Chemical Disability and Technoscientific Experimental Subjecthood: Reimagining the Canary in the Coal Mine Metaphor

The “canary in the coal mine” metaphor is used by the chemically sensitive community to make sense of and crip spaces containing low-levels of toxic atmospheric petrochemicals. This article reflects on the technocultural genealogies entrenched within the metaphor. A by-product of the imperial exotic bird trade, canary companion species played a formative role in early technoscientific understandings of toxic exposure starting in the nineteenth century as animal sentinels in coal mine rescues. Chemically sensitive people mobilize the canary metaphor to situate themselves within toxic environments as sentinel and experimental subjects, potentiating a feminist knowledge about chemical disability. Identifying as a human canary underscores how consumer commodities are universally structured for the chemical capacities of able-bodied male subjects, revealing gendered and ableist technocultural logics. The metaphor may also conjure a universal form of sacrificial life that ignores how canaries and self-identifying chemically sensitive people are differently situated in the colonial surround of racial capital. Canary knowledges arise from practicing metaphor as meaning and method—they offer a trajectory for crip-led community practices to build more capacious knowledges of exposure by extending anti-colonial and anti-racist commitments towards relational productions of accessibility. Reclaiming technoscientific experimental subjecthood can thus encourage new collective possibilities to address the global onslaught of chemical violence.

chemical sensitivities, technocultures, canary knowledges, coal mine metaphor, chemical infrastructures, feminist knowledge production

The Sound a Canary Bird makes is so sharp and quavering, that when it screeches and shakes its little Throat and Chaps, whistling with all its force, it even gives an Ecco to the Hall or Parlour where he hangs.

“Hello, I'm a pissed off canary in the coal mine.” An audience member at the back of the dim auditorium stands up and identifies herself to the small audience during the question period of a panel titled "Warning! How the Secrets of Body Care and Cleaning Products Impact Your Health,” hosted by an environmental nonprofit (May 7, 2018). The panel, previously full of lively dialogue between policy experts and scientists interested in environmental justice, suddenly sinks into a long and tense silence. The woman explains to the group how, after a long wait, she was finally able to move into a rent-subsidized building owned by the City of Toronto. Yet, much to her dismay, the downtown apartment tower had turned out to be a pungent palimpsest of chemical fragrances. Every hallway, and especially the lobby, she continues sardonically, has the scents of “the loveliest cleaners locked in” to the fibers of its walls and carpets. Exasperated, she shares how she had asked the rental board to change the cleaners they use because they impact her ability to breathe, but her requests were not accommodated. A well-meaning panelist responds by remarking on the many others she has encountered in similar situations, offering the platitude, "You are not alone."

Chemical sensitivities are disabling physiological responses and chronic illness linked to low-levels of chemical exposure. Although the Canadian Human Rights Commission formally recognizes chemical sensitivities, legal rhetoric too often fails to translate into advocacy and public understanding of the main accessibility needs associated with chemical sensitivities: finding ways to limit atmospheric exposures to toxic substances (Sears 2007). In the scene above, the “canary in the coal mine” metaphor is effective because it conjures an anthropomorphic image of a living signal—an analogy for an organism’s capacity to discern and communicate significant physiological alteration by fumes and vapors. The metaphor is effective precisely because it restages a familiar and evocative narrative entrenched in cultural imaginations: a little dash of avian yellow whistles in the darkness, warning of gas. But what if we go beyond the surface of this metaphorical adage? Many individuals with chemical sensitivities refer to themselves as canaries. Experiences of atmospheric sensitivity, through inhaling or ingesting toxicants, can provoke gastrointestinal discomfort, body pain, difficulty breathing, cognitive changes, muscle spasms and coordination changes, dizziness, migraine, and fatigue. As many chemically sensitive individuals are female-identifying and/or cisgendered, the move to articulate disability though identification with the canary bird stems, in part, from the refusal to accept pathologizing histories: hysteria, neurasthenia, and psychosomatic disorders have long designated certain patterns of “non-specific" symptoms as evidence of mental disorder. Many scholars argue that this epistemology is misogynist and patriarchal, moralizing a hierarchy of cisnormative biological determinism, and gendering “unknowable” sensing, as feminized psychosomatic distress. One consequence of this mischaracterization of the experience of chemical sensitivity is that potential atmospheric sources of these sensations are left unexamined (Murphy 2006, 152). Re-appropriating the canary bird’s subjecthood refuses such gendering of diagnosis by side-stepping human sociocultural conflations of sex and gender.

