Sacrifice Zone
Ryan Juskus
Related terms: environmental justice, environmentalism of the poor, environmental racism, ontological turn, slow violence
Talk of ‘sacrifice zones’ by activists, journalists, and scholars is a global phenomenon. Human Rights Watch released a report in 2024 with the title “We’re Dying Here”: The Fight for Life in a Louisiana Fossil Fuel Sacrifice Zone (Human Rights Watch 2024). The report was about an 85-mile stretch of towns along the Mississippi River in the U.S. state of Louisiana, where communities live with toxic contaminants released from what is the country’s highest concentration of fossil fuel and petrochemical plants. The region has come to be known as “Cancer Alley” because it also has the highest cancer risks in the country. In a 2022 report, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment listed “Cancer Alley” among a proliferating number of ‘sacrifice zones’ in all regions of the world, including places like “Chemical Valley” in Ontario, Canada; La Oroya, Peru; Norilsk, Russia; Baotou, China; and Kabwe, Zambia (Special Rapporteur 2022). The Special Rapporteur wrote that the existence of these places is “a stain upon the collective conscience of humanity.” Often produced through the collusion of government and business entities, “sacrifice zones are the diametric opposite of sustainable development, harming the interests of present and future generations” (Special Rapporteur 2022, 7). In Quintero-Puchuncaví, Chile, near a large industrial complex, a group of women fighting for a livable environment calls themselves “Las Mujeres de Zonas de Sacrificio en Resistencia” (Women of Sacrifice Zones in Resistance; García et al, 2017). Echoing the message carried by these Chilean mujeres in Europe and beyond, a French NGO published its own report, Stop aux zones de sacrifice! (No More Sacrifice Zones!, Richomme et al, 2017).
What are ‘sacrifice zones’? At first glance, they are relatively easy to define. ‘Sacrifice zones’ are places where environmental injustices, such as disproportionate exposure to toxic substances and degraded environments, are highly concentrated. Generalizing Steve Lerner’s definition, they can be defined as places where socially marginalized and economically impoverished residents are exposed to disproportionately elevated levels of toxic substances and other environmental hazards (Lerner 2010, 2).
Yet, upon further inspection, understanding sacrifice zones requires also understanding how they emerge as a solution to a particular problem. Modern political economies generate vast amounts of environmental harm, like pollution, deforestation, and climate change, when producing the things that make up everyday life in wealthier parts of the world – things like heat, electricity, plastic, food, weapons, and more abstract modern goods like movement, longevity, a sense of fashion, and economic growth. The problem is that these harms must go somewhere. Through complex social processes and structures, including race, class, ethnicity, and modern states, these harms are channeled into ‘sacrifice zones’ in order to keep other places greener, healthier, and more pleasant. In short, ‘sacrifice zones’ are created through a dynamic relationship with their opposites – ‘green zones’ or ‘abundance zones.’ Communities living in sacrifice zones suffer from adverse physical, mental, spiritual, and cultural consequences from living near locally unwanted land uses, like industrial and military facilities and transportation corridors, or in ecosystems that have been degraded due to local or global factors, such as industrial agriculture and climate change.
And yet, defining ‘sacrifice zones’ this way risks making it seem as if the concept is fixed and bounded when it is also rather fluid and imprecise. It is a creature of friction that, since its moment of origin, has largely been deployed to name and judge a social-ecological dynamic rather than to quantify it, even if there have been some admirable efforts to operationalize the concept for quantitative purposes (ProPublica 2021). And in this historical moment, there is plenty of friction between those who are made to live with more than their fair share of the environmental harms generated by modern economies and those with the power to hoard their benefits and shift their costs onto other people in other places. So long as friction exists between those who shift environmental costs onto others and those who live, work, play, and worship in the places where those costs are concentrated, the concept of a ‘sacrifice zone’ is likely to continue to evolve alongside the evolution of cost-shifting mechanisms and the justificatory logics that normalize them. In one of its latest iterations, for example, some now use the phrase ‘green sacrifice zones’ to refer to places where environmental costs are shifted in the name of ‘green’ programs like sustainability and renewable energy transition (Zografos & Robbins 2020). In yet another, some are pushing it in a biocentric direction, expanding its focus beyond human impacts to encompass concern for the more-than-human beings, like the endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle and the ocelot, whose habitat in Boca Chica, Texas, is being sacrificed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX as they test launch rockets to colonize “the final frontier” of outer space (Calma 2023).
