Notes

annotation as excess, leaking, gratitude

Epigraphs

Éireann Lorsung, The Century (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2020), 111.

Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018), 93, 62.

Humboldt Industrial Area

City of Minneapolis, “Humboldt Industrial Park Redevelopment Plan,” December 16, 2005, https://www2.minneapolismn.gov/media/content-assets/www2-documents/government/View-Humboldt-Industrial-Park-Redevelopment-Plan.pdf.

Information about the Howe fire and other historical and contextual information is from this city report. I have relied heavily on city reports over the space of this project. They are strange. Sometimes poetic. Worthy of mistrust. In this report, for example, I learned that a creek that ran through this corporate acreage was moved sometime between 1965 and 1971, but by whom and why remains a mystery. What I don’t trust in the reports is the near-universal linguistic gloss of neutrality; land reuse plans in a city with a long history of redlining and white-supremacist violence that don’t discuss this history. The structural racism of legacy pollution, and the ways place is interconnected with community health, is largely absent from the reports. Instead, there’s talk of redevelopment and jobs; borders are drawn; new maps made. The projected future of land use in the area is swaddled in environmental urgency, and premised on the implicit innocence of cleanup. There is hardly ever talk of who redevelopment benefits and who it harms.

Before he illegally installed the solar panels that heat our home, they’d been used to warm a catfish farm.… I remember the solar panels tipped against the tall wood fence in the backyard. Our cat would lengthen his neck on them. Did they really warm our home? Maybe this detail is closer to family myth than truth. All mistakes of memory are my own.

Curtain

Plato, The Republic, translated by Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin Books, 1955), 147–48.

When I went to the crematorium I didn’t expect to be given the choice to look. It was early morning. The sky raw with light. I drove alone. His death and my grieving were new; his funeral plans intensifying; there was much to do. Watching his body transform from flesh to ash would only happen once, here and now, and so to look at this or to look away from it was equally mired in the fraught blurriness of witness. Was watching this happen love or rubbernecking? Later, would describing this watching be spectacle or truth-telling? On that day, I felt the tension of looking completely. My decision to include this moment is a gesture of tenderness for both of us and owes much to Natalie Diaz’s essay “The Quantum Theory of Suffering or Why I Look at the Moon.” In it, Diaz writes: “The quantum theory of suffering is also the quantum theory of tenderness: Yes, writing about my brother is acknowledgement of his suffering, of his humanity. I am measuring his suffering on the page. I am proving my love for him. To acknowledge his existence is one type of tenderness. It is tenderness even for myself.” To acknowledge the existence of us on this day is one form of tenderness, so I offer it.

Natalie Diaz, “The Quantum Theory of Suffering or Why I Look at the Moon,” January 13, 2015, https://pen.org/the-quantum-theory-of-suffering-or-why-i-look-at-the-moon.

Jacques Roubaud, Some Thing Black (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999), 73–74.

Naja Marie Aidt’s writing on Roubaud’s work and on “death’s heavy unbearable stillness” in her memoir is stunning and was instrumental in early drafts. Roubaud and Aidt write on death and the living in lyric, moving fragments.

Naja Marie Aidt, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2019), 25.

The Soo Line Dump

Rebecca Altman, “On What We Bury,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 85–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isu039.

I walk the dump with Rebecca Altman’s scholarship on body burden in mind. The earth is not static or fixed, Altman observes, but it “is flux and system and process … which means nothing stays embodied or buried forever.” While not a direct quote, my inclusion of thought connected to imperfect sites of burial and the shifting activity of the earth owes much to Altman’s writing and thinking throughout her essay “On What We Bury.”

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, “Health Consultation: Soo Line Shoreham Yard East Side,” September 25, 2007, 6, https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/hac/pha/soolineshorehamyard/soolineshorehamhc92507.pdf.

Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge (New York: Vintage, 1992), 219; 288–89.

I paraphrase Terry Tempest Williams. Here’s the full quote from Refuge: “Death is no longer what I imagined it to be. Death is earthy like birth, like sex, full of smells and sounds and bodily fluids. It is a confluence of evanescence and flesh” (219). Also from Refuge: “The women couldn’t bear it any longer” and the reference to “the contaminated country” and the quote “We are mothers and we have come to reclaim the desert for our children” (288–89).

Shoreham Yards, Minneapolis, Minnesota, © U-Spatial.

Live Map

This piece relied on the EPA’s “National Priorities List and Superfund Alternative Approach Sites” and “Superfund National Priorities List (NPL) Where You Live Map,” accessed August 10, 2021, https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-you-live.

On Openings

Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat (Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2020).

Ghríofa inspired me to imagine the maternal thefts a body performs in pregnancy. While not a direct quote, I reference A Ghost in the Throat when I write, “I will learn that if a woman cannot consume sufficient calcium, her body will take from her bones to give to her infant.”

Here are her words that inspired mine:

“If she cannot consume sufficient calcium, for example, that mineral will rise up from deep within her bones and donate itself to her infant on her behalf, leaving her own system in deficiency. Sometimes a female body serves another by effecting a theft upon itself” (35).

Rebecca Altman, “On What We Bury,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 85–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isu039.

My writing about body burden owes much to Altman’s “On What We Bury.” Here and elsewhere, I think of Altman’s important contributions to this discourse. We are both mothers, and this ecological history is tied to our children’s lives too. Altman: “I have passed it along against my will. Such is the legacy of our time: heavy metals, pesticides, and some classes of long-lived pollutants that did not exist when our grandmothers swam in the interior oceans of our great-grandmothers’ wombs.”

Anders C. Erickson and Laura Arbour, “The Shared Pathoetiological Effects of Particulate Air Pollution and the Social Environment on Fetal-Placental Development,” Journal of Environmental and Public Health, November 26, 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4276595.

I reference this article when I write about the intermediary environment between mother and fetus.

Returning

Anne Boyer, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (New York: Picador, 2020), 30, 131.

Boyer’s brilliant feminist critique of biomedicine and capitalism is deeply instructive. I return to her work often.

I wish to include more of her words here to honor them: “Cancer is not a sameness eternalized in an ahistorical body, moving through a trajectory of advancing technological progress. No patient is sovereign, and every sufferer, both those marked by cancer treatment and those marked by the exhausting routine of caring for those with cancer, is also marked by our historical particulars, constellated in a set of social and economic relations” (30). Boyer, again: “The history of illness is not the history of medicine—it is the history of the world—and the history of having a body could well be the history of what is done to most of us in the interest of the few” (30).

Anna Bierbrauer, “Lost to Progress: Upper Mississippi River and Minneapolis Parks Development,” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 7 (Summer 2017), https://editions.lib.umn.edu/openrivers/article/lost-to-progress.

In 1872 Horace W. S. Cleveland advocated for a Minneapolis city park system that preserved open space for public use but left this stretch of river out.… Historical information about the industrial stretch of the river and information on the rate of asthma-related hospitalizations relies on Bierbrauer.

On asthma, here are Bierbrauer’s words that inspired mine: “Given that North Minneapolis suffers from the highest rate of asthma-related hospitalizations and the highest concentration of lead poisoning cases, these air quality issues could not be ignored. One company—a metal recycling plant was found in violation of their permit and, after a lengthy legal battle, will be moving off of the river in 2019 and has paid the City of Minneapolis $600,000 for community health programs. The soon-to-be shuttered plant is one of many contributors to poor air quality in the area, but the number of MPCA-monitored sites along the river in North Minneapolis places a large burden on nearby residences.”

Bierbrauer importantly observes that it is the Upper River communities of today who are driving restoration conversations. Community members who “have historically been underserved, underrepresented, and denied riverfront access making conversations about equity, environmental justice, and transparency crucial and critical planning topics.”

EPA, “OLEM Programs Address Contamination at Superfund, Brownfields and RCRA Sites Near 61 Percent of the U.S. Population,” October 2021, https://www.epa.gov/cleanups/olem-programs-address-contamination-superfund-brownfields-and-rcra-sites-near-61-percent.

G. P. Jacob, “The Orientation,” Money Power Land Solidarity, August 22, 2019, https://moneypowerlandsolidarity.libsyn.com/size/5/?search=the+orientation.

