Exactly how much heavy-metal particulate was released is still debated, and it could yet prove to be a significant long-term health threat. The Superstack, completed in 1972, was the last major effort to ameliorate emissions by the traditional expedient of dispersing them. Today, almost all of the sulphur removed from the ore is sequestered, rendered into a solid form and used to backfill the underground excavations. Huge areas of the damaged landscape have been dramatically restored through the relatively simple method of spreading limestone on the soil to neutralise the acid and planting wild grasses and trees. Sudburians are justifiably proud of their efforts to reverse the environmental damage, but the city remains the site of one of the most extensive and extreme episodes of environmental pollution in the modern era. 6 This legacy is literally etched into the rock in Sudbury, which is not naturally black but, rather, mostly a pale blue-grey colour. Mining could be said in general to encourage the tendency to view all of nature as a standing reserve, and despite the Herculean effort required to extract minerals, they trigger the fantasy of unearned wealth. This greed has a brutalising effect on society, and generates a culture quite distinct from the dignity of (traditional) agriculture or the inherent civility of manufacturing. For much of its past, and particularly in the 1970s, Sudbury was dominated by a haywire sensibility that comprised audacious improvisation, utter disregard for appearances, sheer expedience and untrammelled force. 7 Profoundly anti-urban, this callous attitude was a unique local development of the pioneer/survivalist impulse that runs throughout the North, and it both fed off of and perpetuated a debilitating sense of impermanence. Work in the mines was hard but lucrative, and Sudbury was regarded by strong and uneducated young men as a place to make a quick start in life. It was understood to be a way station, not a terminus, sometimes even by those who spent their whole lives here. Until the 1960s, pack-sack miners, so named for their mobility and minimal possessions, still lived in bunkhouses and ate at Crawley McCracken’s industrial canteen. New immigrants, if they were big men and worked hard, could labour without speaking English. The material rewards of mining made Sudbury’s working class the most affluent in Canada, but the life also required a good measure of fatalism, given the staggering rate of industrial accidents. The story of the discovery of nickel in Sudbury need not be recounted here, but it is worth noting that the city actually originated not as a mine site but as the junction point of two railroads, and it began as a logging camp.The early extraction of nickel in Sudbury occurred alongside developments in metallurgy that rendered nickel useful and valuable.When German miners in the early eighteenth century found copper ore mixed with an unknown whitish metal, they called it kupfernickel, or Old Nick’s copper, because it was devilishly difficult to smelt. Nickel was identified as an element in 1751 by the Swedish chemist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, but the metal’s capacity to render steel resistant to corrosion was only developed late in the nineteenth century and not perfected until World War I. Along with chrome, the addition of nickel transforms steel from a material that practically bleeds with oxidisation into stainless steel, a cool, impervious substance that is emblematic of the modern era. Stainless steel is steel’s alter ego: tough, aloof, glamorous and faintly menacing. Because stainless steel is not a coating, it is not perceived as superficial, and thus stands as the antithesis of chrome plating. 8 In this improved amalgam, steel takes a high polish and has a glint that suggests an almost theoretical material, one comparable only to gold in its resistance to tarnishing but infinitely more useful. Stainless steel responds to
the human interest in eternity and immutability, and it advances the aim of resisting environmental conditions and the inevitability of entropy. Hard, masculine and futuristic, almost fascistic in its appeal, it is the stuff of machines and weapons and robots. It is the Clint Eastwood of materials, unfuckwithable. Sudburians might object to this admittedly extreme description of nickel’s aura, but they naturally have some awareness of nickel’s strategic role in the modern world. Most know that nickel is used to harden steel for armour and munitions, not least because Sudbury has tended to flourish conspicuously in times of war. This prosperity is not without its psychic consequences. In the paranoid context of the Cold War, Sudbury was commonly assumed to be a priority target for Soviet nuclear weapons, an assumption that was widely reinforced by the discovery of significant uranium deposits in nearby Elliot Lake.The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an uneasy resonance in Sudbury, where the landscape already appeared to have suffered a mega-catastrophe. When the North American populace began to express its postwar anxieties, in popular culture and films, about nuclear annihilation, the nuclear threat fused with the idea of Earth’s collision with an asteroid and Sudbury somehow condensed all of these dystopian imaginings into one barren and inhospitable place. 9 n
1 This proposition was first advanced by Robert S Dietz, in ‘Sudbury Structure as an Astrobleme’, The Journal of Geology 72 (1964): 412–34 2 This structure is called the Rove Formation.There is another major patch of Sudbury detritus in upstate Michigan. 3 Wooil M Moon and L X Jiao,‘Sudbury Meteorite-Impact Structure Modeling with LITHOPROBE High-Resolution Seismic Refraction Results’, Geosciences Journal 2, No. 1 (1998): 26–36 4 Estimates of this area vary, and it is by no means exactly circular. Keith Winterhalder gives the figure of 10,000 hectares of barren land and 36,000 more of stunted woodland in ‘Environmental Degradation and Rehabilitation of the Landscape around Sudbury, a Major Mining and Smelting Area’, Environmental Review 4 (1996): 185–224 5 See the chapter, ‘Metallurgical Practices in Sudbury before 1930’, in the Ontario Ministry of the Environment article at ene.gov.on.ca/envision/ sudbury/early_roasting/index.htm 6 For a community-based account of this history, see Healing the Landscape: Celebrating Sudbury’s Reclamation Story. Sudbury: City of Sudbury, 2001 7 This culture is described at greater length and in other terms by Charles Angus in the book of Louie Palu’s photographs, Cage Call. Portland Oregon: Photolucida, 2007 8 It should be noted, however, that chromium is also an important element in making stainless steel. It is the conception of the material, not its precise metallurgical properties, that is being discussed here. 9 One of the best accounts of this history is by Frances Ferguson, ‘The Nuclear Sublime’, Diacritics 14, No. 2 (Summer 1984): 4–10
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