Paper short abstract:

Ny-Ålesund's arctic landscape is rich in legacy pollutants released from melting mining debris. Observations of toxicologists' research on pollutants' effects on birds invite reflection on the temporal framings of ecological fieldwork and the intertwining of heritage matter and future-making.

Paper long abstract:

An anthropologist, assisting an ecotoxicologist, looks for birds in the debris of the world's northernmost coalmine, Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. Searching for movement or birdsong in a motionless landscape, his eye wanders across acres of mud, broken timber and steel, rails, wires and tubing, even clothes and domestic items. The earth has been torn, first by deep mining, then by the last workers' efforts at erasure, after a catastrophic accident and the mine's closure. Black earth, soaked by melting snow, rainbows of oil seepage - a John Martin painting after the fires burned out. The heritage of industrial violence is framed by older-than-human landscapes: bare glacial moraines and the mountaintops that, during earlier times of brutal exploitation, gave the archipelago its name, Spitzbergen. Landscape forms evoke the coal's geological origins, while the retreating glacier fronts reveal the long-term effects of its human use. The anthropologist-as-bird-watcher seeks movement on a different scale: a female snow bunting landing on the nest, a male calling out. The white birds find shelter in the debris; their eggs accumulate the legacy of pollutants released by the mine's decay and melting permafrost. The birds demonstrate the toxicants' effects on behavior and reproduction, genomes and future individual and population development, and can serve as sentinel, guiding future regulation. Studying the buntings ties industrial heritage and its distant prehistories to emerging futures - altered physiologies and ecologies, and attempts at prediction, modelling and regulation.