I reference “The Orientation,” episode 1 of the podcast Money Power Land Solidarity. Jacob’s podcast covers “issues of land, economic development, politics, race, class and more, all from a working-class left perspective,” and has been hugely influential and meaningful to me. I quote and paraphrase some of Jacob’s reflections. “North Minneapolis is one of the hearts of the Black community in Minnesota” is quoted. Later, when I write, “It was a place where people experienced poverty and oppression in Minneapolis” I quote Jacob, whose words are, “You could see that people experienced poverty and oppression in Minneapolis.”

Terri Hansen, “Kill the Land, Kill the People: There Are 532 Super-fund Sites in Indian Country!” Indian Country Today, September 13, 2018, https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/kill-the-land-kill-the-people-there-are-532-superfund-sites-in-indian-country.

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 8.

When I write, “I held this place, this maroon-trimmed house, this block of complexity and inequity, in my body in the form of memory, and in the form of industrial particulates that inhabited me epidemiologically, and in the form of grief,” I echo Rob Nixon’s observation that “if the past of slow violence is never past, so too the post is never fully post: industrial particulates and effluents live on in the environmental elements we inhabit and in our very bodies, which epidemiologically and ecologically are never our simple contemporaries” (8).

Teaching Hospital

Rebecca Altman, “Upriver: A Researcher Traces the Legacy of Plastics,” Orion Magazine, June 2, 2021, https://orionmagazine.org/article/upriver.

Keisha Brown

Katherine Webb-Hehn, “Dangerous Conditions May Exist in This Area,” SCALAWAG, June 24, 2019, https://scalawagmagazine.org/2019/06/birmingham-epa-superfund.

Katherine Webb-Hehn, “For Black North Birmingham Residents Fighting Toxic Pollution, Staying Home Isn’t Safe,” SCALAWAG, April 20, 2020, https://scalawagmagazine.org/2020/04/qa-alabama-epa-superfund-covid-19.

Quoted material, as well as some of the paraphrased descriptions of Brown’s neighborhood and childhood experiences of asthma, is excerpted from the first article. The second provided more context. With thanks and gratitude to Katherine Webb-Hehn’s reporting.

Kathryn Nuernberger, The Witch of Eye (Lexington, KY: Sarabande Books, 2021), 75.

Harriman Park, Birmingham, Alabama, © U-Spatial.

From: Keisha Brown

A note on my interview methods: All testimonies began as interviews, using a tape recorder. I then cocreated an essay using the interviewee’s own language and rearranging our conversation for flow. I have redacted my questions. Please do not misinterpret these conversations as either persona or a transcript. In all “From” works, multiple versions were discussed and edited, including the final draft. Each interview was a collaboration. Nothing shared here is printed without the explicit consent of the people involved.

All accompanying essays that are narrated from my perspective, in which I am writing about another’s life or our time together significantly, were read by those who appear in the works. No representation was singlehanded.

In select instances, names have been changed out of respect and to honor privacy.

I want to thank Keisha Brown for her generosity, and for sharing her story. The last time we spoke on the phone we got on the topic of hope. Keisha shared the following, included here with her permission:

What gives me hope? I’ve learned how to be humble. Here, we see people transforming into something that they are not. People deteriorating because they’re sick with cancer or sick with something. It’s awful to see that. But we’re still here. You reached out to me. The truth had to be told. It’s like soup—all of us talking. You might bring the corn, someone else might bring the tomatoes. Everybody brings something and we put it together so that we can eat. What I’m saying is, we are the people who are out here living, who are putting everything together for ourselves.

Keisha Brown—in her unwavering generosity—asked me to include the following thanks as well:

I would like to thank God for the opportunity to tell my story here. I speak not only for my community but for communities all over affected by similar pollution and environmental injustices. I speak up and out against the injustice we face here, daily. All of us. I speak up for the lives of the people among us who suffer the most. I’m glad I was given the opportunity by Kathryn Savage and Coffee House Press to tell my story in this book.

Some UN Human Rights language and policy is paraphrased and discussed in this testimony. United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, “USA: Environmental Racism in ‘Cancer Alley’ Must End—Experts,” March 2, 2021, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/03/usa-environmental-racism-cancer-alley-must-end-experts?LangID=E&NewsID=26824.

Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018), 256–57.

In Elizabeth Rush’s book Rising, about rising sea levels and climate change, she asks, “How to tell this story so that it becomes more than elegy alone, both a record of these uncanny times and also a rallying cry?” It is a question I found myself asking too. When I knew that community members’ varied experiences living on toxic lands were the truest way to tell this story of place, history, environmental injustice, grief, and health, I drew inspiration from Rising, a book that inspired my approach to including community testimony here. I am grateful to Rush and Rising for mapping the way from the personal out into the collective.

I am above all else grateful to Keisha, Rebecca, and Gudrun, whose voices are here beside my own. Thank you for the gift of friendship in this work.

Rothstein, Jerome Henry, Artist, and Sponsor Federal Theatre Project, Don’t fear cancer fight it! / JR. New York, None. [NYC: works progress administration federal art project, between 1936 and 1938]. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/98518521.

Exposure

S. Lochlann Jain, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (Oakland: University of California Press, 2013), 184–87.

The title “Exposure” is taken from a subheading in Jain’s Malignant. Duncan’s death is described on page 201.

In the lyric tradition of a work being written “after,” this piece is written after Jain’s chapter entitled “The Fallout,” as it was deeply inspired by their scholarship throughout sections of Malignant on legacy and environmental contamination. S. Lochlann Jain is brilliant. I quote and paraphrase Jain throughout “Exposure.” I wish to include the original text paraphrased in my essay in full here: “Framing survivorship as a personal accomplishment further separates cancer causation from its manifestations. Cancer becomes a passively occurring hurdle to be surmounted by resolve rather than the direct effect of a violent environment, as incongruous a substitution as a lisp versus a gunshot wound.” I have learned so much from them and I am deeply grateful for and indebted to their work.

Suzanne H. Reuben, “President’s Cancer Panel 2008–2009 Report on Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now,” Department of Health and Human Services April 2010, https://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/advisory/pcp/annualreports/pcp08-09rpt/pcp_report_08-09_508.pdf.

Writing on paranoia and also on exploring “some of cancer’s dissonances,” Jain references a 2008–2009 President’s Cancer Panel Report on the lack of national policy attention being paid to the public health risks posed by environmental carcinogen exposure (through industrial, military, and agricultural practices). Regarding the need for a comprehensive policy agenda addressing the impact of environmental contaminants on human health, the authors of the report state, “Environmental health, including cancer risk, has been largely excluded from overall national policy on protecting and improving the health of Americans. It is more effective to prevent disease than to treat it, but cancer prevention efforts have focused narrowly on smoking, other lifestyle behaviors, and chemopreventive interventions. Scientific evidence on individual and multiple environmental exposure effects on disease initiation and outcomes, and consequent health system and societal costs, are not being adequately integrated into national policy decisions and strategies for disease prevention, health care access, and health system reform.” As Jain observes, though “less than 5 percent of cancer diagnoses can be linked directly to inherited genetic traits,” because medical cancer research has long looked to genetics, questioning the environment’s role in health can lead one to feel a bit paranoid, and outside the script of cancer.

Cancer Treatment Centers of America, “Stomach Cancer Stages,” March 9, 2022, https://www.cancercenter.com/cancer-types/stomach-cancer/stages.

Anne Boyer, The Undying (New York: Picador, 2020), 19.

The line “overworked but intoxicated by his own working” quotes Anne Boyer. Her words: “We were overworked, but intoxicated by our own working.”

History.com Editors, “Dancer Isadora Duncan Is Killed in Car Accident,” September 11, 2019,https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dancer-isadora-duncan-is-killed-in-car-accident.

View of a neighborhood home from the Humboldt Yard industrialsite © Magali Pijpers.

Toxic Sites

Mel Y. Chen, “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, June 1, 2011, 280, https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-abstract/17/2-3/265/34745/Toxic-Animacies-Inanimate-Affections.