Self-described canaries exceed Eurocentric scientific and medical framings of exposure embodiment by asserting that their experiences with toxicants require an everyday form of accountability towards the practice of sharing atmospheres. Identifying as a canary insists that experiences of altered functionality reflect a sentinel knowledge that, as an early warning signal, can offer others protection from future chemical harm—but only if it is understood to be a form of chemically provoked disability. Human canaries contend that rather than being a limitation, chemical disability is a capacity for sensing. I term these capacities for sensing and their technocultures—the multitude of creative improvisations that blend technology and material culture to combat chemical exposure’s embodied consequences and support access to shared atmospheres—“canary knowledges.” Canary knowledges emergence from anti-colonial, transfeminist, queer, and crip genealogies that have long articulated knowledge of, and cultivated responses to, chemical exposure, and foreground the work of mobilizing metaphor as both method and meaning. Naming effluvious spaces as non-accessible because they contain atmospheric petrochemicals works to redefine terms of exposure according to those with intimate knowledge of the embodied effects of atmosphere. These sensory abilities can be vehicles for “frictional practices of access production,” a crip technoscience pushback against biosciences that use toxic embodiment in research and development, biasing exposure standards towards able bodies (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019, 10). By identifying as a human canary, a person might reclaim the capacity to experimentally intervene in the ways multiple forms of chemically "altered life" are endured and enlivened (Murphy 2013, 2017).

Whether such knowledges can aid in cultivating a “praxis of care and response—response-ability—in ongoing multispecies worlding” remains to be seen, and is one of the central questions that propels this writing (Haraway 2016, 105). As a white settler discussing the canary bird in the absence of relations with the bird itself, it is especially important to be intentional about how metaphorical representation offers a method to understand exposure’s meanings, rather than as an index of canary kinship per se. Such a distinction is crucial so as not to replicate what Métis scholar, Max Liboiron terms “the already rampant fetishisation of nonhumans as kin by academics as acts of possession and redemption” (2021, 110). In this way, the canary metaphor can invite a practice of accountability towards the atmospheric volatility of wafting, airborne, aromatics—an ethics-based chemical kinship between fume- and vapor-exposed lifeforms (see Balayannis and Garnett 2020 and Grandia 2020). This writing, and several years of thinking with self-identified canary communities, is informed by my own experiences with chemical sensitivity. I grew up within a kilometer of a perpetually flaring Chevron oil refinery that regularly spewed showers of sulphur dioxide, which on some occasions coated neighborhood cars with yellow dust. The hill is located at the end of the Trans Mountain Pipeline that traverses many unceded Indigenous territories across the settler colonial nation of Canada. The bottom of the hill, near a surreally located children’s miniature train that weaves through the forest, continues to have its own neighborhood phone line for odor complaints from the refinery tank farm. For me, fragrance, smoke, diesel, and solvent-based off-gassing materials can trigger migraines, brain fog, body pain, and asthma. When these sensitivities perturb daily functioning, I too relate to the technoscientific subjecthood of a canary bird.¹

In this article, I trace the technocultural genealogies entrenched within the canary in the coal mine metaphor, arguing that it is only by critically thinking with the history of the canary that this metaphor can be better deployed to reclaim and redefine the terms of experimental subjecthood afforded to the chemically sensitive. I begin by outlining how, during fifteenth- to nineteenth-century imperialism and the exotic bird trade, canaries became a companion species valued for their cheerful audibility in domestic spaces (home parlors) and revalued as indicators of work-place danger in industrializing societies. As pets, canary behaviors were trained using dark chambers and musical instruments, which altered a bird’s capacity to sing. I then show how due to their sensitive physiology, canaries became living signals at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their breathing sensitivity to carbon monoxide (CO) made them ideal animal sentinels in coal mine rescues, playing a formative role in early technoscientific understandings of toxic exposure. US coal mining culture celebrated the most resilient canaries as heroes. Reflecting on how canary exposures were used to bolster coal mining capital, I problematize the positivist notion that low levels of atmospheric toxicants are untraceable. I argue that later idea is “technoableist” in how it gives technological sensors of air pollution more authority than human sensors (Shew 2020, 43).²

Now chemically sensitive people who mobilize the canary metaphor potentiate a feminist knowledge about chemical disability by revealing how its “technological imagination” is gendered (Balsamo 2011), and by reclaiming the positionality of being both sentinel and an experimental subject. The second part of the article discusses how problematizing the inhalation of petrochemicals as canary-like—especially through consumer products such as fragrance, personal care products, and the home improvement industry—foregrounds a feminist decolonial approach to the infrastructural elements of long-term, low-level chemical exposure in Canada.

