on Earth, Public Radio International’s Environmental News Magazine, 2015.
[7] “Biden invokes JFK with ‘moonshot’ pitch to halve cancer deaths by 2047,” New York Post, Sept. 12, 2022.
[9] Although “miasma of falsehood” is Vaclav Smil's phrase referring to how renewable”-energy "solutions" ignore the realities of technocratic corporate greed and the roots of our planetary illness, his phrase also applies to the medical establishment's attempts to bypass underlying conditions of our bodily dis-ease.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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