Born Into a Dying World: Human Health vs Ecological Stability

Noons For Now hosted another teach-in with guest speaker Jesse Vermaire a couple of weeks ago, on Thursday, March 24. A professor at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Vermaire spoke about the scientific and analytical elements of the Great Acceleration—the fuel for our current ecological crisis. He began by stating that despite how planet Earth has been able to adapt in the past, this current global climate change is occurring at a faster rate than Earth can keep up. Many phenomena that influence the increasing global temperature are simultaneously responsible for maintaining a balanced global economy. The result is “positive human well-being and negative ecological effects,” according to Vermaire. Of the nine planetary boundaries (excluding two with missing information), Vermaire points out that four (climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, and biochemical flows) are either within or beyond a zone of uncertainty. He spoke on a few of these creations, such as the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorous cycle, and the plastic cycle, all of which have a significant and increasing risk for human populations. These creations have each skyrocketed in the last century. The result is the emergence of a new era: The Anthropocene, in which human beings thrive off a dying planet. With the help of natural and social science, humanity could come up with a solution that ensures the benefits of human well-being are in place while maintaining a healthy climate.

written by Emma Cantlon.

Emma is a first-year student at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University pursuing a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Political Science. Emma entered politics to study the role of government in the climate crisis, and specifically the effects and possibilities of globalization in tackling climate change. Their focus outside of school is finding and testing eco-friendly alternatives to miscellaneous necessities and advocating for the importance of individual efforts in dealing with the climate crisis.

The Impact of Framing on Climate Action

Chris Russill noted the point of the Noons for Now on Climate Communication very early in the meeting. He argued that the frames that we use to talk about the climate crisis must be rethought. The main fames by which we talk about the crisis have always been based on scientific and technical communication; but does scientific communication really convince people that we need to do something? According to Professor Russill, the answer seems to be no. We need, instead, to appeal to people’s emotions when talking about the climate crisis. Maybe anyone who wants to understand the science behind the climate crisis already understands enough to be motivated to take individual or engage in collective action. In that case, we need to communicate our feelings of climate grief, anxiety, or any other worries to try to reach those who still don’t care. Finding new ways to relate to people and engaging in a wider range of communicative models about the climate crisis is essential to overcoming these challenges. Rethinking how we communicate is especially important because these same feelings are also why people can be convinced to deny that the climate crisis is even happening. Disinformation campaigns are designed to appeal to these emotions, they give people privileged information and allow them to be part of an ‘in group’. Oil and gas companies and political actors have created strong identities around oil that people can hold on to by using their fear of the future and by appealing to people’s inherent biases. Nobody has the time to debunk every climate denialist, nor does that even really work. We need to work to build a vision of a just recovery that everyone can be on board with. We must focus on communicating the transition away from fossil fuels as being a social justice issue rather than a technological issue, and make sure our vision of the future doesn’t contain the same inequities as the present.

written by David Baker.

David is a fourth-year student at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University pursuing a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Political Science. David’s main academic interests are environmental policy, the politics surrounding contemporary ‘democratic decay’, and East Asian politics and history.

Manifesting. Exploring. Advocating.
Storytelling as a Guide Through the Climate Crisis

Storytelling does not always require reading a book or speaking to an audience; it can be talking to others about personal experiences or stories heard through the grapevine. Everyone should recognize and share what is known or unknown regarding the climate. What is learned or not yet figured out in the world has a place in the conversation about the climate crisis—even if the conversation is messy. “Messiness has a place in addressing the climate crisis,” said Barbara Leckie during last Thursday’s Noons for Now. ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´’s Professor Leckie made introductions to the topic of storytelling amidst the climate crisis with conversations by guest speakers ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´’s Professor Nadia Bozak and Guelph’s Professor Catherine Bush. The exchanges in experiences and opinions during the teach-in between the professors and other students and faculty members revealed social and political benefits to messy, casual, and formal climate storytelling. In talking about stressful topics, one can find peace inside and in navigating the stresses of the climate crisis, especially since by doing so, we “make the invisible, visible,” as Professor Bozak said. By the end of the meeting, there was agreement on the importance of maintaining relevancy and empathy in climate conversations. More people should be engaged in the critical conversations needed for advocating for the health of the planet and its inhabitants. However, it does not always have to be daunting, and as quoted by Professor Bush, “What we think, we become” (Buddha).

