Volatile Atmosphere: A Tkaronto Archive
Abstract
This article delves into the history of petrochemical-derived gas emissions in Toronto, focusing on their emergence and regulation from the end of World War II and up to 1980. Drawing on archival materials, I trace local knowledge production through four loosely defined periods: 1950’s nuisance and ephemerality, 1960’s threshold thinking, 1960’s reactivity and technoscience, and 1970’s ambient intensities. Building on feminist science and technology studies perspectives, particularly Max Liboiron’s concept of managerial ontologies, and M. Murphy’s notion of regimes of perceptibility, I explore key moments when technoscientific logics within a permission-to-pollute system have invisibilized material registers of petrochemical harm, including uneven raced and classed exposures. I reflect on how approaches to air pollution research and governance transitioned from taking citizen sensory knowledge of pollutants seriously through a nuisance complaint framework to increasingly normalizing continuous exposure and treating the atmosphere as a diffusion space for gases. Consequently, I argue that this sets the stage for an enduring belief that long-term, low-level chemical exposures to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) require little mitigation as they self-attenuate. Overall, I underscore the ongoing historical impacts of the notion of the atmosphere as a sink for pollutants on the present governance of petrochemical gases, advocating for further critical engagement with how permission-to-pollute systems are harbored within taken-for-granted atmospheric concepts.
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