To more concretely understand how the concept of a ‘sacrifice zone’ is a creature of friction, one need only point to the frictions that facilitated its historical transference from the realms of agriculture and land management to those of energy and environmental justice. This transference happened in the U.S. in the 1970s (Juskus 2023). By the early 1970s, it was common for ranchers and public land managers in the American West – in states like Colorado and Wyoming – to create fenced-in ‘sacrifice areas’ so that ecological damage from livestock could be concentrated around feeding areas and pens, thus protecting the rest of the pasture from the ecological effects of trampling or overgrazing, especially during excessively wet or dry periods (see Figure A). In this usage, the concept was conservationist in orientation, in the sense that it sought to balance economic productivity and ecological sustainability. In 1973, several developments, most notably an oil embargo imposed by petrostates and rising energy demand among coastal populations in the U.S., resulted in an effort to promote American energy independence through exploiting energy resources in the American West and Great Plains. The authors of a report on this effort coldly, and without explanation, referred to places that would be irreparably damaged by fossil fuel development as “National Sacrifice Areas (Abandon the Spoils)” (National Research Council 1974). The consequences of applying this agricultural and land management concept to energy were explosive. Ranchers, agrarians, environmentalists, and Indigenous groups in these states quickly seized on the phrase and used it to oppose being set aside as a sacrifice area for the nation. It should not be too difficult to imagine how the concept evolved from there, and through further points of friction, into a useful concept with which proponents of environmental justice could challenge the production of ‘environmental sacrifice zones,’ ‘energy sacrifice zones,’ or ‘green sacrifice zones.’
One might ask why many activists, journalists, and scholars use this phrase rather than alternatives, such as ‘frontline communities,’ ‘pollution hotspots,’ ‘dumping grounds,’ or ‘environmental high-impact areas.’ I suspect one reason the phrase has been borrowed and bent and borrowed again, from one community to the next and from one journalist to another, is that it carries powerful connotations that other, more technical-sounding phrases do not. It would appear that these alternative phrases fail to adequately describe the dynamics through which some people in some places are made to bear the environmental harms produced by complex social and economic processes in order for other people in other places to enjoy environmental benefits. In short, these other phrases fail to describe both the substitutionary dynamics through which sacrifice zones are produced and reproduced and the substitutionary logics through which these dynamics are rationalized.
Consider the following excerpt from the poem “Ascension Parish,” by Malaika Favorite, about “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana (Favorite 2016).
Our lot in life is to intercede for Louisiana,
swallow all the spit, slime, vomit and despair
that comes to us on barges
down the long spine of Mother River.
We must pray ceaseless silent prayers,
lifting up our suffering
in a chalice of baked Mississippi mud. […]
We brush our teeth with dead oil
And flush our guts with sulfur dioxide
That we might be a worthy sacrifice.
Favorite’s poem figures the residents of “Cancer Alley” as a substitutionary sacrifice in a religious ritual to appease a god figure. This way of invoking the concept is not unique to Favorite. In fact, it was part of the explosive entrance of the concept of a ‘sacrifice zone’ into public debates in the mid-1970s about the human and environmental impacts of industrial activities. For example, a journalist in testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1974 averred that turning large swaths of territory into ‘national sacrifice areas’ for energy exploitation would be “sacrifices to our greed and the god of conspicuous consumption” (Hamilton 1974; Juskus 2023, 8). The substitutionary dynamics and logics to which this journalist, Favorite, and many others point suggest that the processes through which ‘sacrifice zones’ are reproduced are not only sociological and technological in nature but also existential, cultural, and even religious. Moreover, they seem to suggest that responses failing to grasp these cultural and religious elements will also fail to address what the UN Special Rapporteur calls a “stain upon the collective conscience of humanity” (Special Rapporteur 2022, 7).