written by Emma Cantlon

Emma is a first-year student at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University pursuing a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Political Science. Emma entered politics to study the role of government in the climate crisis, and specifically the effects and possibilities of globalization in tackling climate change. Their focus outside of school is finding and testing eco-friendly alternatives to miscellaneous necessities and advocating for the importance of individual efforts in dealing with the climate crisis.

In our conversation, Brenda walked me through the narrative of her work as it’s evolved over the years. She started with an interest in human rights humanities scholarship where she was particularly drawn to the later writings of Adrienne Rich on accountable citizenship. Eventually, Rich’s ideas pushed Brenda to consider what these issues looked like in the Canadian context, which led her to Indigenous writers and knowledge keepers. Her work today is guided by the question of how to live responsibly according to treaty and territorial relationships as understood by indigenous peoples.

One figure whom Brenda sees as a mentor in engaging with this question is Coast Salish based poet and water justice worker, Rita Wong. Working with and responding to Wong’s work on water and waterways has pushed Brenda into thinking about what she called “the porosity of the self” and relational conceptions of intersubjectivity in Indigenous teachings. Her current research aims to take up some of Wong’s work in beholden and undercurrent as a kind of guide for a project investigating the relations and communities along the Kitchissippi Kichi Zibi watershed.

She described the evolution of her work as continually picking up the strands of past projects and pulling them through into new interests and contexts. Recently, she was able to bring these strands together to teach her dream course last fall, called Literary Ecological Fieldwork. This class cut down on assigned readings and asked students to spend time each week outside. They kept fieldwork journals to record their observations and reflections in a given space, while each week the course reading materials focused on paying attention to a specific aspect of the world – sometimes it was the trees of their neighbourhood, sometimes wild bee populations. The course tied into Brenda’s love of interdisciplinary thinking and brought Indigenous knowledge keepers, scientists and literary artists into conversation with one another. Many of these conversations happened in the classroom space itself, through a range of guest speakers who appeared throughout the term—including, at the invitation of her students, Rita Wong.

Brenda designed this course with the experimental premise that, “if you invite students to become more engaged with the … multi-storied minutia of where they live, … their sense of relational responsibility, which ties into relational responsibilities on treaty terms—to the where they live—would then … provide an anchor to the bigger questions of climate change which can still seem remote.”

Much of climate change education is focused on pushing students to think systemically rather than individually about what’s happening to our planet, but Brenda feels that this artificial binary is harmful to both her students and the topic at hand. Intervening in climate change requires both perspectives, but “criticality,” as the sole lens, she told me, “privileges the rational. It doesn’t engage with the spiritual, emotional, [or] physical.” In response, her teaching focuses on embodied learning. The students in her class last fall commented on the mental health benefits of being asked to spend time outside every week, just being present and paying attention to the world around them. This is a part of a decolonial, indigenous pedagogy that requires us to engage with whole persons. Brenda explained that “in Indigenous conceptions of personhood, a person is never individual, solely, it’s [all about] relation.” This was what made her class last fall so special, because “so much of [their] learning was about the relational construction of living entities, which we are part of as biological beings.”

When I asked Brenda what she felt was most effective way of reaching people regarding climate action, she told me that this work is “incremental” and that the small conversations in classrooms really matter. Whether it be discussions about climate change or Indigenous issues, she’s found that students take these conversations from class and bring them back to their families, their roommates, and the people in their lives in a kind of co-education effect. “I still believe that educational settings have a great capacity to create critical sensibility and engagement on the part, not only of the students in our classrooms, but potentially, gradually, a broader public.”