In the summer of 2007, panic about lead paint on Thomas the Tank Engine–brand children’s toys, manufactured in China, swept the U.S. media. Fear over the presence of lead paint used militaristic language; the toys were racialized. “Just as the presumed agents of ‘terror’ have become racialized as Arab and/or Muslim after 9/11, so too has lead itself become recently racialized as Chinese.” The subject of harm was often depicted as a middle-class young white boy playing with a train. “For the toy painters,” Chen observes, “the conditions of labor needed to be made just visible enough to facilitate the territorial/state/racial assignation of blame, but not enough to generally extend the ring of sympathetic concern around the workers themselves.” While toxic load may be useful in understanding environmental harm done to bodies, Chen critiques the by and large Global North theory because it can be weaponized to extend environmental racism in a culture mired in affective language about “invasive threat.” As Chen notes, “metaphorical luxuries can have deadly consequences.”

Canadian Pacific Shoreham Yard Cedar Service Site, Minneapolis, Minnesota, “Cleanup Progress Update: 15th Issue,” December 2019, https://www.cpr.ca/en/community-site/shoreham-repositoryDocuments/2019%20Final%20Cedar%20Service20Site%20Annual%20Newsletter%20-%20Approved%20by%20MDA_65845.pdf.

Canadian Pacific and Ashland, Inc., “East Side Shoreham Yard Site Update,” July 2019, https://www.cpr.ca/en/community-siteshoreham-repository/Documents/July%202019%20Final%20East%20Side%20Newsletter%20-%20East%20Side_65924.pdf.

Mailer information and data are summarized from the Canadian Pacific Shoreham Yard facility public document repository web-site. Information on Shoreham Yards draws from various public documents archived in the repository.

Julia Adeney Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value.” American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (2014): 1587–607, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43698892.

Information about the permeable relationship between bodies and places is from Thomas’s article, and page 1,601 is quoted and paraphrased. “Our chemical environment is us … everywhere and with everyone. The old idea that there was a barrier between ‘the body’ and ‘the environment’ that could be policed by governments reining in corporations or by individuals making healthy choices no longer pertains as we have come to understand the interpenetrability of bodies and environments.”

Safe

The name of the Canadian Pacific representative has been changed.

A Series of Symptoms

Camille T. Dungy, “Is All Writing Environmental Writing?” Georgia Review, April 8, 2020, https://thegeorgiareview.com/posts/is-all-writing-environmental-writing.

Dungy’s work is enormously instructive to me, and in the space of this essay, I’ve attempted to meld and draw inspiration from her ecopoetic “concerns of the human world (politics, history, commerce)” with “those of the many life forms with which humans share this planet.” Not to do so, echoing Dungy, is “disastrous hubris and folly.”

“Shoreham VOC Leak” and “Information on Remedial Activities at Shoreham Yard.” I reference the following email exchange, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.cpr.ca/en/community-site/shoreham-repository/Documents/September%202019%20Release%20at%20RW07-39-SP%20-%20Notifications%20and%20Followup%20Reports%20to%20MPCA_East%20Side_65926.pdf.

Miguel Otárola, “Canadian Pacific Takes Rail Yard Off Market, Catching Minneapolis Officials by Surprise,” Star Tribune, December 2, 2019, https://www.startribune.com/with-rail-yard-expansion-minneapolis-worries-about-uneven-relationship-with-canadian-pacific/565669672/.

Historical and contextual information about Shoreham Yards is paraphrased from this article.

Kathryn Savage, “A Charged Stillness: Tema Stauffer Interviewed by Kathryn Savage,” BOMB, January 13, 2021, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/a-charged-stillness-tema-stauffer-interviewed.

Greta Gaard, Critical Ecofeminism (Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2019), 143.

Yangho Kim and Jae Woo Kim, “Toxic Encephalopathy,” Safety and Health at Work 3, no. 4 (December 2012), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3521923.

The Long Night

Michel Huneault, The Long Night of Mégantic (Amsterdam: Schilt, 2016).

The title of this piece is after Michel Huneault’s book of photography and transcribed Lac-Mégantic community testimony. In the years after the crash that devastated the town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, Huneault spent time with the community impacted by the disaster, bearing witness to their stories. The disaster in Lac-Mégantic evidences the profound consequences of an escalation of seemingly harmless actions. Benign escalation was on my mind as I read about the tragedy that befell Lac-and absorbed Huneault’s documenting of the community’s deeply personal suffering. I am writing this during a week when, in the United States, there have been seven mass shootings in seven days. The stories in Huneault’s book are about personal grief in a place transformed after becoming a site of collective suffering. The events in Lac-Mégantic show the myriad ways private grief and public grief and the manifestations of tragedy in individuals, families, and communities both intersect and depart.

Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, “Post Mégantic” by Michel Huneault, accessed November 20, 2021, https://documentarystudies.duke.edu/exhibits/post-m%C3%A9gantic.

Information about the stores in downtown being opened for eight hours comes from the above source.

Jessica Murphy, “Lac-Megantic: The Runaway Train That Destroyed a Town,” BBC.com, January January 19, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42548824.

Christopher Curtis, “Lac-Mégantic: Growing Up after a Tragedy,” Montreal Gazette, July 6, 2018, https://montrealgazette.com/news/lac-megantic-growing-up-after-a-tragedy.

NCPR News, “NCPR Intern Finds Memory and Grief Just Outside Lac-Megantic Disaster Zone,” July 7, 2014, https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/25348/20140707/ncpr-intern-finds-memory-and-grief-just-outside-lac-megantic-disaster-zone.

Factual and contextual information about Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, and the derailment disaster comes from the preceding sources. Specific data about community mental health consequences is from the Montreal Gazette. Further information about how the town collectively grieved can be found via the NCPR source.

Naja Marie Aidt, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2019), 27.

“A night of terror, a cruel night.” This is a line after and inspired by Aidt, who wrote: “A night full of terror, a night, a cruel, cruel.”

T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature (London: Sternberg Press, 2016), 101–106.

I was introduced to the installation Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium and the work of Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway through T. J. Demos’s book. I quote and paraphrase Demos in my writing on Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium. The paragraph that introduces the night sky installation recalls, quotes, and is deeply informed by his words. In Demos’s chapter “The Post-natural Condition,” he writes about Autogena and Portway’s planetary ecosystem that is intentionally “devoid of natural life.” Demos also writes about the history of marketplace trading on “futures that bet on the outcome of regional temperature fluctuations, rainfall intensity, drought conditions, and hurricanes.” He writes, “These mechanisms amounted to financial strategies for corporations to minimize risk to their operations and maximize economic returns, even though this trading is mostly done by speculators without concern for economic or ecological sustainability” (102). Demos presents a thoughtful and nuanced discussion and analysis of artists who are imagining alternative futures to the one trading futures anticipate. Alternative futures that are now “more necessary than ever.”

bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 1990), 87–88.

The name of the community garden manager has been changed.

Mary Siisip Geniusz, Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 190–91.

I am including reference to Anishinaabe botanical teachings published for a general readership to honor the Anishinaabe cultural practices that I continuously learn from in my own relationship with Indigenous lands and in planting. I don’t attempt to appropriate Indigenous knowledges but rather to honor the scholars and teachings that shape and inform my thinking. Of the phenomenal Indigenous scholars leading the way in contemporary knowledge production on legacy contamination and environmental actions needed now, I am grateful to Shawn Wilson’s Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods;

Max Liboiron’s Pollution Is Colonialism; and Elizabeth Hoover’s The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community. I have also drawn inspiration from Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism by Jodi Melamed in my decision to include Anishinaabe botanical teachings in this essay. Melamed draws a useful distinction in her own work, which centers Indigenous scholars. She is not Indigenous and writes “not to lay claim to a field of knowledge or to make pronouncements” that are not hers to make but rather “out of the belief that learning from communally conferred tribal knowledges … offers strong opposition to some of the most deadly articulations of power and knowledge at work on the planet” (201–202).

Office of Public Affairs, “Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Accident,” Backgrounder, March 1, 2022, https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/chernobyl-bg.html.

Serge Schmemann. “The Talk of Moscow; Chernobyl Fallout: Apocalyptic Tale and Fear,” July 26, 1986, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/26/world/the-talk-of-moscow-chernobyl-fallout-apocalyptic-tale-and-fear.html.

Dredge

Wudan Yan, “Superfund, Meet Super Plants,” New York Times, April 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/superfund-plant-microbiome.html.