Lastly, this religious connotation points toward a potentially generative instability inherent in the meaning of ‘sacrifice.’ By drawing attention to the cultural and religious aspects of the substitutionary dynamics that reproduce sacrifice zones and the logics that justify them, the concept figures environmental politics as intertwined with culturally and religiously particular ways of distinguishing ‘true’ sacrifices from ‘false.’ Because sacrificial practices and rituals are closely linked to matters of life and death in many religious traditions, it has become important for the faithful, especially in the Abrahamic traditions, to distinguish between those that bring death from those that lead to life. While the concept of a ‘sacrifice zone’ is often deployed by proponents of environmental justice to resist the setting aside of places and people as expendable, it is sometimes paired with a more constructive social and ecological demand to make those places sacred (Juskus 2023). In a highly celebrated speech, Van Jones, an activist and public intellectual, exemplified this:
We’re tired of the sacrifice zones in this country. From New Orleans to Appalachia, being used and pimped by people who care nothing about the people there. This [Green for All] movement cares about you. And the sacrifice zones of the gray economy will be the sacred zones of this green economy that we are building” (Jones 2009).
Jones’s turn of phrase inspired another activist to turn her region of Appalachia, which had been destroyed by the coal industry, “from a Sacrifice Zone to a Sacred Zone” by envisioning a regional economy not premised on the extraction of coal from its mountains or the exploitation of its communities (Kincaid 2009). Whether Jones and Kincaid realized it or not, the English word ‘sacrifice’ comes from the Latin sacra (sacred) and facere (to make), meaning ‘to make sacred.’ In this sense, sacrifice zones and sacred zones are both geographies of sacrifice, even if they are constituted by rival meanings of sacrifice, one perpetuating death and the other preserving life. A similar dynamic is present in the struggle over Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a place the Indigenous Shoshone and Paiute consider “sacred land” because the Creator gave them a “sacred responsibility” to care for it, but which the U.S. government has sought to convert into a national sacrifice zone for nuclear waste storage (Endres 2012). In many Indigenous American cultures, sacrificial rituals are associated with reciprocity and restoring harmony among human and nonhuman kin. Both cases suggest that the choice is not between sacrifice and no sacrifice, as if sacrifices could be avoided, but between sacrifices that substitute one life for another and those that restore life-giving relationships of mutual responsibility. In other words, rival cultural and religious meanings of sacrifice appear to be at stake in modern geographies and political ecologies. One type is substitutionary in nature, elevating the sacredness of the life and environs of oneself or one’s over that of another’s, thus rationalizing the latter’s expendability to preserve the former’s sustainability. Another type is restorative in nature, committing oneself to transforming the desires and systems that produce sacrifice zones and restoring relationships that have been broken by cost-shifting sacrifices.
To students of the environmental humanities, the concept of a ‘sacrifice zone’ offers a way to critically examine both the language used to talk about environmental issues and the ethical and even religious dimensions of social and political systems built to govern human-environment interactions. It also provides a fruitful avenue for exploring the presence of cosmopolitics and ontological conflicts in the heartlands of the modern scientific paradigm (de la Cadena 2010; Blaser 2013). Unlike the many environmental concepts invented by experts, this concept is the production of friction between experts and grassroots communities who have refused the substitutionary, cost-shifting logic that naturalizes and rationalizes sacrifice zones in the name of a greater good. At a time when some experts promote environmental solutions that will prolong and intensify environmental cost-shifting, such as creating ‘green’ sacrifice zones for cobalt and lithium or sacrificing endangered species habitat for space colonization, the concept is likely to evolve alongside debates over the meanings and politics of sustainability at regional and planetary scales. At root, the concept fundamentally brings to speech a difficult ethical and religious matter at the heart of debates over environmental issues – the meanings of life and death and how the distribution of life and death is to be negotiated. These matters should not be avoided. They should be elucidated, examined, and debated. The concept of a ‘sacrifice zone’ is a useful tool for these purposes.
References
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National Research Council (U.S.) Study Committee on the Potential for Rehabilitating Lands Surface Mined for Coal in the Western United States. 1974. Rehabilitation Potential of Western Coal Lands: A Report to the Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
ProPublica. ‘Sacrifice Zones: Mapping Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution’ Published November 2, 2021.
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