Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the ways in which 'concrete' is enlisted in the 'clean up' processes intrinsic to nuclear decommissioning. Building on the history of a synthetic material that has long been deployed to re-fashion nature, the paper discusses the on-going engineering of material potential.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the ways in which 'concrete' is enlisted in the 'clean up' processes intrinsic to nuclear decommissioning. Current estimates suggest that it will take around 120 years and somewhere between 97 billion and 222 billion pounds to clean up Britain's 'historic' nuclear sites - 74% of which will be spent on the Sellafield site in West Cumbria. With no blue-prints for operations of this kind, Sellafield Ltd. has to imagine not only what 'clean up' might look like - but also how to enlist newly engineered materials and facilities to clear the site and return the land for future use. The concepts of imagination, ingenuity and hubris will guide discussion of this chapter in the history of a synthetic material that has long been deployed to re-fashion nature.

Paper short abstract:

Scientific discourses often speak of the need to revert climate change. Yet reversibility - resulting simultaneously from a process of abstraction and containment of climate, as well as a solidification of change - contrasts with what it is to feel immersed in a living world in constant becoming.

Paper long abstract:

Scientific discourses on environmental change often propose to retain and possibly to revert change. Notions such as resilience, planetary boundaries, rewilding or de-extinction suggest implicitly the idea that processes in earth history are somewhat reversible through intense, often large-scale, bio- and geo-engineering. Attending to the training of skills for measuring and recording atmospheric variables among earth scientists, I look into the proposal to bombard the sky with chemicals to keep the atmosphere within "safe" boundaries. I argue that reversibility in earth history results from a process of abstraction, related to the need to measure, average and represent temporal processes in climate science. Though abstraction the atmosphere is contained and isolated from the earth, emulating the macro-engineering of concrete surfaces that currently dominate human built environments and from which climate change is often modelled. Abstraction and containment of climate coincide, in turn, with traditional narratives of how 'Man the Maker' tames a passive nature through labour. Yet, the image of a passive and reversibility nature, I argue, contradicts the irreversible experience of feeling immersed in living world in constant becoming.

Paper short abstract:

I look at the seemingly modest making of things - in clay, in concrete, in steel and in fibre-glass - that have had played a role in the containment, concentration and distribution of nutrients in the earth of the Anthropocene. I consider the prospects, efforts and politics of their re-ordering.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of the Anthropocene invites 'us' - dwellers within a complex earthy system - to confront the makings of both our distant and our more recent pasts. In this paper I look at the seemingly modest making of things, in clay, in concrete, in steel and in fibre-glass that have had played a role in the containment, concentration and distribution of the essential nutrients needed for plant and animal growth. Clay drainage pipes, concrete slatted flooring, fibre-glass welded tanks have been infrastructural innovations made by agricultural engineers and adopted by farmers to hold and distribute nutrient-rich animal excreta and water in ways that complement intensive, highly productive farming units. These material things - slurry tanks, animal stalls, drains, and so on - are implicated in contradictory relations: of cleanliness and separation but also pollution; of vital growth but also strangled ecologies; of a static/ready resource but also hypermobile flows; of capital and debt. I will reflect on the durability of these technologies, their locked-in temporal and spatial relations, and on the efforts of re-making, re-ordering and re-orientating such relations (human and non-human) in the Anthropocene.

Paper short abstract:

The scope, depths and pace of the efforts to remove and stop further pollution invites us to see polluted landscapes not only as ruins of past nature, but also, following Akhil Gupta, as ruins of the future nature. Remediation includes short term, long term and open-ended future interventions.

