The complex socio-political context of nuclear extraction, processing, testing, employment, and disposal has informed built spaces and environments. Through each of these processes, landscapes of nuclear waste are formed. Many artists, historians, scientists, and designers have developed an understanding and interpretation of the post-conflict landscape of nuclear war. However, this is an investigation into how we might remember and interact with a paradoxical past; a past of conflict between spectacle and fear, triumph and tragedy, discovery and destructiveness, through the revealed and concealed. Nuclear landscapes are boundless, and yet defined with perimeters. What can we interpret about environmental memory from the treatment of nuclear landscapes? This is a local condition with a global reach, of which the consequences are likely too large to fully understand, affecting the conditions of soil, water, and air, creating unfit conditions for biota. This is an effort to not only heal the radioactive environment, but also investigate scars of an emotional and cultural nature.
Nuclear Landscapes | 1991
Peter Goin (photographer)
The obsession of nuclear technology and the various nuclear landscapes can be epitomized by American photographer Peter Goin, who in his photographic book “Nuclear Landscapes” explores the nuclear landscape as a landscape of desolation and expansiveness, one where the human is a foreign object. In doing so, he describes these landscapes through pictorial symbolism, evoking the fear inherent in these landscapes. Through his archive of images, the use of photographic techniques helps to symbolize the destruction thatoccurred on the landscape, but objectifies them as no longer attainable to the human civilian. Instead they are archived through imagery only, accessible only through the pages of a book. This form of documentation is one way in which the memory of nuclear landscape remains, perhaps due to the inherent danger of radioactive exposure, it is the only way these landscapes remain in the consciousness of memory.
Accidents Will Happen: Lessons on Honey, Smoked Pig Fat, Atomic Disaster and the Half-Life of Truth | July 2012 | Steven Boyd Saum Places Journal Rivne Nuclear Power Plant, Kuznetsovsk, Ukraine. [Photo by Jakov Vladimir Leonidovich]
In contrast, Steven Saum, a visitor to the Ukraine, writes about the fear that underlies the everyday condition in Ukraine. Even as a visitor, and someone who did not live through the catastrophic event of Chernobyl in 1987, he has absorbed some of the cultural ways in which an environmental memory lives on in cultural practice and the collective psyche. From this, we can interpret that environmental memory perhaps has nothing to do with how a nuclear landscape is presented, but instead how that nuclear landscape interacted with those communities and people in the area during its use. As such, memory is carried through culture. For example, Saum describes being instructed to eat kelp, which has a high percentage of iodine in case of high radiation levels in the air, or the practice of powerful figures to always have train tickets out of town on hold in case of another nuclear disaster. Through a narrative of personal experience, primarily written to provide a counter-narrative to one of reassurance and security by local newspapers, Saum presents a basis for an argument beyond physical interaction with nuclear sites and society, but instead that environmental memory exists once it has affected the culture of a place.
Similarly, Tomoko Tamari, lecturer of sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, writes about a cultural shift in architectural priorities because of nuclear landscape in Japan. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 sparked the modernist movement of metabolism. This interaction with a nuclear landscape not only generated a demand for a new movement in architecture, one that allowed for the re-development and design of a new identity committed to advanced technology (you say not only here, but you don’t say what else it does). Architectural ideals shift again as a consequence of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that caused the meltdown of Tepco Daiichi nuclear reactors. Tamari describes a catalyzed shift in Japanese architecture from one of megastructrues and the organic city from the metabolism movement, to one of another post-destruction age. Designers such as Toyo Ito and Shigeru Ban are part of a cultural movement that rejects a reliance on technology and security in the environment and instead dwell within the realm of refuge and individual protection. Like in the Ukraine, there are evidences of an environmental history engrained in the shifting cultural practices of the country.
One the other hand, scholars such as Shiloh Krupar and Miriam Engler who study the treatment of nuclear landscapes in the United States offer other insight into the topic of environmental memory. Krupar writes about the heighten concealment of nuclear landscapes as arsenal of the de-militarization of them and the policies of greenwashing by the DOE and DOD. She suggests that ‘military to wildlife’ (M2W) practices act as a screen that removes responsibility of the militarized landscape from the government. Through the device of spectacle as a means of natural consumption, it further conceals the militarized legacy of these nuclear waste landscapes by disguising them as conservation. Environmental memory is intentionally eliminated. Similarly, Engler suggests that through the practices of monumentalization and memorialization, the transformation of nuclear landscapes to cultural landscapes contributes to the practice of landscapes for consumption and concealment. They both encourage that these landscapes not to be concealed, but be considered landscapes of complex socio-political histories that need to be further tested and explored by designers. In short, they argue that American treatment of nuclear landscapes, reduce environmental memory by concealing their pasts.
Environmental memory is especially significant when it comes to nuclear landscape because of their inherently dangerous condition to humans and other living species. Their danger is augmented as they are without clear boundaries, and basically undetectable through human means of perception. While archaeologists and scientists work on ways of communicating hazardous landscapes to future civilizations through symbolism and monuments, perhaps as landscape architects we can work to understand how nuclear landscapes prompt changes in culture. By altering these landscapes to take on new cultural meanings, the environmental legacy of nuclear waste sites is broken, thus reducing the awareness of these sites to future generations. Perhaps through cultural practices, the memory of these landscapes can continue.
Works Cited:
Engler, Miriam. “Post-Nuclear Monuments, Museums, and Gardens.” Landscape Review 9.2 (2005): 45. Print.
Goin, Peter. Nuclear Landscapes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. Print. Creating the North American Landscape.
Steven Boyd Saum, “Accidents Will Happen: Lessons on Honey, Smoked Pig Fat, Atomic Disaster and the Half-Life of Truth,” Places Journal, July 2012. Accessed 22 Mar 2017. https://doi.org/10.22269/120716
Shiloh Krupar. “The Biopolitics of Spectacle: Salvation and Oversight at the Post-military Nature Refuge.” Global ReVisions. Ed. Zahi
Zalloua and Bruce Magnusson. : University of Washington Press, 2016: 116-153
Tamari, Tomoko. “Metabolism: Utopian Urbanism and the Japanese Modern Architecture Movement.” Theory, Culture & Society 31.7–8 (2014): 201–225. SAGE Journals. Web.