Sharon L. Doty, “Using Natural Microbial Symbionts of Trees to Remove Pollutants, Increase Plant Growth, and Produce Biochemicals,” University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, November 9, 2013, https://depts.washington.edu/envaplab/documents/PublicWebsite_DotyLabOverview.pdf.

Information about the poplars and the San Francisco Superfund was drawn from the article by Wudan Yan, and further information about poplars and contaminants came from Sharon L. Doty’s research.

In my work I paraphrase Yan, who writes, “An hour’s drive south of San Francisco, a stand of several hundred poplars grows in a Y-shape—a rather unusual sight wedged between two baseball fields. The trees were planted in 2013 to suck carcinogens out of a 1,500-acre Superfund site contaminated by the U.S. Navy, which disposed of toxic waste generated from developing military aircraft into ponds and landfills.”

Illustration of Shoreham Yards © Gudrun Lock.

From: Gudrun Lock

The name of the film referenced is Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees. It centers the life of Diana Beresford-Kroeger, scientist, conservationist, and author, and was directed by Jeffrey McKay, October 21, 2016.

Thank you, Gudrun, for your friendship and all the good conversations.

Decay Theory

Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, “Five Questions with Harrison Apple,” September 15, 2020, https://www.library.cmu.edu/about/news/2020-09/libraries-speakers-series-five-questions-harrison-apple.

The archive lecture was given by Harrison Apple. My lecture notes are paraphrased.

In the Hospital

Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, a Tale of Love & Fallout (London: Dey Street Books, 2015), 132.

In the science of decay.… In Redniss’s stunning book about Marie Curie’s life and work I read: “Radioactive elements are unstable. They undergo spontaneous decay. That is, the unstable nucleus emits energetic particles and radiation, thus transforming into an isotope of a different element. This process continues until a stable form is reached. ‘Half-life’ is the amount of time it takes for half of the nuclei of a given sample to undergo radioactive decay. The primary element is called the ‘parent’; the product is referred to as the ‘daughter’ element.” The year he died, my father was sixty-six. I was thirty-three.

Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God (New York: New Directions Books, 2005), 2.

Halldoór Kjartansson and Ari Trausti Guðmundsson, Living Earth: Outline of the Geology of Iceland (Reykjavík: Mál og Menning, 2015), 91.

Ronnie Greene, “From Homemaker to Hell-Raiser in Love Canal,” Investigating Inequality, Center for Public Integrity, April 16, 2013, https://publicintegrity.org/environment/from-homemaker-to-hell-raiser-in-love-canal.

Information about Love Canal and Lois Gibbs is paraphrased and quoted from this article.

EPA, CERCLA Section 103: Release Notification, accessed April 3, 2022, https://www.epa.gov/epcra/definition-release.

The CERCLA “release” definition is sourced from this webpage.

David Bressan, “How Volcanoes Became a Symbol for Revolution,” Scientific American, February 19, 2012, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/history-of-geology/how-volcanoes-became-a-symbol-for-revolution/.

Information about the social and political history of volcanoes as metaphors is from this source.

Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017), 152–53.

City of Minneapolis, “Humboldt Industrial Park Redevelopment Plan,” December 16, 2005, https://www2.minneapolismn.gov/media/content-assets/www2-documents/government/View-Humboldt-Industria-Park-Redevelopment-Plan.pdf.

After the Howe chemical fire, sediment was trucked off as waste…. Information about the Howe fire and the response taken is sourced from this city report.

“The GAF Shingles Factory with Nancy Przymus,” Money Power Land Solidarity, September 17, 2019, http://moneypowerlandsolidarity.libsyn.com/the-gaf-shingles-factory-w-nancy-przymus.

Bottineau Neighborhood Association, “A Census Tract-Level Examination of Cancer in Two United States Cities, August 2017, https://bottineauneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Census-Tract-level-Exmination-of-Cancer-and-Asthma-in-two-U.S-Cities_FINAL.pdf.

“Cancer-Death Maps Reveal Nationwide Patterns,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 20, 1975.

I quoted and paraphrased information from this 1975 U.S. Public Health Study.

Arthur J. Snider, “Air We Breathe to Live May Shorten Our Lives,” Chicago Daily News Service, December 23, 1960.

The 1960 public health study information is sourced from this article by Snider.

Anne Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), 3.

Nic Jelinski, University of Minnesota Department of Soil, Water, and Climate, in conversation with the author, February 5, 2019.

The soil facts I’ve included are taken from my conversations with Nic Jelinski.

“Outside Test of Plant’s Emissions Urged,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 12, 1977.

I’ve quoted and paraphrased information about the 1977 lawsuit from this article.

Don Morrison, “Irate Home Owners Hold Meeting to Protest Railroad Switching Noise,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, June 21, 1956.

Quoted and paraphrased information about the 1956 meeting is from Morrison’s article.

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (London: Penguin Books, 2015), 170.

Bill Bryson, Body: A Guide for Occupants (New York: Doubleday, 2019), 335.

The information I include about fear of earthquakes over cancer is sourced from Bryson’s book.

Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2004), 11.

The information about Gertrude Stein’s stomach cancer, as well as Stein’s quote, is sourced from Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. In it she writes, “Why do people waste away? The fact that cancer describes a malignant mass of tissue that pulls all nutrients from the body surprises the body first, then the owner of the body, and finally those who look on. Or as Gertrude Stein, who herself died of stomach cancer, points out, ‘if everybody did not die the earth would be all covered over and I, I as I, could not have come to be and try as much as I can try not to be I, nevertheless, I would mind that so much, as much as anything, so then why not die, and yet and again not a thing, not a thing to be liking, not a thing.’”

Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House, 1945), 23–24.

Janet Malcolm, “Gertrude Stein’s War,” The New Yorker, May 25, 2003, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/06/02/gertrude-steins-war.

USGS, “Oklahoma Has Had a Surge of Earthquakes since 2009. Are They Due to Fracking?,” accessed June 24, 2021, https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/oklahoma-has-had-a-surge-earthquakes-2009-are-they-due-fracking.

This USGS article is one source I reference for information about earthquakes in states where fracking occurs.

Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council, “Regulations and Exemptions,” accessed June 24, 2021, https://www.watershedcouncil.org/hydraulic-fracturing---regulations-and-exemptions.html.

The Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council source is one I reference for information about hydraulic fracturing under U.S. federal law.

Jon Hamilton, “Town’s Effort to Link Fracking and Illness Falls Short,” All Things Considered, May 16, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/05/16/152204584/towns-effort-to-link-fracking-and-illness-falls-short.

I quote and reference Hamilton’s story in my writing about the people of Dish, Texas.

“Ground glass,” Wikipedia, accessed November 13, 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_glass.

Kathryn Savage, “On Land,” Coffee House Press In the Stacks, August 28, 2019, https://coffeehousepress.org/blogs/chp-in-the-stacks/in-the-stacks-with-kathryn-savage-on-land.

I incorporate elements of an earlier essay on similar topics, in particular the included references to the ways that chemotherapy interacts with the smell of a person’s skin.

Anne Boyer, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (New York: Picador, 2020), 49.

Claudius Conrad and James W. Fleshman Jr., eds., Minimally Invasive Oncologic Surgery, Part 1, Surgical Oncology Clinics of North America 28, no. 1 (January 2019): xv–xvii, https://www.surgonc.theclinics.com/article/S1055-3207(18)30685-9/pdf.

The quote by Celsus is taken from this source.

On Tenderness

A friend of mine told me this, the story about the rail yard worker and the owl. It’s anecdotal knowledge and fair to say that, as such, it can’t be proven. Maybe I’m remembering some of the details wrong. As can happen with memory, maybe I’ve remembered what I want to be true—that such small moments of tenderness do take place at industrial sites, between people and animals.

Psychogeography

Andrew S. Mathews, “What Remains,” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), G143–G153.

a man in Monti Pisani, Italy, who walks chestnut forests that lie in ruin due to a long-running nut industry.… Information about Mathews and Monti Pisani, as well as quotes, are from Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.

Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 20–21.

“It would be nice, ideal even, if we didn’t have to subdivide by gender”.… Elkin goes on to write, “but these narratives of walking repeatedly leave out a woman’s experience.” I found my way to Elkin’s thoughtful and expansive scholarship on walking in reading Aminatta Forna’s essay “Power Walking” in her collection The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion (New York: Grove Press, 2021).

Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6.

Tuan writes, “If we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.”

May-lee Chai, Trespass: Ecotone Essayists Beyond the Boundaries of Place, Identity, and Feminism (Wilmington, NC: Lookout Books, 2019), xi–xvi.

Chai writes, “Even without access to literacy, women have sung their stories, woven them into cloth, stitched them into quilts, embroidered them into paj ndau, danced them in ceremonies, chanted them alone and in groups. Women in various cultures have invented their own forms of writing. Some archeologists now believe that the oldest known cave paintings were made by women, based on analysis of handprints on the walls.

“We have trespassed throughout history so that our minds could be free and so that our stories could be told.”

Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 2010), 226.

The world as body; the body as world.… Denis Wood, on Susanne Slavick’s visual and map art work, writes, “Over the years her work has evolved from aerial views of invented topographies, through the manipulation of graticules popularized by 16th-and 17th-century mapmakers (Slavick is especially attracted to the cordiform maps of Mercator and Waldseemüller that enable her to allude to the body, and so to the world as body and the body as world), to work influenced by Gulf War battle plans” (226). I quote and paraphrase Wood in my work.

Bombweed

Rebecca Altman, “On What We Bury,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 85–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isu039.

At the garden, I get to thinking about all that fills dark wombs of the earth.… I wish to quote at length from Altman—who has been hugely instrumental to my thinking on burial and seeding, here and elsewhere—who writes,

I get to thinking how similar the acts of burial and planting are, and what they reflect about our relationship with the Earth and with each other. We open the Earth and place into it seed. We place into it our deceased beloved. We ask the Earth to take what we bury and to give us the solace that comes from cyclical conversion of dormancy and death into transformation or new life. And yet, we also open the Earth and bury what we’ve wasted, or what we want to hide, and then bury the thought of it. With our landfills, and our mines backfilled with tailings, our deep injection wells, our caverns of radioactive waste, our faith placed in underground reservoirs of sequestered carbon, we ask the Earth to hold our waste when the Earth isn’t static or fixed. It is flux and system and process. There are things that cannot be contained, like glass shards or radioactivity or grief. What I am grappling with here is how we came to believe that certain things we bury could remain outside the cycle of life, or that they would stay where we put them.

“All that fills the dark wombs of the earth” is inspired by Altman’s scholarship throughout her essay.

In Crescent Junction, plans are still being made as if stasis should be expected.… Altman writes, on the Paradox Basin and the arches in Arches National Park, “These stone monoliths, with their windows and hollowed arches and boulders balanced atop spires, were created by incremental acts of wind and water, and by a restive Earth, forever shifting underneath.”

Lindsey Dillon, “Race, Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard,” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, October 23, 2014, https://discardstudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/anti12009_ev3.pdf.

On the persistence of historic erasure in contemporary brown-field redevelopment projects, Dillon writes, “This dominant narrative of an inevitable tide of progress imagines a break with the neighborhood’s industrial past, even as hazardous waste endures as a reality for many in the present.” Dillon: “For William Jones, who lives in Hunters View and has for decades watched over the old naval base, including the recent, slow process of brownfield remediation, the shipyard is a site of violence and sometimes death. … What William described to me was an experience of being left to waste: exposed to the material forms of waste—without sufficient knowledge of or protection from its dangers—and left, more broadly, or neglected, by the state in ways that have manifested in the wasting of human lives through health problems and premature death.”

Connective tissue between present and past.… Dillon’s scholarship explores “connective tissue” between present and past, and waste and space. She writes,

And yet digging up E-2 [a Superfund within the sprawl of brownfields in Bayview-Hunters Point] would also mean another kind of redistribution—that of an even greater amount of contaminated soil from the shipyard to a low-level nuclear waste facility in the desert lands of Tooele County, Utah, near the Skull Valley Goshute reservation. The Skull Valley Goshute tribe already lives with the effects of the Dugway Proving Grounds, the Tooele County Army Depot (the site of the world’s largest nerve gas incinerators) and MagCorp—a magnesium production plant which emits chlorine gas (Jeffries 2007). Even without the removal/ displacement of E-2, thousands of truckloads of soil from the shipyard have, in the past few years, been deposited in Tooele County. In short, brownfield redevelopment—now a generalized urban strategy—represents a new challenge for the environmental justice movement, in terms of thinking through what justice might mean in such circumstances where the toxic by-products of twentieth century industrialization must ultimately be confronted and lived with by humans and other creatures at some time and place. Here, the concept of waste formations attempts to bring emerging theoretical approaches on waste together with ideas of environmental justice in a way that recognizes these new socio-ecological problems of the twenty-first century.

Her scholarship explores ways of thinking less in terms of a return to “pristine nature” but instead, encourages the imagining of “a new, hybrid form of post-industrial nature emerging in and through the ruins of an industrial past.”

Clarence Hightower, “Quindaro, Kansas, A Symbol of American Urban Decline,” Minnesota Spokesman Recorder, August 31, 2016, https://spokesman-recorder.com/2016/08/31/quindaro-kansas-symbol-american-urban-decline.

Cut off from the rest of Kansas City by the path of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, the Missouri River, and interstate highways.… I quote and paraphrase Hightower, who writes,

The Quindaro neighborhood is one of the most industrially polluted places in America, with the local coal-fired power plant directly causing a multitude of illnesses and even deaths each year. This is without a doubt a cruel and disheartening fate for such a historically significant and once proud place. … America’s communities require dialogue, empathy and reconciliation. … So, where do we begin?”

Quindaro’s geographic location and its placing on the historic register quotes and summarizes Hightower.

Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), 32–41.

Some strangers, the same sad world.… this is a Boyer quote (31).

Kansas City–based writer Anne Boyer observes.… Boyer writes, “There is a problem for a poet who lives in a city like this. There is, along with the brutality, the aesthetic allure of ruins and the long Western poetic tradition of admiring them. Like many “ruined” Midwestern cities, there is the problem of “art” in Kansas City, and of artists and gentrifiers and lifestyle. It is a problem that exists precisely because of the aesthetic allure of a city like this, and its cheap space and cheap lawlessness: these vacancies created by white supremacy and capital” (39).

Shadow Mountain

Kelly Bostian, “It Used to House a Zinc Smelter. Now the Collinsville Superfund Site Houses Rescued Honeybees,” Tulsa World, July 31, 2019, https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/it-used-to-house-a-zinc-smelter-now-the-collinsville-superfund-site-houses-rescued-honeybees/article_2f8ea6d8-d0e9-501a-810c-3407f0a51ec8.html.

EPA, “EPA Celebrates 20 Years of Superfund Redevelopment; Recognizes Restored Site in Collinsville, Okla., for Reuse as Honeybee Habitat,” July 31, 2019, https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-celebrates-20-years-superfund-redevelopment-recognizes-restored-site-collinsville.

Information about the Collinsville smelter comes from the two sources above.

Patricia Shannon, “This Pretty Orchid Looks Just Like a Bumble Bee (And It Helps Attract Them, Too!),” Southern Living, accessed November 15, 2021, https://www.southernliving.com/garden/flowers/bee-orchid.

Nicholas Shapiro, “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime,” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 3 (2015): 368–93, https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca30.3.02.

I quote and paraphrase Shapiro’s scholarship throughout this essay. Shapiro observes, “Bodies uncover invisible toxins with their wounding” (384). His work on bodily attunement to environmental and domestic toxicants positions itself as “the beginning of a confrontation, not its resolution” (381). Shapiro writes, “If bodily reasoning is the dynamic process through which knowledge of individual spaces of chronic exposure is somatically attained, the chemical sublime is the accrual of bodily reasoning to the point of articulating the patterned practices and infrastructures that distribute pockets of exposure across space. It is the traversing of a threshold of chemical awareness whereby the irritations of one’s immediate environment become agitations to apprehend and attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructures” (380).

Éireann Lorsung, The Century (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2020), 6.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, eds., “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene,” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), M4.

Property Relations

Bertolt Brecht, “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties,” translated by Richard Winston, in Civil Liberties and the Arts: Selections from Twice a Year, 1938–48, edited by William Wasserstrom (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1964), 295.

