mapping | appropriation by sara jacobs
surveys ruin military sites boundaries toxicity
August 11, 2015 I am in Wendover, Utah for the month. This is my third full day, and I am feeling a little overwhelmed by all the somethings in the nothingness. Today I went to a place called the Blue Lake, an inland salt marsh managed by the BLM that is inside the arid expanse of the Utah Test Range, an active military site managed by the Department of Defense. There is something to the solitude outside my normal routine that is causing me to think a lot about space and land, but also place and landscape. At first, this place seemed like a blip on the map, empty and only given a name as the result of cartographic engineering. The grid randomly assigns a value without regard for materiality or histories in areas we don’t know or can’t see. In the dry, hot west, we made the unseen a property and then stripped it of its history and economy. We gave it a number and allowed it to be used any which way. Tooele County, S4, W19, Grid 5. Virtue on this side, vice on the other. There are signs along my route warning not to wander off the roads. The ghosts of an unproud history are buried in a place already filled with the extractions and disposals that no one else wanted. Within my small zone of Cartesian benignity, there is a fence that appears to start out of nowhere. It runs in a straight line as far as I can see, as if to delineate a real boundary between two different places. I had read this quote earlier today in a book about downwind military and chemical
Sara Jacobs
The army didn’t contain its tests and training to its own ground. A Department of the Interior study shows about 1,400 square miles of public land in Utah is covered with unexploded ordinance, some of it containing nerve agent and germs. 1 When walking or riding on BLM land adjacent to military property, it is wise to stick to the road in front of you. You never know where the chemical ghosts of the Cold War may be lurking. 2
31
testing in Utah, and it all felt very full circle. Also, it is just so austerely beautiful here.
1 Nearly one quarter, or 650 million acres of the continental landmass of the United States is part of the public domain. Located mostly west of the 100th meridian, these lands are primarily managed by the Department of the Interior and Department of Agriculture. Nearly 28 million acres, again mostly in the west, are Department of Defense lands. Since 1851 the rec- tilinear Public Land Survey System (PLSS) has been used to identify and de- termine land ownership in the United States. Often called the Jeffersonian grid, this system of surveying laid the foundation for city development, but was also applied to distance lands that were unknown and unseen. Public lands management is a contentious political issue, as the administrative boundaries of these lands have been drawn without regard to physical or ecological geographies. The agencies tasked with their management carry a multiple-use mission of simultaneously balancing cultural heritage, productive industry, and ecological conservation to ‘best meet the present and future needs of the American people’.
2 Chip Ward. Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West. Verso:1999. p101
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator