I've been spending the last month trying to wrangle dissertation writing into a 9-5 office job. Most people in graduate school will tell you that it's an amorphous blob of a profession--inspiration comes when it comes, sometimes you can spend hours sitting in front of your computer and not be able to write anything more than a feeble facebook update. And most graduate students refuse to use the offices that their departments give them; these offices sit bare and lonely, sometimes with a dusty pile of old blue books or a couple of tattered copies of books we once read for a seminar and never needed again (for some reason, it's often Marx). Instead, they go to local coffee shops.
I quit all that after my master's thesis, which was written entirely in coffee shops in two hour increments (two hours was the average amount of time I could sit and write without having to get up and pee, and thus leave my laptop unattended. So every time I had to pee, I would pack everything up and move on to the cafe down the road). Now I write in my office. I moved all my books here, put things on the walls, brought my printer, my 3 hole punch, and a tin of assorted teas. Ready to attack the dissertation. Thinking the whole time: I am SUCH a grownup!
It didn't take long for me to realize that dissertating, that long lonely stretch of road when a graudate student is expected to be at their most brilliant and independent, is a quite difficult thing to do. It's really hard for me to sit still and focus for long periods of time, and I find myself fantasizing about going to Target, watching TV, going to the beach, anything but sit here and finish my hours for the day.
Which is what any sane human should do when sitting in a bland office on a beautiful summer day in San Diego. Or what any writer does when she's trying to force inspiration and productivity--two things that occur more or less spontaneously. But what adds to all this is that there is nothing, nothing, obvious about how to go about writing a dissertation. It's a total black box: you see the mechanics going into it (seminars, prospectus, quals) and those coming out of it (defense, publication, book, tenure) but what goes on in the middle is a mystery that no one can quite explain. I think most people look back on this period as a lot of unproductive boredom interlaced with random moments of brilliance, when an idea suddenly strikes and you sit down and write ferociously for an hour before drawing up, exhausted and panting, and re-reading what you wrote to find that it's overly-sentimental drivel that your committee will never allow in the final document (sigh).
So I'll keep sitting here, surrounded by books and primaries and office supplies, and have faith that, somehow or another, this last rite of graduate school will result in a dissertation. I know it will--it has to.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
On Maps
Yesterday I unpacked a half a dozen enormous maps I collected almost a year ago in the archives in New Mexico, and wallpapered my office with them. Then I left to go surfing and promptly forgot about them--and so, this morning, when I opened my office and turned on the lights to find a room brightly lit with big white maps of New Mexico, I had to blink a few times and try to remember where I was and what they were.
Even though I'm writing a dissertation that revolves around the ideas and artifacts of mapping and cartography, maps themselves always leave me with a unique feeling: blank emptiness. To me, they are like instant meditation, my very own zen gardens up on the wall. And I never realized that I have this reaction to maps until I decided to study them for their hidden meanings--only to realize that their "hidden meaning" might very well be, um, nothing. Or nothingness...I know that might not be very obvious, so I'll explain a little.
Maps, perhaps more than many artifacts of modern knowledge, are meant to convey a LOT of information. They are charged with a very ambitious task, to represent actual land--earth, soil, dirt, homes, buildings, rivers, roads, the very everything of human context. Maps can purport to show us almost anything; I have three on my wall right now that claim to show me what the New Mexico mining industry looked like in 1958. I have another that claims to show something called "land ownership status" of the state, also in 1958. So I, perhaps quite reasonably, have awesomely high expectations of maps. The maps on my walls, for example, I thought could contain enough to write entire chapters on. But I look at them and my head fills with a blank buzzing. What is this thing on here called "HIDALGO COUNTY" etched in a bland font across the checkered space of the paper? What could this possibly have to do with the richness of desertscapes in the deep borderlands of southwestern New Mexico, where dry heat competes with mythic history for center stage of your imagination? What are the straight lines of oil pipelines across jagged land littered with jackrabbits, dusty mesas, and beat-down pickup trucks?
