Settler wastes: Sarah Elizabeth Fox, Vexed Forgetting and Unruly Plumes: Tracing the Settler Wasting Cycle in the Pacific Nortwest across the Long Twentieth Century, PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler wastes: Sarah Elizabeth Fox, Vexed Forgetting and Unruly Plumes: Tracing the Settler Wasting Cycle in the Pacific Nortwest across the Long Twentieth Century, PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2024

26Nov24

Abstract: Generated by the movement of waste materials from their point of origin or dispersal, a plumescape is an eco-social landscape resulting from the integration of waste materials into interconnected ecosystems and bodies, which hold or circulate those materials for varying periods of time. These contamination geographies may be produced, described, or altered by human technologies and behaviors, but they do not abide by socially constructed borders, timescales, or ideas about the purported separation of “nature” and “humanity” held by EuroAmerican societies. In the North American West, the production of plumescapes has proliferated since the mid-nineteenth century, illustrating a distinct cycle of environmental decision-making characteristic of settler colonial projects, a phenomenon I call the settler wasting cycle. Based on the survey and analysis of themes and patterns in archival materials, public testimonies, oral histories, and scientific studies, this study examines patterns in the histories of the Victoria, British Columbia sewage plumescape, the Tacoma, Washington ASARCO copper smelter plumescape, and the Hanford plutonium production plumescape, initiated in eastern Washington and spread widely around the larger region. The late establishment of EuroAmerican settler colonialism in this multinational region meant the production of these waste plumes coincided with new scientific understandings of disease, driving settler policy and infrastructural development designed to remove potentially dangerous wastes from proximity to white setter bodies. This dissertation charts the distinct stages and mechanisms responsible for perpetuating the settler wasting cycle, which fails to eliminate dangerous wastes from lived environments, but excels at creating vexed forgetting of the presence and danger posed by those wastes. This vexed forgetting relies on the production of scientific doubt about the health impacts of wastes, and the introduction of new technological and infrastructural strategies which promise (and inevitably fail) to diffuse or contain wastes. This study also traces counter-epistemologies developed from embodied knowledges and community networks, and the influence of those local ways of knowing on social movement organizing within and beyond the plumescapes which shaped them. This dissertation contributes to ongoing discussions in Discard Studies, Environmental History, and studies of the North American West.

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