Brenda is currently accepting students for supervisory projects and hopes to have the chance to teach her Literary Ecological Fieldwork course again soon.

Some Recommended Readings:

• Fred Wah and Rita Wong, , 2018
• Rita Wong, , 2015
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, , 2013
• Adrienne Rich, Your Native Land, Your Life, 1986

Interview written and conducted by Veronika Kratz

“Plastiglomerate sample” from Cindy Stelmackowich’s “Plastic Planet” exhibit

On January 8, Ottawa-based artist, presented on her exhibit “Plastic Planet” at the MacOdrum Library to address the urgency of climate change through contemporary art. The panel extended to other academics, community organizers and activists, facilitating an interdisciplinary conversation. Dr. Stelmackowich’s goal to “make us uncomfortable” was well executed.

Her work displays the effects of globalized consumer culture through the principal subject – resurfacing of garbage that modern society has been trying to repress. The evidence captures floats of discard and other materials from around the world retrieved through a “mega-highway for trash”. The newly formed rocks from man-made waste further illustrates a catastrophic paradox of “world destroying….and world making”, says Sara Adams from the Department of English.

“Fishbitten” from Plastic Tides series, Cindy Stelmackowich

Insights from Larissa Holman, director of Science and Policy at and internationally recognized activist, Catherine Abreu from , led to a comprehensive understanding of current initiatives and disparities within the community regarding climate change. Holman addressed the importance of recognizing the power of citizens in the fight against climate change. This power is utilized by the Ottawa Riverkeeper volunteer network, which strives to educate the community on the sacredness of the river and the need to protect waterways, while facilitating experiential programs. Catherine Abreu enhanced the event with her remarks on structural interventions and the need to challenge individual responsibility for the state of the world. Her discussions on grassroots work such as collaborating with academics, First Nations organizations, and youth groups to influence policymaking demonstrates the trajectory of climate change activism.

“Footprint” from Cindy Stelmackowich’s “Plastic Planet” exhibit

When asked about what gives her hope, Abreu stated that sustainable change looks like institutional reform, which requires the “antidote to despair” – action. This includes extending the horizons of discourse surrounding environmental justice to include students, academics, community members of all ages through various forms of activism like that of Cindy Stelmackowich. The exhibit will be displayed until April 30, 2020.

“Colgate Flotsam” from Plastic Tide Series, Cindy Stelmackowich

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Climate Common’s Colloquium on Plastics, Art, Activism, and Climate Change

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Climate Common’s Colloquium on Plastics, Art, Activism, and Climate Change

Cindy Stelmackowich’s “Plastic Planet” exhibit

Cindy Stelmackowich’s “Plastic Planet” exhibit

Cindy Stelmackowich’s “Plastic Planet” exhibit

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Climate Common’s Colloquium on Plastics, Art, Activism, and Climate Change

In my brief remarks today I plan on putting Cindy Stelmackowich’s work, “Plastic Planet,” in conversation with discard studies, an emerging sub-field in the social sciences that goes beyond looking at waste from the perspective of the physical, biological or engineering sciences. Discard studies is not about addressing the problem of waste itself, but rather about contextualizing and analyzing the wider cultural, economic and political systems that produce waste and wasting. As Max Liboiron puts it, the task of discard studies is to “interrogate these [larger] systems for how waste comes to be, …and offer critical alternatives to popular and normative notions of waste” (“What is Discard Studies?”). Discard studies asks: what does it mean to systematically leave out, externalize, leave behind, or devalue? In short, what does it mean to call something waste, and what does this act of naming tell us about waste as a site for producing (and also resisting) dominant power structures and theories of value?

Viewed through this framework, discards move beyond being unimportant and dull remnants of everyday life and become fascinating and vibrant tools for thinking through and with our past, present and future relationships with humans, non-humans and our environments. The discarded, as both concept and material object, take center stage in “Plastic Planet”: the plastic objects photographed are foregrounded in the frame and thus amplified, collected together and piled up in order to dominate the viewer’s field of vision.

