Many of the points made in the article can be made about contamination concerns for other types of waste, and particularly how industrial narratives complicate what “the commons” is, what it is for, and how it works. Here, wastelands become productive lands undergirding development of what is already valued at a local level.
Donna Houston’s “Environmental Justice Storytelling: Angels and Isotopes at Yucca Mountain, Nevada” in this issue of Antipode (March 2013), touches on the difficulties and triumphs of rendering often invisible, massive, or otherwise difficult to fathom forms of twenty-first century waste manifest via storytelling. While there is considerable ongoing research in scientific and health circles in […]
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Edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, has many entries on waste. Perhaps this is not surprising, since many of what Samantha MacBride calls “modern wastes,” characterized by their synthetic nature, unpredictability, and heterogeneity, are also permanent. From plastics to e-waste, industrially-generated waste now lasts in geological time rather than evolutionary […]
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It’s always been a doozy of a discard problem: where to put radioactive waste? How to make it inert — and keep it that way? It exemplifies the essential dilemma created by so many categories of our discards: how can it be contained? Recent developments at the Hanford Site, which covers 586 square miles in […]
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