Identifying as a human canary names as gendered and ableist how technocultures petrochemically imagine consumer products’ material compositions. It has the potential to cultivate what Aimi Hamraie (2015) terms a “feminist crip” space for the toxicological knowledge of chemical disability. However, when humans metaphorically claim to be animal sentinels, they conjure images of a universal form of sacrificial life that ignores how canaries are situated in histories of racial capital and Eurocentric technoscience. For the terms of human canary articulation to cultivate a response to chemical harm, crip-led practices must reorient knowledge of exposure towards relational productions of accessibility (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019) that are anti-colonial and anti-racist. I finish by suggesting that the metaphorical naming of chemical disability, through identification with the canary’s sensitive capacity, can open other avenues for radical intersectional feminist orientations to toxic exposure, and disability justice (Sins Invalid 2016). Reclaiming technoscientific experimental subjecthood in this way opens new collective technocultural possibilities to address chemical injury.

Many scholars, but in particular crip, Black, and Indigenous scholars of technoscience, illuminate how empire and settler colonialism’s monetization and quantification of life manipulates forms of markedness (such as socially constructed ideas of ability and race) to designate particular subjects, and their relations with other communities and lifeforms, as surplus value to industrialization and technological innovation (see Murphy 2013; Fritsch 2015; Haritaworn 2015; Benjamin 2019). These processes of extraction and dispossession continue in the settler city of Toronto, Canada, where I write, and where my wider research focuses on the sociocultural significance of volatile organic compounds that off-gas from petrochemical-containing consumer products in indoor spaces. For the purposes of this discussion, my description of everyday chemically sensitive experience is limited to folks living in Toronto, while the history of the canary metaphor extends to the wider North American fossil fuel context. As Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee scholar Vanessa Watts observes, “Natural cause and determination in Euro-Western colonial history have acted to rationalize and justify mass violence, biological racism, sexism and de-culturation” (2013, 29), which too often is perpetuated when eco-feminists and science studies scholars theoretically abstract the material, in this case chemicals, from their situated relations to land and Indigenous territories. Cedric Robinson (2000) names the institutional and state structures that distribute harm across these sites of extraction “racial capitalism.” An articulation of human canaries must thus begin to cultivate a place-based response to chemical harm that perpetuates disabling illness by addressing how racial capital is historically and currently bolstered by local exposures (see Barba 2020 for a discussion of cognitive disability in environmental injustice contexts; see also the work of Kenneth MacLeish and Zoë Wool 2018 on burn pits).

Lindsey Dillon and Julia Sze (2016) use the canary metaphor to discuss environmental inequalities in the United States, focusing on the uneven conditions that combine to result in limited capacities to breathe. They tie the metaphor, and its implied exposures, to the disproportionate rates of asthma in US communities of color, and to violent police practices, such as the choke-hold, that deprive Black citizens of breath at a much higher rate than their white, or white-coded counterparts. Giovanna Di Chiro (2018) similarly observes that individuals in communities experiencing environmental injustice often self-refer as “sacrificial canaries,” including residents in northern Philadelphia who resist forms of green gentrification, or gentrification through environmental initiatives.

In “The Miner’s Canary,” Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres (2002) use the canary metaphor to discuss how the socially toxic environments of institutionalized racism—and not individual or collective pathologies—leads to the overincarceration and surveillance of Black, Latinx, and other peoples historically targeted by security apparatuses. In Guinier and Torres’s words, “Racism explains the canary’s condition as its own problem, without further investigating or even questioning the conditions in the mines” (2002, 292). This view supports prison abolitionist arguments that the prison-industrial complex was designed to naturalize and capitalize racialized incarceration (see Wang 2018).

My attending to the canary metaphor is also inspired by recent science and technology studies scholars’ conversations about the significance of sensation for environmental knowledge production. These perspectives consider experiences of toxic atmosphere, as “attuned sensing,” that is an embodied form of knowledge beyond what can be captured by monitoring (Calvillo 2018) and technoscientific sensor instruments (Gabrys 2016). At the same time, considering chemically sensitive knowledge production “invites apprehension” into the emancipatory assumptions that might underlie attempts to translate chemical sensitivity into quantitative data (Shapiro, Zakariya, and Roberts 2017).

