Skip to main content

Search

The Glass Plate

sgknowles

By Scott G. Knowles: As part of the STL Anthropocene Field Campus the research team visited the Wood Refinery Refinery History Museum on March 9, 2019. This museum is located on the grounds of the Wood River Refinery, a Shell Oil refinery built in 1917 and today owned by Phillips 66. The site is Roxana, Illinois, just upriver from Granite City, and just over two miles from the convergence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Sitting on the actual grounds of the refinery, the museum is an invitation to think across the micro, meso, and macro scales of the Quotidian Anthropocene, in terms of geography and also in terms of time. This refinery was built at the crux of the WWI, at a time when United States petrochemical production was entering an intensive phase of production, invention, corporate structuring, and global engagement. The museum is an invitation to think across temporal scales, backwards to the start of the refinery--through the individual lives of the workers and engineers whose lives defined the refinery--and forward to indeterminate points of future memory. This photo captures a key moment in an informal interview we did with one of the history guides. He had worked in the museum for decades before retiring. He explained to us that the museum sits in the former research facility of the refinery--and the glass plat he is showing reveals a beautiful artifact, a photograph made of the complex when it was built. Our guide only showed us this collection of slides after our conversation had advanced, perhaps after he was sure we were truly interested in his story, and the deeper history of the refinery. The pride in the place, the community of workers, and the teaching ability of the museum was manifest. The research team felt impressed, but also concerned about the health impacts (and naturally the environmental impacts as well) of the refinery. There was a mismatch in the scales--the memory of the individual tied to emotions of pride and knowledge of hard work done there--and the Anthropocene, global scale of petrochemicals. How do we resolve this mismatch? The glass plate is somehow a clue.

EiJ Global Record Panel 4S Mexico 2022

beyondeij2022_eventbrite_final_0.png

Environmental injustice involves cumulative and compounding, unevenly distributed vulnerabilities, hazards, and exposures – produced locally, regionally, nationally and transnationally – with open-

FIELDNOTE_0419_NALUWAN_MOLLY

Today's visit started with all of us students going down to the canal that runs parallel to Naluwan to collect shells.

Fieldnote _0415_Naluwan_MOLLY

I arrived earlier than the other students and had some time to interact with Ivan and his family before the others arrived.

Fieldnote _0412_Naluwan_MOLLY

Also this week we spent time with the elderly in the community. Me and Charles had a conversation with a man in a wheelchair that Charles also talked to last time.