West Lake Landfill
AllanaRossNone so far. But its future could be much like Weldon Spring's. DOE educators providing AEC-driven education.
None so far. But its future could be much like Weldon Spring's. DOE educators providing AEC-driven education.
Capitalism. All of the practices on this land since settlers arrived have been driven by capital and extraction, perhaps a sense of pioneering and conquering...but what are the underlying motivations of Westward expansion? -accumulation of territory for capital, extraction, and political power. Also important to think about motivation of the government figures encouraging expansion as opposed to those who are actually engaged in it. Maybe settlers are analogous to foot soldiers. settler:expansion::foot soldier:war.
Boenker farm to landfill area...have not been able to find the info about how that happened, though with some research may be able to learn more.
Karst! Means water flows freely through the landsape. Also makes for good mining (limestone).
Thus history is a series of pits, and then filling the pits in to make mounds, and meanwhile extraction on the borders (farming) until recently. A pattern we see repeated in many, many places.
This place is nothing but anthropocenic conditions, whether vineyard or landfill or road or office space or liminal spaces between.
What does 'reflective' mean? Impacts are seen by those who live/work there on the ground, in the dirt, in their yards...raising children, being in proximity day in/out. Like a farmer knows their land. These people recognize and acknowledge the (physical existence of ) impact, but may have different perceptions of what that impact actually is. These people are worrying and thinking.
It seems that the people who have the power to do anything about the situation are physically removed from it and thus have a very different perception of the impact. The mound itself remains relatively unseen, or very rarely seen, and cursorily acknowledged if at all.
Land use: extraction: Pits. Fill: mounds.
quarry to farm to landfill
practices: extraction, cultivation, disposal.
public participation is discouraged at sites engaged in these practices. Landfill has always been private property (what does that mean when the contents of 'private property' are regularly distributed into public property downstream?). Public participation is organized solely by the public, met with resistance by most public officials, and disdain/scorn/disbelief by PRPs.
-Republic Services (land owners)---priority: $$$ for shareholders
-PRPs (land owners, past and present, and companies who dumped)---priority:avoiding losing $$$
-Government organizations (from AEC to EPA)---priority: competing pressure from lobbyists and citizen activists
-Citizen organizing (Just Moms etc)---priority: neighborhood health and safety
-Civil servants (at behest of one of the above)---competing pressure from lobbyists and citizen activists, retention of power
One interesting example of land use education that I found is the Whitney Plantation Museum in Wallace, LA--about an hour north of New Orleans proper and right on the banks of the Mississippi River. The museum is, according to its website, "the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on the lives of enslaved people." The 2,000 acre property was once a sugarcane plantation that operated from 1752 until well into the 19th century, with over 350 enslaved persons working on it during this period.
The museum was founded in 2014 by John Cummings, who has spent more than $8 million of his own fortune on this long-term project, and worked on it for nearly 15 years.[ The director of research is Ibrahima Seck, a Senegalese scholar who has done much work on the history of slavery. These two seem to be the primary organizers of education in the musuem which focuses on how land in the Lower Mississippi was organized towards the cultivation of Sugar.
Right off the bat, it is interesting that this museum is completely financed by a private citizen. I've looked up other plantation museums in the region and for the most part they see to all be privately run. Also, contrast the focus on slavery at Whitney to the Oak Alley plantation museum's celebration of a family legacy of sugar planters: "Hold fast to that which is good...."
The question of data relates to Denise Brock’s key role in the passage of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA). Brock independently collected thousands of documents related to the health of workers in nuclear facilities like Weldon Spring in her efforts to show that they had been exposed to pathological levels of radiation. In many cases, their employers were fully aware of the dangers these workers faced, but kept this information to themselves or hidden away in the private documents that Denise uncovered decades later. Prior to Denise's work this information was not publically available, and if workers who had become ill wanted to receive compensation for worksite expose, they would have to undergo exposure reconstruction assessments, which--due to the lack of accurate and available data--were imperfect evaluations of the actual levels of radiation workers had been exposed to. Due to Denise's advocacy, which led to the passage of the EEOICPA, workers at nuclear facilities are exempted from the exposure reconstruction assessments and are eligible for compensation payments up to a maximum amount of $250,000, plus medical expenses for accepted conditions.
Denise's experience raises a few questions and reflections on data in the Anthropocene:
Project managers at the Army Corps of Engineers are not concerned with the Anthropocene. Their job at SLAPS and other FUSRAP sites revolves around a different contestable term: remediation. What exactly does Anthropocenic remediation look like in St. Louis? As the ACoE project managers informed us, remediation consists of removing contimated soil and shipping it to approved waste management sites in Michigan, Kentucky and Ohio. It would be interesting to further investigate how ACoE practices of remediation have historically been shaped.