By tracing how the canary bird became an exemplary experimental subject in the first place, we can begin to see, and then to disrupt, the naturalized relationships between capitalism and chemical exposure embedded in the canary metaphor. In what follows, I weave together a partial account of the occluded histories of canaries as technoscientific experimental subjects that have been sacrificed in the name of industrial and consumer capitalist “progress.”

Understanding the prevalence of human canaries in the twenty-first century requires attending to how global circulation of canary birds as commodified lifeforms have accompanied projects that use their sensory capacities to expand forms of resource extraction. The canary in the coal mine metaphor has become so commonplace, it often conceals the history of the canary bird as a commodity. My genealogy of canaries spans fifteenth- to nineteenth-century imperialism and exotic bird trade, and extends to when a companion species—valued for its cheerful audibility in domestic spaces (home parlors)—became revalued as an indicator of workplace danger in industrializing societies.

The canary is a small finch songbird imported to Europe from the Canary Islands, an archipelago near the northwest coast of Africa (Parsons 1987). Before canaries were used as disposable experimental subjects in coal mines, they were inhabitants of parlors and dens in European and North American homes. Bourgeois households kept the birds as pets, and collectable show pieces, that were ranked by superiority of breed and gender, with male canaries considered the most valuable because of their ability to sing (Buffon 1798). As only male canaries have historically been regarded by their trainers to sing well, the blurred and highly gendered anthropomorphic lines between the canary and the human have a history tied to colonial geographies spanning over four hundred years.

The geographic origin of the bird is an important node in the commodification of human life. The Canary Islands were inhabited by Indigenous Guanches for thousands of years. In the fifteenth century, the Spanish began enslaving the local population and bringing them to slave markets across Spain (Blumenthal 2009, 5). The islands became a key site for the Spanish slave trade during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, operating as a stopping off point for African slave ships and merchants from Upper Guinea through the Cape Verde Islands (Eltis and Richardson 2015). The Portuguese subsequently used the Canary Islands for sugar plantations that were planted and harvested by individuals who had been displaced from West Africa, making the islands a base for further expansion of the transatlantic slave trade mobilized by sugar plantations in the Caribbean (Mintz 1986). Export of canaries for domestication, noted as early as 1478 (Parsons 1987, 22), coincided with settler voyages to these islands, and with the forced transportation of human chattel.³

First bred in captivity in the seventeenth century, the domesticated canary from the Macaronesian Islands (the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands), became a commodified lifeform (Parsons 1987). Devoted technocultures of breeding and song training arose in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, projecting imperialist ideals of high culture onto the quality of the bird’s coloring and song (Buffon 1798). Canary pets were fashionable amongst the upper classes. The proliferation of European animal merchants across European cities meant that the birds soon became popular with the general public. Canaries emerged as a staple of the bird trade in the eighteenth century. Enthusiasts purchased them cheaply from markets and specialty bird shops.

Dark chambers and musical instruments were used to alter the pet bird’s capacity to sing. A large amount of literature gives detailed instruction on canary breeding and training. Some books guided early eighteenth-century readers in France to use bird organs (serinettes) to teach melodies to canaries. Other books espoused theories of diet to alter a canary’s temperament, or suggested isolating the birds in “dark bowers” or “dark chambers” to alter the patterning and tenacity of their song, as a response to sunlight (Dickens 1887, 92–93). These technocultural examples of instruments used for behavior modification, and to breed evolutionist hierarchies of plumage, are eerily reminiscent of the later fate of canaries in the mines as living signals.

Out of the Parlor, into the Mine: Canaries and the Intersection of Technoscientific Knowledge and Capital

Figure 1. Image from “Canary Birds in Mine-Rescue Work,” Popular Mechanics, March 1912, 355.

Once they became widespread in European pet culture, canaries began to be imported into North America in the mid-1800s for the same domestic purposes. Not long after, they were recognized as a universal parlor bird. German immigrants to America, Charles and Henry Reiche shipped approximately 20,000 canaries in the decade preceding 1853, and annual shipments rose from 10,000 in 1853 to 20,000 in 1867 (Pollock 2013). Early accounts of canary domestication frequently noted the birds’ tendency to develop asthma (Buffon 1798, 126), and to have “so tender a constitution that a very small matter impairs their health” (Hervieux 1718, 55). By the late nineteenth century, the birds’ sensitive temperament had become a familiar presence in many North American homes.

