In the East Ward of Newark, New Jersey, the Ironbound neighborhood, a multi-ethnic community of 50,000, lives surrounded by industrial plants, warehouses, and the polluted Passaic River. Like many across New Jersey, this neighborhood has sustained the state’s economic base for decades. Here, abandoned industrial plants sit side by side with mega warehouses where trucks pass through thousands of times a day emitting diesel exhaust.
Though the remnants of New Jersey’s industrial past have fossilized, post-industrialism did not lead to a post-growth society; instead, growth has mutated into new forms. Across the state, warehouse development has exploded; as of 2023, there are an estimated 1,900 warehouses, with more than 26.5 million square feet of warehouses planned between 2021 and 2024, according to the state planning commission. This development has sustained criticism from local environmental advocates and non-profits like the Ironbound Community Corporation (ICC), who raise concerns about poor working conditions and air pollution from trucks, which increase the risk of cancer and respiratory disease for residents. Ironbound residents refer to this area as a “sacrifice zone,” where human health is sacrificed for profit.
Critiques of environmental injustice coincide with those of environmental racism. In New Jersey, the probability of being either Black or Latino nearly doubles when residing within 0.25 miles of a warehouse. Despite this, developers and smart growth proponents tout warehouses as a force for good, arguing that they help fuel local economic development through job creation and tax revenue. Rather than unique, this story is commonplace, emblematic of a society that defines well-being through markers of abstract growth and material consumption.
Chile’s Sacrifice Zones
In Quintero-Puchuncavi, Chile, a coastal region two hours from the country’s capital, economic growth has also taken root, its effects spanning generations. Copper smelters, coal-fired power plants, petrochemical facilities, and natural gas facilities dot the landscape, contributing to Chile’s economic development and “very high” status on the UN’s Human Development Index. But despite the presence of numerous industrial plants, the region is among the poorest in Valparaíso. It is part of a collection of communities in Chile that likewise refer to themselves as “Zonas de Sacrificio” or “Sacrifice Zones.”
A 2023 report from the UN Office of Human Rights and the Environment depicts a community struggling to fight against the industrial complex that has been sited there since the 1960s. In Quintero-Puchuncavi, air pollution accidents have made hundreds of schoolchildren ill, and the soil in the region contains lead and copper levels that vastly exceed international health standards. In the report, the principal investigator recounts a moment when young girls hand him drawings that say “Tengo miedo de morir intoxicada” (“I’m afraid of dying from poisoning”) and “estamos respirando veneno y a nadie le importa” (“we’re breathing poison and no one cares”).
Codelco, the Chilean state-owned company that oversees the country’s copper smelters, accounts for 27% of the world’s copper. According to a report from Envirotech, 60% of copper demand “stems from the building of infrastructure for electricity, meaning that Codelco’s prospects are only growing brighter as the world electrifies in response to climate change.” In communities like Quintero, it has quickly become evident that the arrival of “green growth” will not result in a change to their material condition; rather, it is indicative of a “green future” that has already been divided and parceled out.
A grassroots feminist group, Women of Quintero-Puchuncavi Sacrifice Zone in Resistance (Muzosare), has been fighting against these conditions for over a decade, organizing education and advocacy workshops as well as using legal measures to pursue environmental justice. Their efforts have not gone unrewarded; in 2022, Codelco announced the closing of one of their copper smelting plants, but still, many of the industrial plants remain open with no plans to close. One member recounts a time back in the 1980s when the skin of male workers at the local copper plant began to turn green, referring to them as “hombres verdes” or “green men.”
The Consumer Society
In “The Consumer Society,” Jean Baudrillard argues that today, the individual has been reduced to a consumer, coerced into consumption as the only means to ‘find oneself,’ presupposing that without participation in capitalist society, one is lost, or worse, without meaning. Although this system of logic has led us to the brink of ecological collapse, it should not come as a surprise that in the global North, there is still a refusal to look towards degrowth as an alternative form of existence.
The Degrowth movement calls for the prioritization of “social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits, overproduction, and excess consumption,” but what happens when social hierarchy and well-being are defined by markers of excess consumption? Well-being and consumption become much harder to disentangle than previously imagined. Degrowth is a call to reduce the size of our material economy and, by extension, consumption, but in the Global North, this has become akin to “reducing oneself.” Our refusal to imagine a social structure without consumption and growth leads us to incorrectly conclude that degrowth asks that we “sacrifice” ourselves.
Sacrifice and Degrowth
The emergence and sustainment of “sacrifice zones” both in the Global North and Global South reflect growth’s dependence on the subjugation of communities based on race, socioeconomic class, and power. Whether driven by commerce, industrial production, or climate change technologies, case studies in Newark, New Jersey, and Quintero, Chile, reveal growth’s dependence on a violent form of “sacrifice” of man or nature, or both. Thus sacrifice and rituals of extraction are interwoven into the capitalist system, despite neo-colonial claims that modernity has left them behind as practices of a “primitive” past.
As Baudrillard puts it, “The sacrifice of useless millions in the struggle against what is merely the visible phantom of poverty is not too high a price to pay if it means the myth of growth is preserved.” In the pursuit of environmental and redistributive justice, degrowth is a call to find a way out of the growth machine and challenge a society that has switched out the term “sacrifice” with “cost” to maintain the appearance of rationality. In the global North, degrowth should not be posed as a movement that calls for unjust sacrifice but as an instrumental tool in helping to end it.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ivan Melchor is a research assistant with the VizE Lab for Ethnographic Data Visualization at Princeton University. He is conducting ethnographic and quantitative research on the environmental degradation caused by warehouse development in New Jersey and its implications for notions of environmental justice and environmental racism. He has previously published work with Angles, an urban planning website, and has a forthcoming article set to be published in the UNC-Chapel Hill Planning Journal titled “Molded to Consumption: Warehouse Development and Environmental Justice in the Growth Society” in Spring 2024.
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