this page, top: Vale’s new Totten Mine sited near an old collapsed Worthington mine shaft below: View from Bay Street Overpass towards a railway bridge crossing Highway 17, demonstrating the straight lines blasted into the Canadian Shield
facing page, top: Slag Dump, Sudbury 2013. View from Big Nickel Mine Drive at Old Highway 144 below: Sand Pit Lake, Sudbury 2013. View of the reclaimed slag heaps from Big NIckel Mine Drive
In 2003 after 25 years of Sudbury’s Land Restoration program, the city asked citizens to say what the regreening program meant to them. The theme and template, a ‘thin green line’, was provided as “a reflection of the ongoing work required to ensure that diverse self-sustaining ecosystems replace barren land” and “of the rather fragile relationship between the regreening hillsides and the physical state of the soil, the air and the water” in the city. 1 The commonly used ‘thin red line’ figuratively denotes a point of no return, a line drawn in the sand – a limit beyond which safety is no longer guaranteed’; the thin blue line refers to law enforcement officers who stand between good and bad. Thus, the thin green line is more than a statement on health, it is the new morality, negotiating the “uncomplicated choice between natural things, which are good, and unnatural things, which are bad.” 2 As a result, conventions of land reclamation have become a master narrative unquestioned by anyone except those who are necessarily aligned with destructive anthropocentric and other opportunistic forces. William Cronon explains that in this way, “Nature becomes our dogma, the wall we build around our own vision to protect it from competing views. And like all dogmas, it is the death of dialogue and self-criticism”. 3 Eric Cazdyn has identified an intersection with medicine, relevant to Sudbury’s regenerative image, as a period called the ‘new chronic’. 4 Although regreening and restoration may be perceived as a cure, Cazdyn’s theory relegates it to a prescriptive meantime. It begins with healing the city’s scars rather than deepening them, but progressively deals with the easier to manage symptoms of a complicated and ongoing relationship between industry, community and environment. Sudbury’s industrial sector remains active and new technology is rediscovering untapped potential at historic mine sites – the narrative of ‘healing’ detracts from these and other potentially meaningful agendas. Abandoned and hazardous mine sites are only just finding their way into current reclamation strategies, while urban brownfield sites, ageing infrastructure, disappearing heritage and below-average human health still negatively affect the city. Although the community has no independent public accounting of the social costs of the mining industry, 5 a declining ratio of barren to recovered land satisfies the city’s narrative that to make green equals health , although this is neither true, nor even representative of the whole truth.
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Leanna Lalonde
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