Each of these images and assemblages foreground the dislocation, fragmentation and dissolution that inhere in discards in both concept and material form. By collecting, arranging and photographing plastic discards, Stelmackowich arrests their flow as waste objects and directs the audience’s attention to their physicality and permanence, thus countering modern waste management practices of silently and efficiently expurgating waste and removing it from view (at least, out of the view of the privileged).

Thus in her work, Stelmackowich performs a kind of waste management that does not seek to dispose of these discards and hide them from view but rather to foreground and amplify their material afterlives, the ways in which these objects stubbornly “last on” (to borrow a phrase from John Scanlan) even after they have reached their planned or perceived obsolescence. Most of the plastic discards on display are unrecognizable as the “terminal commodities” they once were, except for a toothbrush, several bottle caps and a pile of ropes coiled up like entrails. These bitten and brittle plastic shards will, as we know all too well, stubbornly “last on” in the Earth’s oceans, on its beaches, in landfills and in human and non-human bodies on a geological timescale that eclipses human lifespans. These plastics will never full biodegrade, Stelmackowich reminds us, but will rather “slowly fragment…into thousands of crumbs of microplastic,” thus never actually disappearing but rather dissipating ever-so-gradually, with both humans and non-humans living downstream from the fallout. In this way, the “crumbs of microplastic” transform into the seeds of new and increasingly difficult problems that face all life in our ecologically-precarious present.

“Plastic Planet” highlights an interesting idea in discard studies, namely that waste and discards can be both world-destroying and world-making all at once. The world-destroying part seems devastatingly straightforward enough: micro plastics like the ones pictured in the exhibition can seriously injure and even kill sea life, as Stelmackowich notes. Plastic discards can choke, perforate, poison and contaminate because of waste’s fundamental ability to flow, leak, spill, and transform. However, waste’s flexibility and flow can also be world-making, like the molten plastic mixed with sand, seashells and other matter we see pictured in Stelmackowich’s work. These new hybrid, unknown worlds show at a micro-scale how anthropogenic pollution and climate change operate at a macro-level, leading to catastrophic consequences on a global scale. As Myra J. Hird puts it,

We are not so much leaving behind our waste for some imagined future humanity to decipher our history, as we are bequeathing a particular futurity through a projected responsibility for the toxicity, contamination, and resource depletion our epoch created. Waste, therefore, introduces a paradox: the Anthropocene marks humans’ significant re-assemblage of the planet at the same time that it puts an end to any lingering sense to human exceptionalism (Hird, “Waste Flows”).

The fact that waste like the plastic discards pictured here linger and “last on” as long as they do, and furthermore that they do not “last on” in a neutral mode but rather continue to actively disrupt and do harm long after they have been discarded and disregarded, tells us a lot about our social, economic and political systems and how they fail to dwell with the consequences of our production, consumption, and disposal practices. Stelmackowich’s work, however, foregrounds this dwelling-with and, perhaps, the world-making that follows. Just like Donna Haraway’s injunction to dwell with the trouble, in addition to Chris Russil’s related call (at a previous Climate Commons event) to dwell with the doom, Stelmackowich’s colourful and disturbing assemblages make us stop and dwell with the discards. The works in this exhibit isolate discards from their waste flows, immobilize them in still images, and do the work of making visible their afterlives. This exhibition asks us to dwell with the discards by contemplating the byproducts of large-scale, industrial waste flows. It also, I think, galvanizes its audience to learn from and replicate waste’s world-making practices. As plastic increasingly dominates our world and waste of all kinds is rapidly making our world more and more inhospitable to many forms of life, our present moment calls for a variety of disruptions, insurrections, and mixed-modal assemblages that mirror the hybrid form of the “plastiglomerates” or “plocks” depicted in Stelmackowich’s work. We must move forward by dwelling with the trouble, dwelling with the doom, and dwelling with the discards in equal measure. We must also endeavour to create our own world-making projects through the formation of new commons, collectives and political assemblages in our increasingly melting and mixed-up world.

