We start with a brief sampling by Dora Crouch of her brilliant 2003 book, Geology and Settlement: Greco-Roman Patterns . The complexity of tectonic plate movements in the eastern Mediterranean is both frightening and active, but there is a built record of up to 3000 years old that demonstrates the very roots of the geological imperative in building. Giulia Piana shows the influence of Rupe Tarpea in Rome, Michael Leeb – the Frank Slide, Thomas Mical follows with volcanic Auckland and Ryan Coghlan with Vancouver’s False Creek. In all these pieces, geological upheaval happens, we stumble out of the rubble. Then comes a group of articles on mining and its impacts: Heather Asquith looks at Cobalt, Ontario, site of a silver rush in the early 1900s; Martin Abbott looks at hinterland mining in Australia with the astounding metaphor that massive excavation in the west is piled up literally and productively on the east coast of Australia’s dense urban shoreline. Greg Stone finds a company town in Sweden at the mercy of the mining corporation which seems able to move it around the countryside at will, and Shane Neill writes about lead, ASARCO and the remediation of a very scarred landscape. Remediation and reclamation figures in the next grouping: Dustin Valen raises important questions about the technological ‘disappearance’ of waste which actually encourages the production of more of it; Clint Langevin, Amy Norris and Chester Rennie present a demonstration of this elision of waste dumps and pleasure, and Karianne Halse has sent a beautiful project for the re-use of a concrete plant at Fresh Kills landfill. John Calvelli thinks about mineralisation. In the next section, the articles are connected through the sense that there are hidden worlds beneath the surface. Nick Sowers listens to it; Vanessa Eickhoff writes about a creek treated like a sewer pipe under a small Ontario town and Ted Landrum tunnels through life. Mary Kavanagh visits Trinity Site in New Mexico, the site of postwar nuclear tests now turned tourist site, and Will Craig goes into an Icelandic volcano and is very afraid. Bradford Watson presents a critique of Denver’s relentless suburban push into unsuitable geologies – because foundations are by definition hidden, politicians, developers and buyers remain unaware of the unsuitability. Maps and the making of maps are the subject of Trent Workman’s work on charting the prairies and of Joshua Craze’s essay on determining the location of Abyei on the border between Sudan and the recently declared South Sudan. And to end, we have Douglas Moffat’s aural mapping of Montréal and Daniel Canty’s thoughts and words as he walks the island. The map is just the top layer of deep histories, deep geologies. c
The deep movements and forces of the earth, its deep geological processes which we have either ignored, discounted or taken for granted, have more influence on our species’ future than we have previously thought. This is new territory for artistic practice: activist, scientific, historic, at the scale of aeons not just the post-industrial era. If we look at oil extraction, particularly bitumen, what we find is that where previously we focussed on the product and what use could be made of it, we now realise that the process of extraction releases many unforeseen conditions and other, usually toxic, products that were hidden deep in geological strata historically released slowly by erosion. Thus, for example, there is a concentration on the process in artist Mary Kavanagh’s works on the oil sands and the infrastructure it takes to collapse the slow- release of arsenic or barium in amounts that do not threaten life in favour of a rush-release in the bitumen-extraction process. We know that radiation occurs naturally in the atmosphere. What we have developed is a way, through weaponry, to concentrate it in lethal amounts. It is this concentration of the earth’s products that has parallels with concentrated cancer cells, an uncanny metaphor as it is the concentrated release of things deep under the surface (uranium, asbestos, oil, carbon) that causes cancer in the human body. The value of land and territory today is evaluated entirely on the basis of extractable resources, whether platinum (South African miners’ strike), bitumen (the 2012 US presidential election – selling the US to China in exchange for energy) or potash (the end of the Wheat Marketting Board as surface production of grain is marginalised by the under-the-surface production of potash, ironically, for fertiliser). Wars are no longer fought for ideology or for humanitarian causes, but for geological reasons. This is the general awareness within which we now work. There is a reason why there is a geologic turn now and here. It is because it is larger than consumerism, it is unthreatened by information technology (other than rare earth extraction) and it is, as many of the essays in this issue of On Site review show, omnipresent.
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opposite page: Dora Crouch (see page 4) sent us this 1778 drawing by James Hutton, Theory of the Earth , the first published study of geological patterns. This illustrates an unconformity at Jedburgh, Scotland. Near-vertical beds of Silurian sandstone are topped by angular detritus over which lie flat beds of Devonian sandstone, topped with vegetation, humans and horses.
Giulia Piana (see page 8) sent a copy of this eighteenth-century etching of the uses of geology: Punition de Cassius, an de Rome 268. Joseph de Longueuil, after Silvestre David Mirys.
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