For me, this is like making an algebraic equation to represent a novel. Character A plus Character B equals Love and Triumph. The intricacies of human form, emotional texture, the rough feel of desert dirt, the aching curve of low riverflow in winter--these are things written in tongues that mapmakers don't speak.
I feel this way too when I study the history of soil conservation projects in northern New Mexico. To me, this was a rigid history, with political upbeats for sure, but more or less dry and smooth on its surface, until the spring morning I was driving from Taos to Santa Fe and saw a "Soil Conservation Service Region 8" sign on the side of the highway. Its rusted corners were curled backward with time and weather, and it was pockmarked with a handful of bullet holes. This, more than any map or history book, told the story of soil conservation in all its human depth. The context helped--I had just passed a homemade sign on the side of a broken down trailer that read in blue spray paint "Federally Stolen Land Grant, 4700 acres," and then, a few miles back on the road, a roadside memorial cross for a victim of a drunk driving accident. Here, humans and nature and history are mapped onto the land in ways like this that are dirty, rusted, scary, and so deeply, powerfully distinct from the white maps on my office walls that I feel like one or the other of them must be an alien form.
Maps aren't mean to be beautiful--but they are anyway. They just don't need to be so earnest and so ambitious. If they didn't try so hard to by clean signifiers of something called Reality, they might do just what they purport to do: show us something Real.
Even though I'm writing a dissertation that revolves around the ideas and artifacts of mapping and cartography, maps themselves always leave me with a unique feeling: blank emptiness. To me, they are like instant meditation, my very own zen gardens up on the wall. And I never realized that I have this reaction to maps until I decided to study them for their hidden meanings--only to realize that their "hidden meaning" might very well be, um, nothing. Or nothingness...I know that might not be very obvious, so I'll explain a little.
Maps, perhaps more than many artifacts of modern knowledge, are meant to convey a LOT of information. They are charged with a very ambitious task, to represent actual land--earth, soil, dirt, homes, buildings, rivers, roads, the very everything of human context. Maps can purport to show us almost anything; I have three on my wall right now that claim to show me what the New Mexico mining industry looked like in 1958. I have another that claims to show something called "land ownership status" of the state, also in 1958. So I, perhaps quite reasonably, have awesomely high expectations of maps. The maps on my walls, for example, I thought could contain enough to write entire chapters on. But I look at them and my head fills with a blank buzzing. What is this thing on here called "HIDALGO COUNTY" etched in a bland font across the checkered space of the paper? What could this possibly have to do with the richness of desertscapes in the deep borderlands of southwestern New Mexico, where dry heat competes with mythic history for center stage of your imagination? What are the straight lines of oil pipelines across jagged land littered with jackrabbits, dusty mesas, and beat-down pickup trucks?
For me, this is like making an algebraic equation to represent a novel. Character A plus Character B equals Love and Triumph. The intricacies of human form, emotional texture, the rough feel of desert dirt, the aching curve of low riverflow in winter--these are things written in tongues that mapmakers don't speak.
I feel this way too when I study the history of soil conservation projects in northern New Mexico. To me, this was a rigid history, with political upbeats for sure, but more or less dry and smooth on its surface, until the spring morning I was driving from Taos to Santa Fe and saw a "Soil Conservation Service Region 8" sign on the side of the highway. Its rusted corners were curled backward with time and weather, and it was pockmarked with a handful of bullet holes. This, more than any map or history book, told the story of soil conservation in all its human depth. The context helped--I had just passed a homemade sign on the side of a broken down trailer that read in blue spray paint "Federally Stolen Land Grant, 4700 acres," and then, a few miles back on the road, a roadside memorial cross for a victim of a drunk driving accident. Here, humans and nature and history are mapped onto the land in ways like this that are dirty, rusted, scary, and so deeply, powerfully distinct from the white maps on my office walls that I feel like one or the other of them must be an alien form.