Due to their physiological attunement to air quality, by the beginning of the twentieth century canaries were put to work as living signals. Their breathing sensitivity to carbon monoxide (CO) made them ideal animal sentinels in coal mine rescues, playing a formative role in early technoscientific understandings of toxic atmospheres and acute high-level respiratory exposure. Canaries were particularly commodified for use in the burgeoning coal mining industry in both Britain and the United States. The coal mining industry during this time was especially dangerous as it involved chipping away at underground coal veins in small chambers with the potential to release large quantities of unscented gases such as CO. These surreptitious clouds often suffocated miners with little warning.

Employed to mitigate the rate of mortality in a US industry that suffered 69,097 coal mine fatalities between 1900 and 1929 (US Department of Labor, n.d.), physiologist John Scott Haldane suggested using small animals such as birds or rodents as experimental subjects that could detect exposure to CO. Haldane discovered that canaries, because of their small size and high rate of breathing, maximize the effects of CO blood saturation more than rodents. The birds signaled the effects of chemical exposure in a dramatic and easily identifiable way: they ceased to sing, swayed on their perches, and then quickly lost consciousness (Haldane 1917, 46).

Scientists like Haldane justified the use of the canary as an animal sentinel by invoking a constitutional susceptibility that they projected onto both humans and canaries. An accompanying mining research publication states that at 0.15 percent CO exposure, “canaries will show distress usually in from 5 to 12 minutes,” whereas with 0.20 percent exposure, “the distress is usually apparent in from 2 to 6 minutes” (Burrell and Seibert 1914, 243).⁴ The same publication describes how, "the idiosyncrasy of the individual" influences “action of the gas in producing bad nervous disorders” (244). However, it also argues that canaries may be repeatedly used in the mines "without becoming less useful" (244).⁵ In 1911 the US Bureau of Mines began using canaries in wire cages during missions to rescue miners trapped deep in the earth. Described in US accounts of mining rescues as "most sensitive to any atmosphere not supporting life" and "showing symptoms of dizziness" (Baltimore Sun 1911), canaries became sentinels able to “draw the line of safety” when they "droop and gasp for breath" (Washington Post 1912). Mine rescue crews would leave a special door open in its cage until the canary, as living sensor, began to exhibit changes in behavior. They would then close the door and infuse oxygen into the cage to resuscitate the bird (see Figure 1).

US coal mining culture celebrated the most constitutionally resilient canaries as heroes. The US Bureau of Mines rescue reports from the 1910s and 1920s list the mine room numbers where canaries collapsed, where they were able to endure an atmosphere, or where overcome by fumes. A 1914 Baltimore Sun article reported that canaries, "refreshed with oxygen" after their initial droop and led to spaces of clear air, saved five thousand miners during the first few years of their use. Bird heroes were invaluable to the male-bodied workers who took them into the mines. Baldy was a canary who survived five disasters, “overcome one or more times upon each occasion" (Boston Daily Globe 1921), and Goldie became well known as a “living instrument…having saved scores of lives” (New York Times 1917). Much like they treated house pets, the public projected an anthropomorphized companion species fondness onto canary sentinels.

By the 1920s the blue-collar miner with canary in hand became a heroic emblem of industrial imperialism. This image has remained in the colonial imaginaries of mining in the United States and Canada, where “the relationship between industrialism, resource extraction, and infrastructure development…[is] based on ideologies of racial, cultural, and religious superiority of European American settlers” (Gilio-Whitaker 2019, 72).

By this point, the technoscience of animal exposure was refined enough to maximize the labor value of coal miners. The canary, as human respiratory surrogate, transformed understandings of sensitivity and the presence of dangerous chemicals. Its rapid heartbeat and tiny lungs introduced the problem of exposure scalability in industrial processes, and its sacrificial signaling enabled toxic exposures to be figured into human value in coal mining. Today, technocultures of petrochemical materials figure chemical exposure into the atmospheres of everyday life.

The canary bird’s foray into mining set the stage for other living signals and animal sentinel species to become popularized in liberal imaginaries of environment, and to stand in as symbols of a universalized industrial imprint on the natural world. Similarly, the lives of humans in mid-to-late adulthood, who currently experience a multitude of complex chronic illness, parallel the permutations of petrochemical expansion through scientific animal testing. In this sense, “baby boomers” are an entire generation of canaries for the era of leaded gasoline, coal, PCBs, DDT, and thousands of other chemical substances known to have toxicological effects on multiple organ systems, human and animal alike. Canary exposure takes place in the proverbial parlor every day.