The title “Property Relations” and the Brecht quote are both taken from this source.

“Saint Germaine Cousin,” Wikipedia, accessed November 14, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_Cousin.

Marguerite Mills, “Exodus: Living and Leaving the North Side,” May 22, 2020, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/695d1dcd10194addb331eebc5a21de73.

The phrase “performances of white violence” quotes Marguerite Mills’s cartography scholarship on private property, spatially racialized discriminatory financing policy, and cross-cultural trauma in U.S. cities. Mills writes, “The areas of the city, now concentrated with minority residents through racially restrictive covenants, were deemed ‘hazardous’ for bank investment. And it became nearly impossible to secure a loan to purchase property in the areas of the city where people of color now lived.” These processes “cemented a myth” of “segregated white space as desirable, safe, and inherently valuable.”

Mills’s work explores individual, collective, and city-scale trauma. When I spend time with her work, I am reminded that to exist within a place is more than being there; it is also to hold community scars. Much of her work centers on the contemporary and historic violence of private property ownership in Minneapolis. Her maps and essays explore places as being like bodies in that both are locations of “trauma and resilience.” Mills writes, “Ourselves and our bodies hold intergenerational and family traumas, and place holds cross-cultural traumas. It holds oppressor and oppressed. Place bodies hold our community scars and hidden histories. Place bodies hold networks of care, roadmaps of revolution.… Place holds the muscle memory of healing.” Quotes included in this paragraph reference Mills’s “Place Keeps the Score: An Atlas of Collective Trauma and Radical Healing in Minneapolis,” accessed November 15, 2021, https://mills278.wixsite.com/mcmills/copy-2-of-project-09.

Timothy Otte, “notes toward an incomplete understanding of cartography,” manuscript in-progress, 19.

I am grateful to Timothy Otte’s manuscript in-progress, “Landscape Quartet: notes toward an incomplete understanding of cartography,” the work to which I owe the line “Our lives are shaped by empire / our lives shape the land.” Quoted with his permission. Thank you for your kindness, insights, and all the good talks, Timothy.

Mary Siisip Geniusz, Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 184–91; 216–23.

Mullein thrives on newly turned soil, so it is one of the first plants to regrow after a woodland has been clear-cut.… Information about roadside mullein, ancient England, and mullein stalks as “witch’s candles” is paraphrased from 184–85. For more on jewelweed and animal interactions, see the examples on 222–23.

Kathryn Savage, “Witch Trials, Symbiotic Mutualism, and the Poetry of Fury and Yearning: A Conversation with Kathryn Nuernberger,” World Literature Today, June 10, 2020, https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/interviews/witch-trials-symbiotic-mutualism-and-poetry-fury-and-yearning-conversation-kathryn.

I recall what my friend Kate said about what cocktail ants do.… I quote and paraphrase a conversation between us in this essay. With thanks to Kate, for your friendship and endless brilliance, and for letting me quote you here.

Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

“Between the white paint and Germaine, I feel disgust” honors Sianne Ngai’s seminal affect theory scholarship. In her Ugly Feelings, she critiques ecofeminism that hinges on hunches, on poetic-paranoia. She advocates for, rather than a poetry of ecological paranoia, the embrace of a lyricism of disgust. “In its intense and unambivalent negativity, disgust thus seems to represent an outer limit or threshold of what I have called ugly feelings, preparing us for more instrumental or politically efficacious emotions.” I strive to push my own ecological paranoia to a point that is more “politically efficacious” (354).

Wasteland

Anagha Srikanth, “The Carbon Footprint of Cancer Care,” Changing America, May 18, 2020, https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-change/498342-the-carbon-footprint-of-cancer-care.

U.S.-hospital cancer care requires considerable amounts of energy; the pharmaceutical industry is 50 percent more carbon intensive than the automotive industry.… The information I include about the energy involved in cancer care and its related pharmaceutical industry is drawn from this article.

Urns Northwest, “Are Human Ashes Bad for the Environment?,” February 16, 2021, https://urnsnw.com/articles/are-human-ashes-bad-for-the-environment/.

The by-products of burning a life include fine soot, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide. Mercury from dental filling.… This information is paraphrased from the above article.

Rebecca Altman, “On What We Bury,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 85–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isu039.

My “We also bury seeds, I realized, we plant our dead and our desires for more life in the same earth” isn’t a direct quote, but the idea is indebted to Rebecca Altman’s scholarship on inter-generational body-burden, burial, birth, and planting seeds from her essay “On What We Bury.”

Roads to Take

Rebecca Altman, “Who Sings from the Resins?,” Orion Magazine, August 2021, https://orionmagazine.org/article/who-sings-from-the-resins.

There are hardly any markers in Hawk’s Nest to memorialize the disaster.… I paraphrase Altman’s scholarship on Raymond Thompson Jr.’s photography and archival work. Altman writes, “Thompson honors ‘the history of those left behind.’ Deliberately, he celebrates their lives, their American experience, as he put it. All to correct ‘historical amnesia,’ to counter the institutionalized erasure, gaps in the archival record that feed into partial and damaging histories parceled into boxes, when in fact the histories interconnect: energy systems with metals with chemicals with plastics with racism with war-making with nationalism.”

Rebecca Altman, “Upriver,” Orion Magazine, Summer 2021, June 2, 2021, https://orionmagazine.org/article/upriver/.

“These are roads to take when you think of your country” my opening paragraph paraphrases Altman’s introduction to Rukeyser’s work. In my descriptions of the disaster at Hawk’s Nest, I have relied on contextual and descriptive language from Altman’s essay. Please see her excellent essay “Upriver” to learn more about Hawk’s Nest and its intersections with the complex legacy of plastics.

My refrain of Rukeyser’s roads to take is also after Altman, who also refrains this line in her essay.

Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018), 61, 96.

Adelina Lancianese, “Before Black Lung, The Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster Killed Hundreds,” NPR, January 20, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/685821214/before-black-lung-the-hawks-nest-tunnel-disaster-killed-hundreds.

In Hawk’s Nest, the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation is at work constructing a three-mile tunnel in 1930.… I paraphrase Lancianese’s reporting.

Bryan Nelson, “10 Places Ruined by Human-Caused Catastrophes,” Treehugger, September 22, 2021, https://www.treehugger.com/places-ruined-by-man-made-catastrophes-4869131.

Quapaw Nation, “Environmental,” accessed November 18, 2021, https://www.quapawtribe.com/563/Environmental.

Dates and details about the history of the Quapaw Nation are from this source.

LEAD Agency (Local Environmental Action Demanded), https://www.leadagency.org.

In Picher, contamination from lead and zinc pit mines extending hundreds of feet under homes.… Years of extensive research inform my writing on the Tar Creek Superfund. Included contextual information is also provided by the Quapaw Nation and the LEAD Agency.

Alex Anderson, “Tar Creek Remade: Taking on 120 Years of Environmental Injustice at an Oklahoma Superfund Site,” June 15, 2021, https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/2021/06/tar-creek-remade-taking-on-120-years-of-environmental-injustice-at-an-oklahoma-superfund-site.

At the turn of the twentieth century, found to be mineral-rich, this swath of prairie was force-leased by the U.S. government and sold to private mining companies.… I found my way to Niall Kirkwood’s work on landscape architecture, remediation, and imagining alternative futures in Tar Creek through Rebecca Jim. Some of the historical context I include is taken from the above essay that also details Kirkwood’s teaching landscape architecture students about community-centered approaches to collective envisioning of slow transformations in brownfield remediation work and “a healing landscape.” Anderson writes, “At the outset of ‘Tar Creek Remade,’ Kirkwood cautioned the students to consider that in their designs, what matters is not “the ‘stamp’ or ‘signature’ of the author” but “ethical and cultural attitudes to land, landscape and the natural world” and a genuine concern for the people who work to repair the land and who live on that land.”

Raymond Thompson Jr. and Rob Simmons, “Appalachian Ghosts—Story Behind the Art,” December 2, 2019, https://vimeo.com/376951187.

Thompson reflects, in the film on his photographic work, “History’s been written by the winners in society. They decide what is collected and kept to tell new histories. So I’m interested in the histories of the people who were left behind.” Thompson describes his photographic work as a celebration and not a memorial.