Works Cited

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Hird, Myra J. “Waste Flows” in Discard Studies’ Discard Studies Compendium, .

Liboiron, Max. “Why Discard Studies?” Discard Studies, 2014, .

Scanlan, John. “In Deadly Time: The Lasting on of Waste in Mayhew’s London.” Time and Society, vol. 16, no. 2/3, 2007, pp. 186-206. DOI: 10.1177/0961463X07080265.

On behalf of the scholars, and the project principal investigator (Dr. Onita Basu) we would like to invite you to a speakers series being held at the  in Old Ottawa South.

Time: Wednesday, June 12, 2019 from 6-8p.m.

We will be covering three broad themes under the heading ‘Climate Conversations with an African focus’: 1) Societal Transformation, 2) Women and Climate Change, and 3) Business and Leadership.

We hope to see you there – it will be an informative and exciting evening.

Sabrina Peric (Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary) is a visiting scholar at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University from the University of Calgary. Her visit on March 21 and 22, 2019 focused on issues related to the anthropology of climate change, her research, and ways to integrate climate change into teaching. When discussing the goals of the talk and her work, Peric described it as an opportunity to “get together with faculty and students to talk about how we can teach climate change since it is not only a newer pedagogical topic, but something that’s garnering more demand from students and faculty.” Her discussion focused on the opportunities and challenges that the topic of climate change and decolonization in Canada presents today. “Specifically, the way that land has been treated in a colonial context,” she says, “and, what it means to move out of that colonial context, whether it’s possible, and what possibilities there are of building new relationships with our indigenous neighbors, including what role this can play in action against climate change.”

Discussing how social inequalities influence the ways climate change is addressed, Peric stresses the huge implications they have. For her, it’s the basis of understanding how energy systems affect people on a daily basis and how energy is impacting us. Within Canada, the issue of decolonization and “understanding Canada as a settler state that has exploited many of the resources across the country” are essential in addressing the central issues of climate change. Due to the difference in lived experience and how climate change is addressed, she mentions research into energy and climate change should focus on the local level as opposed to the national level. Peric believes energy stories from individuals, their own narratives, are “powerful and very revelatory” as energy infrastructure are unequal, and not everyone has an equal voice in deciding how to move forward with energy in the future. “I think that precisely by focusing on people’s individual energy stories we can get to the roots of some of these bigger questions.” Peric, as a scholar, feels a responsibility to engage with communities across the country on these broader discussions of energy and climate change considering the current climate (i.e. questions surrounding the Trans Mountain pipeline and climate change). For her, addressing the issues of reformulating relationships to the land means addressing the broader decolonization process, acknowledging that it is still ongoing, and it has been affecting indigenous people for many centuries – and, equally critically, the environment. Peric views humanities and social sciences as playing a critical role in understanding and reformulating this relationship: “I don’t think our roots to solving climate change are technological, I think they are deeply social, and … deeply political”.

The Energy In Society (E I S) research group was formulated specifically to recognize energy transition as a social and political problem. Peric formed this group with her colleagues Dr. Petra Dolata, in history, and Dr. Roberta Rice, in political science, at the University of Calgary. They are interested in creating at the University of Calgary a community of energy scholars – people who look at broader issues of energy at the University of Calgary –, to work on new research collaborations. The University of Calgary is generally seen as a university that does a lot of energy research on the natural sciences. Peric and her colleagues were aware of humanities and social sciences scholars who were doing work on the question of energy futures and transitions but had no forum within which to get together. The E I S research group was created to bring these people together. Over the past couple of years, they’ve been working on collaborative research projects, have run speaker’s series, and public events for the broader Calgary community to bring recognition to the real social effects that energy has on our daily lives. Peric, Dolata, and Rice are interested in these broader issues of science and governance as energy has a very daily, tangible effect on people’s lives. “Generally, there has been a great burden – and also opportunity – put on the natural sciences to be some technological fix … [but] we recognize that there is a massive role for the humanities and social sciences to play here.”

