history remediation narrative truth denial
remediation consequences exposed
reclamation | re - greening by leanna lalonde
I mpressions of Sudbury are intimately linked to landscape. Like an archive, the ground is a repository of the events, both geologic and anthropogenic, that transform it. The most significant work operates at the surface in what can be discerned, most explicitly through sight. Once a trackless wilderness of tall red and white pine, quick and successive waves of human activity stripped Sudbury of its vegetation revealing extensive rock surfaces, stained black by sulphurous smog. Negative perceptions of these surficial qualities obscured the complexity and value of affected communities as ‘lived in’ places, reducing them to icons of dereliction and decay. These surficial qualities are also superficial , concerned with the immediately apparent, perceived without any depth. When, in 1971, two Apollo 16 astronauts visited Sudbury, the common view was that the landscape was a proxy for the lunar landscape to prepare the astronauts for stark environmental conditions. This misinterpretation solidified a narrative that cast the city as categorically ugly, hostile and unhealthy in the minds of visitor and resident alike. As the basis upon which people act and react, narrative and image are as consequential as material reality; environmental crisis is as much a problem of narrative and the imagination as it is technology or science. As a signifying system, landscape and the ground surface is a means of communicating narrative – a medium through which truth is revealed, seeing is believing, but which also is infinitely malleable and susceptible to manipulation. Any given ‘truth’ might be an endeavour in selectivity, narrow and restrictive. As a beloved narrative, the Edenic garden generally falls into two categories that establish ‘right’ models of behaviour in our relationship with the natural world. The first exhorts people to transform the wilderness ‘back’ to garden by taming and controlling undeveloped unruly and rugged nature into a state of civility and order. The second condemns humans for polluting and destroying nature. Contemporary environmentalism has grown out of this second interpretation; land reclamation finds its genesis in the admission of guilt for a scorched and endangered earth, and recompense for the loss of an intact and pristine natural environment. Sudbury’s specific recovery narrative begins in 1978, building compelling images of the compensatory value of nature against the harsh realities of the region. Regreening was a prescription of lime, fertiliser and grass seed that produced a cover of green that relieves – even eliminates, the impression of a devastated landscape.
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Leanna Lalonde
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