Maps aren't mean to be beautiful--but they are anyway. They just don't need to be so earnest and so ambitious. If they didn't try so hard to by clean signifiers of something called Reality, they might do just what they purport to do: show us something Real.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
On Fuzzy Concepts
I just got an email from a friend that has a signature quotation attributed to Ansel Adams: "there's nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept." As soon as I closed the email the first thing behind it was Chapter 2. God needs to work on subtlety.
Environmental historians have some serious beef with Ansel Adams. As the premiere PR artist of the American West, he played a major role in the museum-ification of Western landscapes--a process which included shunting indigenous peoples out of newly-created "national parks" and the John Muir mythology of wilderness as space that is ideally empty of humans and human intervention. White naturalists saw places like Yosemite as tainted by indigenous presence, in blunt ignorance of highly sophisitcated indigenous relationships to nature that kept it and them in balance; they also saw places like Yosemite as in need of protection from white industrialism--quite rightly. Adams indeed created sharp images of a sharp concept: that Nature reflects a divine transcendence from the pollution of humanity. What is excluded from his work, however, is the immense human energy that goes into drawing these stark lines between humans and nature, creating unpolluted borders between us and it that make it an unreachable, aesthetic object to be visually consumed, akin to a painting on a museum wall. It is exactly the fuzziness of human-nature division that Adams (and his contemporaries) found so distasteful.
These are the first things that went through my head when I saw the Ansel Adams quotation. The subsequent things were more along the lines of "dammit, he's right--and he's talking about my dissertation." Yesterday I tried to present my dissertation plan, and the more I tried to explain it the more the whole project dissolved in my hands. Holes in the arguments, gaps in the literature review, blatantly overlooked fields of knowledge and intervention...all of these things add up to the dissertation as a fuzzy concept.
Help. How do I fix it?
Environmental historians have some serious beef with Ansel Adams. As the premiere PR artist of the American West, he played a major role in the museum-ification of Western landscapes--a process which included shunting indigenous peoples out of newly-created "national parks" and the John Muir mythology of wilderness as space that is ideally empty of humans and human intervention. White naturalists saw places like Yosemite as tainted by indigenous presence, in blunt ignorance of highly sophisitcated indigenous relationships to nature that kept it and them in balance; they also saw places like Yosemite as in need of protection from white industrialism--quite rightly. Adams indeed created sharp images of a sharp concept: that Nature reflects a divine transcendence from the pollution of humanity. What is excluded from his work, however, is the immense human energy that goes into drawing these stark lines between humans and nature, creating unpolluted borders between us and it that make it an unreachable, aesthetic object to be visually consumed, akin to a painting on a museum wall. It is exactly the fuzziness of human-nature division that Adams (and his contemporaries) found so distasteful.
These are the first things that went through my head when I saw the Ansel Adams quotation. The subsequent things were more along the lines of "dammit, he's right--and he's talking about my dissertation." Yesterday I tried to present my dissertation plan, and the more I tried to explain it the more the whole project dissolved in my hands. Holes in the arguments, gaps in the literature review, blatantly overlooked fields of knowledge and intervention...all of these things add up to the dissertation as a fuzzy concept.
Help. How do I fix it?
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
On Environmental Justice
The chapter I'm currently writing explores uranium mining in the context of debates about energy and national security--the oft-invoked trope that the nation must turn to domestic sources of energy in order to protect our national interests. Exploring these kinds of issues, and the odd new association between energy, security, and environmentalism, led me to the following essay-in-progress about the meanings of environmentalism and environmental justice in my dissertation:
Energy security is not new; this has long been part of larger discourses of national security and defense-related industrialization. What is new is the emergence in the zeitgeist of claims to climate security, and links between keeping "us" safe from both global climate change and from terrorist threats to the homeland. In the new politics, when "green is the new black," climate change deniers and non-recyclers are condemned as philistines and real, critical conversations about environmental justice threaten to go the way of conversations about racial justice in the 1980s--that is, to be relegated, largely, to the realm of political correctness and cosmetic, rather than structural, change. We (if there is a "we") cannot afford to miss this opportunity to galvanize a democratic movement toward real structural and cultural change.