Interview Conducted by Anne Cynthia Kazora

(Human Rights and ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Climate Commons practicum student, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University)

Below are a few recommended readings by Dr. Sabrina Peric:

Coulthard, G. S., 1974 (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cruikshank, J. (2005). Do glaciers listen?: Local knowledge, colonial encounters, and social imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.

California has always had the reputation of being a green state. It has been a leader within the United States for climate change policy and actions, ranging from mandated clean air initiatives to high numbers of veganism. According to the New York Times, state law even requires at least 50% of electricity coming from non carbon-producing sources by 2030. Enter December 2018, when California became the first state to pass legislation requiring new residential buildings to have solar panels.

The California Building Standards Commission unanimously voted to pass the decision which will apply to new homes under 3 stories. The policy will go into effect January 1 of 2020, and is aimed at reducing the ozone-damaging household emissions that come from natural gas and move the state towards a more sustainable future.

Though it may seem like another incredible environmental effort, no change is without criticism. Let’s walk through some of the pros and cons.

One of the largest downsides is initial cost. The move will increase the price of building by an average of $10,000 per home and presumably drive up real estate as well. Unfortunately, this means green homes will be available only to those who can afford the added cost in an already expensive state housing market. In addition, half of the country’s solar panels are in California already, with excess energy being wasted during the day, as other states are not buying it all. California already has one of the highest energy costs in the country, and critics have expressed concern that the initiative will push costs onto non-solar users.

On the other side, though, one must acknowledge that the move is groundbreaking and a tangible, effective way to reduce carbon emissions and support clean energy. Though building and buying costs will increase, it is estimated by the California Energy Commission that the cost savings will be around $19,000 for each home over 30 years. Short-term increase will lead to long-term savings in household bills. Solar panels are actually the cheapest they have ever been right now, and are very accessible to builders as well as owners.

The transition from fossil fuel use to renewable energy sources is a step in the direction scientists are urging the world to move. In a time when we are being flooded with environmental reports and experts urging that immediate action is needed, solar panel mandates seem like a necessary, forward-thinking move. New Jersey, Massachusetts and Washington DC have all considered similar legislation, and spreading energy efficient practices would be good for one of the world’s highest CO2 emitters and most populated countries.

Perhaps it is time for Canada to take a nod from California and up their climate change policy, or introduce some kind of mandated energy efficient practices. With the upcoming federal election in September all eyes will be on Ottawa, and hopefully climate change actions are pushed to the forefront of platforms and debate.

Written by Emma Baker, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Climate Commons practicum student

References:

Bach, N (2018, Dec 6). California becomes 1st state to require solar panels on new homes. Here’s how it will reduce utility costs. Fortune. Retrieved from

Husseini, T. (2018, Dec 6). California approves solar power law for new homes built from 2020. Power Technology. Retrieved from

Penn, I. (2018, May 9). California will require solar power for new homes. The New York Times. Retrieved from

United States Environmental Protection Agency (2015). Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data. Retrieved from

While I have had the pleasure of e-mailing extensively with professor Barbara Leckie, our paths had never crossed in person until last September, when I had the opportunity to come to ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ as a visiting graduate student at the Climate Commons Working Group. Within that context, I organized a series of workshops around the topic of waste and time. My goal was to chart waste through different notions of time, as an attempt to provide an explicit locus for the discussions. Waste stands among the major environmental concerns of our time and grappling with its conceptual challenges provides an important outlook to reckon with the scalar dissonance of climate change. Moreover, the concept of waste moves fluidly between different disciplines which renders understandings of the term profoundly inconsistent from context to context.