While canary use in coal mines is long past, the metaphor lives on when individuals identify as human canaries, overlaying a type of human experimentality onto the uneven permeations of industrialism into consumer product technocultures. As a language of disability advocacy, the canary metaphor underlies how experiences of chemically altered life lead some to identify as subjects of technoscientific experimentation. I can attest to the uncanny parallels between the imaginary of a canary as a living signal and feeling like a dystopic test subject caught in an involuntary conscription. While the canary is a yellow feathered flash in a dimly lit mine who detects the thresholds of safe atmospheres (possibly being gassed and then resuscitated by an oxygen mechanism in the cage), I am prone to sandbag lungs from paint and building product off-gassing and perfume, and my flash (always electric blue!) is a migraine aura, a visual hallucination of scintillating lights and colors. Both of us creatures are capable of sensing chemicals at levels otherwise deemed benign by toxicological science (Fortun and Fortun 2005).⁶ Often times, perhaps more often than not, we also sense levels deemed concerning by toxicology’s standards, but because these levels are bearable by many bodies, their significance is frequently dismissed.

Identifying as a human canary names, as gendered and ableist, how technocultures imagine petrochemical exposure as a “necessary evil” of consumer production. Chemically sensitive people who mobilize the canary metaphor potentiate a feminist knowledge about chemical disability by revealing how its “technological imagination” is gendered (Balsamo 2011) and reclaiming the positionality of being both sentinel and experimental subject. Although individuals who claim to be human canaries imply that their exposure experiences are similar to those of dehumanized experimental subjects, they also actively subvert the patriarchal assumptions of canary science. In particular, they challenge how sensitivity is exceptionalized as a feminine characteristic. Such metaphorical play disrupts environmental discourses that have been co-opted by anthropocentric liberal concepts of sustainability and dehistoricizing “techno-fixes” that erase “the many stories and histories of human systems that organize life differently” (Di Chiro 2018, 529). The canary metaphor crips a status quo of de facto experimental subjecthood in everyday atmospheres full of gendered products such as fragrances, and personal care products.

Similar to how canaries continue singing after falling off their perch, many chemically sensitive people also experiment with creative technoscientific interventions to make atmospheres accessible despite disabling exposures.⁷ Examples of interventions shared with me in interview conversations and in casual co-conspiracy include using materials such as Mylar and Tyvek to seal homes from fumes, or searching for the most efficient air filter and breathing mask that uses activated charcoal to remove chemicals that have volatilized into gas.⁸ If the impact that low levels of incitants have on the daily functioning of human canaries is taken seriously, spaces that provoke sensitivities can be reimagined as zones that expand understandings of living signal abilities and capacities. Through these homemade and repurposed interventions that accompany the use of the canary metaphor, human canaries reclaim what experimental subjecthood can be: technocultural living signals whose capacities for sensing low-level exposures treated as a valuable form of knowledge production, as opposed to being subsumed by consumer product profit. My experiences learning with human canaries have taught me that many use these technocultural interventions to prevent loss of social networks, housing, and employment, thereby transfiguring animal sentinel technology into reparative reckonings with modern material culture.

Just as the unproblematized metaphor of the canary in the coal mine can naturalize moments when fossil fuels fuel extractive capitalism, so too can this notion gloss over how the metaphorical language of animal symbol “marks whiteness” (Walcott 2014, 129). Some in the chemically sensitive community search for elusive biomarkers in blood tests and genetic analysis. This practice stems from the view that possessing particular genes is related to the physiological challenges of processing a lifetime of exposures that accumulate in organ systems. While these biocentric “molecular narratives” can be significant in structuring a given individual’s identification as a chemically sensitive canary, too often racialized categories are offered in the same breath as genetic causality (TallBear 2013, 150). This oversight results in glossing over the conjoined histories of racialization, animalization, and ability. As discussed earlier, if part of what biologically deterministic, individualizing, ideas of chronic illness conceal are transnational, extractivist, chemical infrastructures (Murphy 2013; Jones 2013), then to mobilize the canary in the coal mine metaphor from an anti-colonial perspective requires reckoning with how Eurocentric science, biomedicine, and toxicology rely on the lineages and ongoing replication of white, liberal humanist ontology.

Otherwise, when humans claim to be animal sentinels, they conjure images of a posthuman sacrificial life that risks reifying exposed subjects as damaged (Tuck 2009). Overrelying on a nostalgic image of animal likeness whitewashes how uneven exposures of lifeforms bolster extractive environmental data (Vera et al. 2019), and how technocultural materialities are produced by colonial infrastructures. Guiding what is provoked by the canary in the coal mine metaphor toward the work of solidarity involves denaturalizing resource extraction from Indigenous territories, and the canary as a color-evasive emblem that denies how sacrificial life is tied to white supremacy.