The "good" news is that environmentalism doesn't have to be a treehugger politics--in fact, it never has been, although trees (or, better put, forests) are certainly part of the conversation. The dimensions of environmental justice politics and their capacity for revolutionary change have been haunting our national discourses for quite some time. Discursive movements that are open to real conversations about climate change have the potential to bring that haunting into the open.
Poverty, class oppression, resource and labor exploitation, geographical segregation, Moynihanian "benign neglect," the racial-sexual behemoth that is eugenics, "natural" disasters like Hurricane Katrina--these are all manifestations of social problems that a new environmental justice politics can address. That is the promise, and the opportunity, we have here in this brief window when eyes have been forced open to climate change concerns, but not yet turned cynically away to technology "solutions" and "energy security." For this moment, we can instigate real conversations about sustainability and justice.
Energy security is not new; this has long been part of larger discourses of national security and defense-related industrialization. What is new is the emergence in the zeitgeist of claims to climate security, and links between keeping "us" safe from both global climate change and from terrorist threats to the homeland. In the new politics, when "green is the new black," climate change deniers and non-recyclers are condemned as philistines and real, critical conversations about environmental justice threaten to go the way of conversations about racial justice in the 1980s--that is, to be relegated, largely, to the realm of political correctness and cosmetic, rather than structural, change. We (if there is a "we") cannot afford to miss this opportunity to galvanize a democratic movement toward real structural and cultural change.
The "good" news is that environmentalism doesn't have to be a treehugger politics--in fact, it never has been, although trees (or, better put, forests) are certainly part of the conversation. The dimensions of environmental justice politics and their capacity for revolutionary change have been haunting our national discourses for quite some time. Discursive movements that are open to real conversations about climate change have the potential to bring that haunting into the open.
Poverty, class oppression, resource and labor exploitation, geographical segregation, Moynihanian "benign neglect," the racial-sexual behemoth that is eugenics, "natural" disasters like Hurricane Katrina--these are all manifestations of social problems that a new environmental justice politics can address. That is the promise, and the opportunity, we have here in this brief window when eyes have been forced open to climate change concerns, but not yet turned cynically away to technology "solutions" and "energy security." For this moment, we can instigate real conversations about sustainability and justice.
On the New Uranium Boom
**Disclaimer: this is a blog post I wrote after finding a report published by the Reagan Administration in 1984 (which was the low-point of the uranium industry, when it was at such low levels of production as to be considered a dying industry). Although the point of the report was to give an analysis of the history of the uranium industry, it also made projections, including that the industry would see a resurgence and a return to solvency in the year 2000. What follows is a discussion of this prediction, which I consider a self-fulfilling prophecy, of what is now being called the "new uranium boom."**
So in 1984 Ronald Reagan predicted the new uranium boom. He missed it by about six years, predicting that it would peak right around 2000, when the profitability of the industry, the amount of uranium being mined and milled, and the sales of uranium to energy industries would hit higher rates than even in the mid 1970s when the industry was at its height.
