How consideration of the local effects of global dependencies, can help us to reckon with—and change—our role in sustaining often damaging entanglements of commodity flows.

Commodity Flows seminar reflection

The Anthropocene River Campus seminar “Commodity Flows” immersed participants within a dense landscape of actual and historical commodity flows associated with the Mississippi Basin. In this reflection, Benjamin Steininger recounts how performative intervention, the mysterious “Bureau of Commodity Flows,” and engagement with local activists served as methods for disentangling the logistical complexity that helps to obscure the operations of these flows. In doing so, the links between the trade of Black bodies in Louisiana during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the local region’s contemporary petrochemical industry are underscored, as are the global connections of these streams. Through a consideration of the local effects of global dependencies, Steininger suggests, we can begin to reckon with—and change—our role in sustaining these flows.