Does the canary metaphor posit the animal in lieu of the human, then recenter a predetermined (whitewashed) human agency at risk of essentializing a Eurocentric “epistemological-ontological divide" (Watts 2013, 31)? This epistemic move necessitates the consideration of promoting canary speciesism as a particular ideal type of sensitive subject that excludes the capacities of many other forms of life and being, and reifies a binaric understanding of human/animal. Likewise, to resist the reinscription of disabled people as dehumanized or rendered animal, scholars and community members can build relations that center what Sunaura Taylor calls the “cripping of animal ethics” (2017) and Cree scholar Billy-Rae Belcourt describes as “an animal ethic that disrupts anthropocentrism as a settler-colonial logic” (2015, 5). Human canaries, who reappropriate experimental subjecthood, must orient themselves and their reconfigured technocultural modes of accessibility toward knowledge production that acknowledges the power of metaphor to subvert material realities. This practice centers how chemical exposure co-constitutes relations with future life and more-than-human beings (TallBear 2015; Todd 2018; Lee 2020).

Human canary crip-led experimental atmospheric intervention also needs to center the demands of queer, trans, and gender nonconforming persons of color whose work has created, and is leading, the disability justice movement. Part of this work encompasses Mel Chen’s call for grappling with the ways notions of toxicity are imbricated in histories of “relations of contamination” that figure racialized and nonheteronormative others as threats to a sovereign body, and how these nativist notions can lead to chemical substances bearing “their own toxic racializations” (2012, 170–71). Chen writes of their exposure to mercury and subsequent development of chemical sensitivity as a being-in-relation with the combinations of chemicals that exceed biological schemas of human and object. They navigate exposures by rethinking the possibilities of causality and the (largely heteropatriarchal) “socialities attributed to toxicity” (204).

These queer- and crip-led practices subvert monolithic social constructions of exposure, reorienting the concept away from anthropocentric and androcentric threshold theories of harm, towards material interdependence across constructed categories of difference and capacity.

Future work can continue to reflect on the significance of what kind of relational cultures are needed to sustain a crip science of chemical exposure (Hamirae and Fritsch 2019), especially one that situates the concept of access itself outside of individualizing “white, settler accommodation frameworks” (Cowing 2020). In a late-industrial, late-capitalist world facing climate change, knowledge production must cultivate collective access to experimental materials and social resources. The disability justice principles of building cross-disability and cross-movement relationships, as well as reflections on the localized and community-based recommitments and reorientations required to dismantle systems of oppression, are needed now more than ever to contest the ways petrochemical materiality structures the technocultures of consumer products (Sins Invalid 2016).

Rather than providing a complete archive or history, my partial exercise in metaphorical genealogy has explored how the identification of those with chemical sensitivities, as canaries, creates space for reimagining the sensing of exposure as an important ability. Critically unpacking and scaling the infrastructural histories gathered in the canary metaphor nuances the relationships between human canaries, environmental injustice, gender, and disability. Sensitivities need not be exceptionalized as a feminized and gendered capacity. While lived experiences of chemical disability demonstrate how canary knowledge can guide toxicological knowledge production, the epistemological and allied work of building canary knowledges is still in the process of learning and growing.

The historicity of the canary in the coal mine metaphor disrupts the naturalized coalescence of colonial and capitalist projects that generated canary domestication and the use of such birds as scientific subjects. Using the metaphor without acknowledging its complicated history transposes a universal animal sentinel onto universal signatures and warning signals of chemical injury, without attending to the conjoined histories of racialization and animalization that structure chemical exposure. Thus, it is my hope that chemically sensitive communities and other advocates of disability and environmental justice can, with this history of songbird commodification, continue to subvert the heteropatriarchal and Eurocentric scientific apprehensions of chemical exposure it has come to represent in popular verbiage. The metaphor contains a technocultural lineage that instrumentalizes bodily sensing, illuminating how sensing exposure is materially and historically contiguous.