Raymond Thompson Jr., “Artist Statement,” accessed November 19, 2021, http://www.raymondthompsonjr.com/artist-statement.

Thompson’s artist statement on his photographic series inform my descriptions of his work.

Floodwaters

“Skaitook Lake, Oklahoma, USA,” LakeLubbers.com, accessed April 4, 2022, https://lakelubbers.com/lake/skiatook-lake-oklahoma-usa.

I credit this source for contextual information about Skiatook, Sand Springs, Sapulpa, and Tulsa using lakes as water supply as well as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers relationship to the pit lake.

Oklahoma Historical Society, “Osage County,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=OS004.

Chris DiMaria, “8 Year Old Battles with E. coli Exposure after Lake Swim,” 2News Oklahoma, June 27, 2019, https://www.kjrh.com/news/local-news/8-year-old-battles-e-coli-exposure-after-lake-swim.

Contextual information about the child with kidney disease was originally reported on by Chris DiMaria of CBS Tulsa local news.

The Zone

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (Mosfilm, 1979; Criterion Collection, 2017, new restoration), DVD.

Mel Y. Chen, “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, June 1, 2011, 280, https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-abstract/17/2-3/265/34745/Toxic-Animacies-Inanimate-Affections.

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 6.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 38.

T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature (London: Sternberg Press, 2016), 45–47.

My phrasing European and American pollution-driven environmental art and theorizing that emerged during the 1960s and ‘70s … owes acknowledgment to Demos’s Decolonizing Nature. My inclusion of Bateson’s work (and quote) is also from Demos’s comprehensive and historic work. For more on the intersections and representations of ecological art from the 1960s on, please see Demos. He has been very influential to my own thinking on Tarkovsky and his contemporaries.

Gregory Bateson, “Up against the Environment or Ourselves?,” Radical Software 1, no. 5 (Spring 1972): 33 (emphasis in original). Mark Le Fanu, “Stalker: Meaning and Making,” Criterion, July 18, 2017, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4739-stalker-meaning-and-making.

My phrase “The film was shot in Estonia near the capital of Tallinn paraphrases and quotes Le Fanu, who went on to write, “[Stalker was] shot in the vicinity of physically dangerous materials, without much thought given to protecting the crew or the actors. … There are people close to Tarkovsky’s legacy who swear that the cancer that killed him, and possibly others, had its origins in the terrible months of Stalker’s multiple shootings.”

Tar Creek and chat piles in Picher, Oklahoma, © U-Spatial.

Coronal CT reconstruction and PET scan, from T. Vag et al., “PET Imaging of Chemokine Receptor CXCR4 in Patients with Primary and Recurrent Breast Carcinoma,” EJNMMI Research 8, no. 90 (2018): fig. 1a–b, is licensed under CC BY 1.0.

Chat Piles

Stephanie Buck, “The Oklahoma Town That Produced Most of WWI’s Bullets Is Now a Poison Graveyard,” Timeline, August 9, 2017, https://timeline.com/picher-oklahoma-lead-toxic-186e5595232b.

My descriptions of chat and pollution were informed by Buck’s essay.

Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2006), 6.

My “How easily my body opens “ quotes Purpura’s “How easily the body opens.”

Downstream

Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 24–25; 34.

Liz Blood and Joseph Rushmore, O’River (Tulsa, OK: Walls Divide Press, 2019), 7, 20, 24.

Time laps the banks references Blood, who writes, “Time laps your banks.”

Moira Villiard, Illuminate the Lock: Madweyaashkaa: Waves Can Be Heard, installation 2021, accessed December 6, 2021, https://parkconnection.org/illuminate; and Suenary Philavanh, “Resilient: Searching for Connections through Waves,” February 17, 2021, http://northern.lights.mn/2021/02/resilient-searching-for-connections-through-waves.

Quapaw Tribe, https://www.quapawtribe.com/401/Tribal-Name, accessed November 21, 2021.

Photo of Superfund Cleanup didactic © Magali Pijpers.

Felicity Barringer, “Despite Cleanup at Mine, Dust and Fear Linger,” New York Times, April 12, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/12/us/despite-cleanup-at-mine-dust-and-fear-linger.html.

As of 2017, the Tar Creek Superfund site remains one of the largest and most challenging Superfund sites to remediate in the country. In a 2004 New York Times piece, Felicity Barringer, on Tar Creek, writes: “Like a patient riddled with overlapping infections, Tar Creek has exhibited almost every symptom of a modern wasteland. … The site is a stark reminder of the limits of the federal government’s ability to clean up the messes of the industrial age.”

Steve Ward, “As Almost Generational Trust Litigation Ends, the Quapaw Finally Get a Settlement,” AmericanIndian Law, November 20, 2019, https://www.cwlaw.com/newsletters-84.

In 2019, after years of litigation, the Quapaw Nation reached an agreement with the United States in a multimillion-dollar settlement to “obtain a measure of justice for serious federal mismanagement of its reservation lands, accounts, and other Indian trust assets.” From the Nation’s press release: “Under a settlement with the United States, the Nation and its members are due to receive almost $200 million through a combination of immediate payments and appropriations to be requested from Congress. … This settlement represents symbolic justice for the wrongs done to the Quapaw people through the federal government’s mismanagement of our lands and other assets.”

From: Rebecca Jim

I am grateful to Rebecca Jim for leading the way, and for all the good conversations. Thank you.

Tar Creek

OK Energy Today, “Flooding Might Have Increased Dangers of Tar Creek Superfund Site,” June 6, 2019, http://www.okenergytoday.com/2019/06/flooding-might-have-increased-dangers-of-tar-creek-superfund-site.

Tar Creek and chat pile © Magali Pijpers.

Watershed

Rebecca Jim, “Local Environmental Action Demanded,” The LEADer, Spring 2021.

“Tar Creek must be addressed as a matter of environmental justice,” Rebecca Jim writes in LEAD’s spring 2021 newsletter. She advocates that Congress reauthorize the Superfund Fee under CERCLA. Over twenty years ago, this fee, also known as the “polluter-pays” tax, expired. “Reauthorizing the Superfund polluter-pays provision will provide cleanup money so citizens do not have to pay for cleanup.” For added context, Lacy M. Johnson, writing on the polluter-pays provision, observes, “For the last twenty years, there has been no fund funding the Superfund.” See The Reckonings: Essays by Lacy M. Johnson (New York: Scribner, 2018), 305. Further action is needed now. The action should include the new EPA Region 6 administrator ordering, Jim writes, “a new Remedial Investigation and Human Health Risk Assessment that is more protective of human health and the environment. The health of communities around Tar Creek can no longer be ignored and set aside as an accepted casualty of historic mining.” She points out, “Indigenous people from nine tribes make up more than 20 percent of the population in the county, with many individuals having ancestry in multiples tribes.” In her discussion of rising coasts and trees, Jim is referencing Elizabeth Rush’s book Rising (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018).

I paraphrase Jim’s letter and also some of our other conversations in this essay.

Julietta Singh, The Breaks (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2021), 3-4.

Bound (i.5), 2019, Exhibition: “Beyond Measure,” photo by Phil Maisel, courtesy of Tali Weinberg.

What Is Birthed?

Tali Weinberg, Bound, 2017–2019, https://www.taliweinberg.com/inextricably-bound.

The didactic quoted appeared in an August 29, 2021 email announcing Tali’s solo show Water Ways that took place at Praxis in Cleveland, Ohio, September 2021. I attended Bound in Tulsa. As the didactic was iterative, and emerged out of Tali’s earlier work, she has granted permission for descriptive melding in this essay.

Thank you, Liz Blood, for your friendship and your willingness to be quoted.

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 35.

Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (Boston, MA: Da Capo Press), 2.

Sandra Steingraber’s book on ecology and cancer has been very influential to my own thinking throughout this essay. When I write “Water flows within a diffuse net of permeable vessels like the movement of fluid inside bodies,” I am referencing her writing on the similar movement patterns of water and blood. Both flow “within a diffuse net of permeable vessels. So too in Illinois, a capillary bed of creeks, streams, forks, and tributaries lies over the land.” When I write “I live both up-and downstream,” I am paying tribute to her important work.

Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice (New York: Picador, 2012), 104.

The movements of blood and milk.… I am echoing Terry Tempest Williams’s writing on the body. “Milk and blood live together” is a quote from Williams’s When Women Were Birds.

Lacy M. Johnson, “What Slime Knows,” Orion Magazine, Autumn 2021, https://orionmagazine.org/article/what-slime-knows/.

I think about how legacy ecological violence and other legacies of white supremacist thought and action thrive on imagining a world of separations and hierarchies.… When I write this, I am thinking about Lacy M. Johnson’s scholarship on historic racism in taxonomy and the violence of the Anglo-white imaginary in ecological discourse, and also—seemingly unrelated, but she ties the two topics together brilliantly—the awesomeness of slime molds. Johnson writes,

Taxonomy has evolved in the centuries since Haeckel and Linnaeus, but much of their thinking still remains. Even if science no longer views humans as divided into different and unequal species, we continue to refer to ‘race’ as if it were a natural, biological category rather than a social one created in service of white supremacy. The myth that humans are superior to all other species—that we are complex and intelligent in a way that matters, while the intelligence and complexity of other species does not—also exists in service to white supremacy, conferring on far too many people an imagined right of total dominion over one another and the natural world.

Rebecca Altman, “On What We Bury,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 85–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isu039.

Inheritor of my ancestors’ trash and misdeeds.…Rebecca Altman’s children play at a hilly playground near her house that used to be the Reed Brook municipal landfill. The hill, she writes, is “a mound of our forebears’ trash.” As is evident throughout this work, Altman’s scholarship is very influential to my own thinking. In writing on body burden and the impact of toxins on future generations, I frequently recall Altman.

How?

Nick Flynn, “Killdeer,” Poets.org, January 4, 2018, https://poets.org/poem/killdeer.

These are the lines I quote as they appear in “Killdeer”: “whatever / inside us that we think needs / protection, the whatever that is / small & hasn’t yet found its / way. And later: it thinks it could live / on air, on words, forever almost.”

With deep thanks to Nick Flynn for allowing me to include these lines in my work.

Keep Out

“Keep Out,” 2019 © Victoria Hannan.

Shotgun Fungi

Mary Oliver, “Spring,” House of Light (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992), 6.

Linda Treeful, Cynthia Ash, Rebecca Brown, Chad Behrendt, and Crystal Floyd, “Common Fungi in Yards and Gardens,” University of Minnesota Extension (2018), https://extension.umn.edu/lawn-care/common-fungi.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), viii, 1, 137–39.

It’s like they’ve got everted stomachs.… Tsing writes, “Fungi have extracellular digestion. They excrete digestive acids outside their bodies to break down their food into nutrients. It’s as if they had everted stomachs, digesting food outside instead of inside their bodies. Nutrients are then absorbed into their cells, allowing the fungal body to grow—but also other species’ bodies.”

But sometimes harmony breaks down.… Tsing writes, “Mutual benefits do not lead to perfect harmony. Sometimes the fungus parasitizes the root in one phase of its life cycle. Or, if the plant has lots of nutrients, it may reject the fungus. A mycorrhizal fungus without a plant collaborator will die. But many ectomycorrhizas are not limited to one collaboration; the fungus forms a network across plants. In a forest, fungi connect not just trees of the same species, but often many species.”

I paraphrase and reference Tsing’s work in my own.

Acknowledgments

Thank you Keisha Brown, Rebecca Jim, and Gudrun Lock, for sharing your words about healing bodies and places with me, and filling these pages with your commitment to community and ecology. Thank you for reading every version of your testimony, for your candor and strength. I can never properly repay you for agreeing to be part of Groundglass. When Maggie Nelson writes, “The heart, too, is porous,” I think about our conversations over the years, full of grief, but also humor and joy. Please know that your friendship has been my healing.

Thank you to the following magazines and journals for publishing portions of this work, sometimes in different forms: Ecotone Magazine (“Mullein” and “Safe”), BOMB Magazine, Menagerie Magazine (“Shadow Mountain” and “The Soo Line Dump”), the Virginia Quarterly Review (“At the Tar Creek Superfund Site”), and World Literature Today (“The Long Night”). Thank you to the generous and incisive editors Sophia Stid, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Raluca Albu, Steve Woodward, Allison Wright, Heidi Siegrist, and Daniel Simon.

Thank you, Coffee House Press, and special thanks to my kind, brilliant, and exacting editor Lizzie Davis. Thank you Anitra Budd, Daley Farr, Chris Fischbach, Erika Stevens, Marit Swanson, Carla Valadez, and the whole team. Thank you Annemarie Eayrs, Laurie Herrmann, Kellie Hultgren, and Stacey Parshall Jensen. Thank you Samantha Shea.

For sharing your time, insights, and expertise, and talking with me about everything from your work and advocacy to your experiences of family and place, I am ever grateful to Tom Bierlein, Christine Brown, Mike Curran, Kirsten Delegard, Kristi Eaton, Dr. Rachel R. Hardeman, Nic Jelinski, Ryan Mattke, Marguerite Mills, Abby Moore, Roxxanne O’Brien, Christopher Pexa, Kate Probst, Nancy Przymus, Todd Stewart, William Toscano, Jake Virden, Loren Kasey Waters, Dr. Elizabeth Wattenberg, Tali Weinberg, and Nathan Young. Thank you to the countless scientists, scholars, and writers whose work shaped my thinking and writing, in particular Kazim Ali, Rebecca Altman, Anne Boyer, Mary Siisip Geniusz, bell hooks, Max Liboiron, and Sandra Steingraber. Thank you to the publishers, authors, and artists who extended permission to have your work quoted and included here.

Thank you to my students and colleagues at Augsburg University, Hamline University, MCAD, the University of Minnesota, and St. Cloud State University. Thank you to my teachers and classmates at the Bennington Writing Seminars, the University of Minnesota, and The New School. For providing support and community, thank you Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Grand Marais Art Colony, the Loft Literary Center, Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, Minnesota State Arts Board, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Thank you, mother in words, Rebecca Chace, for believing in me. Paul Yoon, thank you for being an extraordinary writer and mentor. Thank you, Kathryn Nuernberger, for seeing what I couldn’t see and loving this book into being. I am forever grateful to all my teachers and mentors. You light the way with your words.

My deep appreciation goes out to Victoria Blanco, Liz Blood, Rebecca Brill, Eleanor Garran, Ray Gonzalez, Victoria Hannan, Jessica Harvey, Douglas Kearney, Daniel Kossow, Mariela Lemus, M. L. Martin, Katie Moulton, Timothy Otte, Susan Pagani, Roseanne Pereira, Erin Kate Ryan, Nathan R. Stenberg, and Allison Wyss—for reading, talking, and sharing your wisdom with me so that this book might grow.

Beloved friends, thank you for being part of my life. For your influence and encouragement as I shaped these pages, thank you Julie Alpert, Jennifer Bowen, Charlie Baxter, Yanna R. Demkiewicz, Jenny Dodgson, Sara Fowler, Kate Gunther, Su Hwang, Ginny and Peter Janelle, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Keith Lesmeister, Rhett McNeil, Ben Moren, Rajesh Parameswaran, Angela Pelster, Drew Peterson, Bao Phi, Peter Price, Ruth Pszwaro, Mary Austin Speaker, Tema Stauffer, Patricia Straub, Paul Solum, Katherine Rochester, Max Ross, Damon Tabor, Josh Theroux, Christina and Kawai Strong Washburn, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, and Diane Wilson. Thank you, Kate Boyle. For your generosity as I rounded the final lap, thank you Rebecca Heidenberg and Gregory Smith. Taylor Dees, Molly Fuller, Corey Lawson, Lindsay Mound, and Magali Pijpers—I would be lost without your love; you are family. Thank you, Dad, for being beside me and for your love. Thank you, Mom, for your nurture and bravery. Thank you, Nana and Andrew, for your endless care and effusiveness. Thank you, Jim, for your writer’s faith; and Beth, for being lovely. Thank you, beloved Holmquists and Hershleders. Thank you, Jason, and the Savages. Thank you, Solimans, for welcoming me. Moheb, I love you. Henry, oh, how I love you.