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.