Paper long abstract:

Could we think of the contaminated sites undergoing environmental remediation as ruins of the future? The length, slow pace and complexity of knowledge, financial and especially material interventions required to remediate the soil and waters of heavy polluted industrial waterways invites us to do so. Drawing on an ongoing ethnographic investigation began in 2018, I suggest that seeing future, 'good', desired nature as ruins is particularly useful for understanding the efforts to clean the heavily polluted Newtown Creek, bordering Brooklyn and Queens. These efforts include short term, long term and open-ended future interventions. The short term efforts of NYC administration and environmental groups are attempts to make residents see the Newtown Creek differently and behave differently: landscape interventions aimed to increased accessibility to the creek's shores in a few publicly owned shores of the creek, semiotic interventions aimed to highlight the presence of nature (e.g. billboards), but also asking residents to postpone shower, laundry or toilet flushing when it rains. The long term efforts include, among others, creating green infrastructure for mitigating the intransigence of combined sewers pipes which collect both sewage and rain water, and the removal of 'black mayonnaise' (feet-deep sediments of heavy metals and sewage). The open-ended future efforts range from attempts to make sense of, and imagine the appropriate action for, past pollution, to the creation of ambitious plans, whose exact timing and financing are difficult, if not impossible, to predict, but which, nonetheless, offer a meaningful and comforting sense of the future nature.

Paper short abstract:

Sellafield has long sparked the imagination as a place of human engagement with fissile materials. As these must now be stifled in decommissioning, alignments and fissures pattern the company's ambitious project of engineering that seeks to integrate technological, natural, and social futures.

Paper long abstract:

Vilified as a dirty place of secret goings-on, praised as a site of pioneering scientific work, cherished as a big local employer offering high salaries and life-long career opportunities, the Sellafield site in West Cumbria has for three quarters of a century sparked the imagination as a place of human engagement with explosive and fissile materials. During the site's operating life, nuclear waste has piled up in ponds and silos as a hazardous legacy left for later generations to deal with. This time has now come. In 2020, reprocessing of nuclear spent fuel for foreign and domestic customers at Sellafield ends, which means that all energy on site will go into its decommissioning, resulting ultimately in what might be imagined as a brownfield, a process expected to take over a hundred years.

Sellafield Limited's latest branding, then, in an attempt at a clean break with its past reputation, is that of an environmental remediation company. Recognizing West Cumbrian economic, and affective, dependency on the nuclear industry, the company seeks to marry the drive for environmental remediation with a dedicated project of social engineering aimed at empowering local communities facing an SL-less future against a backdrop of splendid 'natural' scenery. Drawing on on-going fieldwork at and around the Sellafield site, I will explore alignments and fissures between the technological, the natural, and the social that pattern this integrated project of seeking to contain and stifle fissile matter whilst keeping 'the community' vibrant.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork with ecologists, foresters, conservationists, volunteers, and members of the public, this paper explores human imaginations, scientific expertise, and practices on the ground involved in the deliberate re-makings of Icelandic environments, centered on the plant the Alaska lupin.

Paper long abstract:

Iceland is often said to be the most ecologically devastated country in Europe, with 90% of forests and 40% of surface soil lost since human settlement in the ninth century. Still, with the oldest soil conservation service in the world, and over 110 years of restoration measures, it is an example of a collaborative human effort to return environments to their 'natural' state. In 1945, a spoonful of seeds of Lupinus nootkatensis, a perennial legume with nitrogen-fixing qualities, were brought to Iceland from Alaska, specifically for the purpose of revegetating Iceland's vast barren areas. The lupin was used within large-scale revegetation and afforestation projects, and the public was actively encouraged to participate in the purposeful re-shaping of Icelandic environments. Today, the lupin is officially considered an 'alien invasive species' in Iceland, and what once was a uniform belief in the 'miracle plant' has given way to a complex debate over its (un-)rightful place in the country. Large-scale eradication projects of the plant now envision another, and more 'wild' future for Icelandic landscapes by way of careful planning and tending. Based on fieldwork with restorationists, ecologists, foresters, conservationists, volunteers, and members of the public, this paper explores human imaginations, scientific expertise, and practices on the ground involved in the deliberate re-makings of Icelandic environments. We place these efforts in the context of enduring and powerful cultural narratives of a 'moment' of origin and a desire to return to that origin while imagining a bright future for the nation and its country.