In my own research, I am looking at nuclear waste that is stored in for over thousands of years and thus poses unprecedented temporal challenges; in this context, the link between waste and time was an obvious topic for me. But nuclear waste as my initial point of entry to the study of waste tout court turned out to be an unlikely opening wedge after all. For the simple reason that, as I came to realize, most of the scholarship around waste remains largely wedded to a spatial approach, treating waste as an entity that has consequences on the way we think about and organize space; and this, despite the fact that scholarship in waste studies have certainly moved on since Mary Douglas’ influential conceptualization of waste as

Demolition waste (public domain image)

Keeping these initial thoughts in mind, I had certain expectations about the kind of themes that would come up during the discussions, but I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of approaches that emerged – in large part due to the interdisciplinary background of the participants. The meetings were orchestrated around a selection of texts that we navigated through collective discussion: building on recent scholarship from anthropology, science and technology studies and cultural theory. We discovered waste entered the realm of temporality only to become conceptually “scattered” in improbable conversations around ruins, ethics, memory and absence. It became our , to take up Gabrielle Hecht’s relevant expression. Hecht, whose text we discussed during the last session describes interscalar vehicles as empirical objects that simultaneously occupy different political, ethical, epistemological, and affective scales that are usually ‘kept apart’ or that resist being brought together: the scale of deep time and that of human time or, on a more graspable level, the death of an animal after exposure to toxic gasses over a landfill, to the death of an entire ecosystem due to toxic waste.

The temporal ‘discontinuity’ between these scales is a challenge that remains to be addressed and it is precisely this bridging of the tiny and the incommensurable that demands innovative and creative ways of thinking about waste today. What stories could possibly translate such temporal discrepancies? For example, one of the participants, Stephan Sturve, proposed to think of a landfill as a body. Bodies, just like landfills (and deep repositories), leak – and fluids run through them before being expelled, beyond human control – only to enter other material relations in the environment. This discussion was sparked by Myra Hird’s work on the creation of an ethical framework to responsibly deal with waste. Suggesting the notion of an “ethics of indeterminacy,” this term was met with hesitation by some of the participants. They wondered, why not simply speak about uncertainty? How to deal with the uncertainty denoted by the unthinkable timeframes of certain types of waste? Throughout the sessions, it gradually became clear that developing metaphors for our understanding of waste’s temporal effects is a necessary first step to come to grips with, what Joshua Reno, another author, describes as the open-endedness of time and place of waste sites.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (public domain image)

Through Reno’s work, we got to discuss waste sites as interstitial spaces, some temporarily, others permanently, out of circulation, in a state of limbo that has its own time. At the same time, these sites are places of intensive (financial) speculation, an observation that holds true to an even higher extent for the case of nuclear waste. We discussed this theme throughout the last session, where we had the opportunity to watch the documentary Containment, a film about the insidious legacy of the Cold War and transuranic military waste stored at the (WIPP) in New Mexico. The waste is supposed to stay sealed in containers deep underground, although the repository has not been entirely successful in keeping the toxicity isolated from its environment. The WIPP is a site of artistic speculation too, where artists are interested in questioning the idea of burying waste to prevent future humans from digging it out again. In that respect, the film also grappled with some that communicate the environmental hazards to humans for many millennia into the future, functioning as marking systems and thus inviting much-needed discussions on the unthinkably long futures of nuclear matter.

Some of the participants after the visit at the National Gallery (image
courtesy of the author)

Some of us were lucky enough to be able to pursue these conversations outside the classroom, as the workshop resonated with other events on campus, such as the conference . The conference dealt with architecture and waste, or architecture as waste, a topic we also touched on in William Viney’s article, Waste, A Philosophy of Things. Our discussions concluded around a table at the National Gallery of Canada, after a visit to the exhibition . We had mixed feelings about the show linked to the impression of fetishizing that these large scale photographs of extraction and waste sites produced. Covering up the environmental and social violence of these places through subliminal aerial views can be a questionable artistic strategy. In favour of the artists though, the exhibition had enough material to fuel critical discussions. Throughout these three months, the conversations stimulated a fortuitous variety of possible responses to the temporal qualities of waste, and underscored the necessity for interdisciplinary dialogue to navigate the vast spatio-temporal dimensions that encompass our current ecological condition.