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Monitoring. Decisions from the EPA about 'safe' levels of radiation exposure. 

Cancer cluster. Not racialized in this particular area so much as class-based. Bridgeton is a working-class, mostly white suburb. The neighborhood closest to the landfill is a mobile home park. 

Dualistic attitude of humanity as separate from nature led us to believe that we can dump nuclear waste in a floodplain and it will not affect us. Refusal to trust in ecological processes, hubris of engineering, and faith that we are not subject to natural laws because we are above nature led us to use the land in this way. Ecosystems compromised are innumberable because of the nature of the site--its proximity to water and the porous nature of the karst beneath it. This is still not recognized as a fundamental issue as evidenced by the fact that our solutions to these problems are always based on engineering, attempting to outsmart geography, geology, and physics...never a long-term solution or re-thinking land use practices. 

I think the public imagination hasn't arrived at this juncture yet. Priority=removal of hazardous waste. Some academics are imagining futures (the landscape architecture students and professors at Washington University for example). Discursive histories in use= culture of nature. Wildlife preserves on land unfit for habitation. 

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.