AsARCo ANthRopoCeNe ANxIetIes ANd the AesthetICs oF RemedIAtIoN
cultural politics | reclamation by shane neill
Arriving at site security , I sign a waiver acknowledging the presence of hazardous materials and heavy metals. I accept responsibility for my presence and actions. Protocols describe how I should avoid touching anything, how I should avoid inhaling or kicking up dust, and how I am to immediately wash my hands, clothes, and boots upon returning home. Soon this entire site will be exhumed, redistributed, capped, and covered with 1.5 metres of new, clean earth. The original ASARCO lead smelter burned to the ground in 1902 after fifteen years of operation. Reconstruction was fuelled by an ambitious expansion of production capacity that required the creation of an expansive flat ground. The terrain was steep and rugged, carved by numerous arroyos that channel runoff from the Franklin Mountains to the Rio Grande during the sporadic but intense seasonal rainstorms. To form a mesa 15-20 metres above the previous foundations, the arroyos were infilled with any material available on site: molten slag cooled in-place, re-deposited slag, crushed rock, brick, concrete fragments, asphalt, and native soils. 1 Gambling that the waste was inert, the convenient and efficient land forming process continued for almost seven decades as the smelter further expanded. When the plant was shuttered in 1999, the mesa had grown to cover 120 acres. Anthropocene anxieties are increasingly present in our collective imagination. Images such as those by Ed Burtynsky or Sebastiao Selgado feed these anxieties, placing first-world pursuits in opposition to natural orders. 2 Additionally, shifts from industrial to ephemeral production are coupled with the rapid growth of cities into previously exurban industrial lands. The moral impetus to restore our relationship to the landscape is given economic force by our consumption of land. Engineers have developed creative remediative strategies that satisfy health, environmental and economic mandates. 3 Correspondingly, the responsibilities of architects and landscape architects have been marginalised to the end aesthetics of the site. Who then is charged with the ethical imperatives that come with the reinhabitation of remediated landscapes? Elizabeth K Meyer calls such sites ‘disturbed’ and notes that even after they have been decontaminated, their unsettling effects remain. 4 Remediated sites require new and imaginative reinhabitations. The present-day remediation of the ASARCO smelter faces additional challenges. It sits on the USA border across from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and while the toxic territory wrought over a century envelops both sides of the narrow bi-national valley, the remediation stops at the border. While both the EPA and the ASARCO remediation trust lack international jurisdiction, they do not lack culpability. However, their plans do not even acknowledge the informal Mexican barrio of Anapra that faces the smelter. Our imagination of the future stops at the border. 1 Malcolm Pirnie Inc. ‘Final Remediation Action Work Plan’ (technical report to Texas Custodial Trust, El Paso, Texas. April 2011. www.recastingthesmelter.com/wp-content/themes/ recastingasarco/downloads/site_documents/asarco-final-rawp-with-appendices-04-2011.pdf) p 2-4 2 See, for example, Saskia Sassen, ‘Black and White Photography as Theorizing: Seeing What the Eye Cannot See’, in S ociological Forum , Vol. 26, No. 2, 2011. pp 438-443 3 See, for example, C N Mulligan, et al. ‘Remediation technologies for metal-contaminated soils and groundwater: an evaluation’, in E ngineering Geology , Vol. 60, 2001, pp 193±207 4 Elizabeth K Meyer. ‘Uncertain Parks, Disturbed Sites, Citizens, and Risk Society’, in Large Parks , eds. Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007
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