I have also critically traced the metaphor to continue to invite further speculative orientations to practices of reappropriating experimental technoscientific subjecthood. Reclaiming this subjecthood involves imagining work attuned to the future stakes of experimentation as a form of technocultural knowledge production. As Neel Ahuja reminds us, experimentation encompasses interspecies reproduction: “Minor atmospheric intimacies open out into bigger scales that laterally determine how the reproduction of some bodies will affect planetary form, including through processes of climate change and disease that threaten mass premature death” (2015, 379). Such a task gestures towards the cultivation of learning that is antiracist and decolonial, a practice of unlearning that is itself metaphorically “willfully permeable to contamination…an openness to contaminate an epistemology that relies on the equivalence of learning or mastery and disavows the violence this produces. It is also a call for openness to temporal contamination, which troubles the teleological narrative of progress with regard to knowledge production” (Harvey 2016, 18).

Echoing the canary’s song in subterranean rooms, where CO gas is a signal from the living ground itself of coal extraction, the human canary’s knowledge can be attuned to transcontinental and intergenerational exposure-scapes, our respiration provoking a call for collective sense-ability.

¹ Reflexively taking up the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” as someone who is cisgendered and otherwise able-bodied, I situate my location of privilege within canary communities and this article’s discussion of canary knowledges within the research contexts of ethnographic interview and informal conversations with people who self-identify as experiencing chemical sensitivity. These folks were able to access a publicly funded environmental health clinic in Toronto, Canada, over three years, and come from a range of backgrounds, including diverse lived experiences of class, racialization, diaspora, gender identity, comorbid illness, and disability. Due to long-term challenges securing disability income and navigating public space, many lack forms of desired community, experience insecure housing and also may be low-income. Anthropology is an academic discipline that has its own deep problems investing in and perpetuating/reinforcing colonial and imperial violences and forms of white space. My engagement in the present settler city of Toronto, despite Canada being my “home,” is accountable to this disciplinary responsibility and the complicities it upholds as part of institutional knowledge production. I reflect on ableist conventions in ethnographic methods that pressure particular types of relation with people in the field. My need to reconfigure access by connecting with chemically sensitive communities online, alongside my experiences of sensitivity persistently disrupting ongoing relationships, are not a failure to maintain an ideal, or romanticized relationship of knowledge exchange, but can be considered part of the work of building canary knowledges. Future work must continue to elaborate even more fully how human canary identifications and accessibility needs shape the co-production of canary knowledges, including beyond North American, Global North–centered, contexts.

² This is true even for consumer products that purport to measure and collect air quality. The expanding personal air monitors and air purifiers industry, for instance, still invisibilizes chemical harm. Calibration at safety thresholds and levels higher than chemical sensitivity still compromises accessible exposure prevention by constructing low-level chemical fates as untraceable.

³ A religiously motivated model of Christian divine right to possession formed the basis of later colonial voyages to North America. Black feminist philosopher and historian Sylvia Wynter describes the Canary Islands as playing a key role in reinforcing a pattern of Western European colonial rationale, where individuals aspiring to set out on voyages would receive commissions in contracts where “the licensee, in exchange for his deed of expanding the wealth and power of the licensing state, was that of a vice-regal administrative position in the governance of the expropriated territory, as well as a percentage of the tax on trade goods and all other forms of tribute” (1995, 29). In her argument, these logics of conquest would also inform the notion of a “natural slave” in the sixteenth-century Spanish Empire in order to displace a purely “theological mode of legitimation,” and lay the foundation for the further commodification of life.

⁵ Later, Burrell and the Bureau of Mines would be responsible for research into US poison gas for use in World War I. A wartime publication mentions canaries used in trenches to detect gas (Carpenter 1918, 8). The use of canaries as sentinels would foreshadow the use of animals in consumer product testing, which came into full force after the passing of the US Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1930. Haldane describes an animal hierarchy using the example of coal burning inside homes: “Lower organisms…are on the whole far more sensitive to impurities in air and other changes in the environment than higher animals, and particularly man” (1922, 302).

⁷ Human canary status is connected to the loss of functioning experienced when exposed to chemical incitants such as perfumes, air fresheners, laundry detergents, cleaning and personal care products, cigarettes, diesel, inks, paints, construction materials, and off-gassing consumer products manufactured from petrochemical materials such as MDF board, carpet, couches, clothing, and laminate flooring (Sears 2007). Shared indoor atmospheres like apartment complexes can provide little ability to control exposure. Similarly, income level influences the degree of the toxicant atmospheres from commodities, furnishings, and building materials encountered daily. When houses are located near industry or highways, this too influences the cumulative effects experienced from multiple outdoor sources of exposure and the ways these effects alter functional ability.

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Sophia Jaworski is a settler who grew up on Coast Salish territories. She is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto on Dish with One Spoon Territory.