The 1980s were a low time for the uranium industry. This darling child of the US government, a global market “created solely by the US Department of Defense,” held strong and viable for really only 2 and a half decades, including its two incarnations as a defense industry and as an energy industry, before hitting the walls of anti-nuclear social movements and economic recession that prevented expansion of energy technologies—particularly ones wherein the public and environmental health aspects were both very expensive and relative unknowns. In fact, the only thing the uranium industry had going for it in 1984 was the federal government’s political investment in it, and the strange logic of free market economics that dictates that markets, mysteriously, will find ways to make themselves viable. The federal government’s prediction that the uranium industry would return to viability, unfortunately, relied only on two options. 1. on pro-nuclear energy industry moves in the marketplace (so-called “atoms for peace” applications of nuclear technology, dependent on the hazy presupposition that technology advances can make this kind of energy “clean”—technology development that would be better spent on real green alternatives to fossil fuels, ones whose back and front ends don’t entail radioactive environmental and human health disasters) or on 2. (much more likely) a continuation of militarization of US foreign relations that would require another (or an extended) nuclear arms race.
Why would I emphasize the latter when considering what the Reagan Administration’s logic might have been in virtually guaranteeing a year 2000 peak in uranium mining and sales? First, and most obviously because of the hawkish bent of the neoconservative movement, of which Reagan was the creepy uncle (Bush Sr. was the somewhat hesitant patriarch, and Bush Jr. was, of course, the blunt end of the stick wielded by the cruel, fat and acne-ridden tween, Dick Cheney). Reagan’s version of neoconservativism, this radical ideology’s first trial-run in mainstream politics, was fraught with sci-fi sounding, post-Cold War projects for world domination like the Star Wars program, as well as new (improved! Now fought against poor brown people!) options for military industry in a post-Cold War world: namely, the War on Drugs, which effectively turned Latin America into a playground for US military personnel, CIA training programs, neoliberal political economic zealotry, and military toys.
However, there are other reasons I think Reagan would lean toward new government purchases of uranium rather than uranium for the energy industry (that is, assuming that Reagan did not have in mind the massive privatization of defense—if he did, then uranium would be bought privately, but still for the purposes of “defense.” Also if he did then the neoconservative movement was way more prescient and frighteningly ideologically organized and disciplined than I ever would have thought.). These revolve primarily around the logic of Akum’s Razor: the philosophical truism that the simplest answer is usually the right one. In the ideological world of the neoconservatives, public access to cheaper energy options is rarely the first priority. In fact public anything is rarely the first priority, except for perhaps public deception or public control. Despite their tendencies to protect industry at all cost, even when that industry is criminally negligent, incompetent, or stupid (witness not only the financial bailout of 2008 but also the pandering to impetuous and insolent American carmakers, who dug their own deep graves and then crawled out by making a ladder of 8-miles-a-gallon Hummers) the rhetorical misnomers “defense” and “national security,” which both refer to massive militarization, military industrialization, and militarized imperialism abroad, occupy center stage on any neoconservative agenda.
Therefore in 1984 Ronald Reagan's guarantee of a return to solvency of the uranium market, when it was quite clear that the American public had very well reasoned and evidenced mistrust in nuclearism in energy or defense, and that the government had already stockpiled enough nuclear weapons to cause global apocalypse some 500 times over, what he was actually guaranteeing was a continued escalation of the neoconservative politics of political isolationism, neoliberal globalization of market forces, and a continuation of the ever-so-profitable us versus them global model of struggles between Good and Evil—the Evil would likely no longer be the Soviet Union, that much was clear in 1984, but there were plenty of other Evils, many of them quite a lot easier to motivate the public against given the US’s history of waging racial wars. The War on Drugs, the War on Terror—these both fit the US’s historical discourses of power, conflict, threat, and domination much more snugly than the USSR ever did. Red Scares just never were quite as powerful as the racial terrors of white Americans.
Okay, so back to 1984: there’s good news. The uranium industry, left to its own market potential, was nearly dead. Without the intervention of hawkish politics and the habit of the US government to come down on the side of industry, no matter how useless or unwanted it is, the uranium industry would have sunk under its own weight and probably never resurfaced. But since this industry was born, it has relied on the welfare given it by the government and/or military. It was a born addict, sucking on public funds, that was never successfully weaned, even when, in the early 70s, the government ceased to be the sole buyer of uranium.
But because of this prediction of a resurgence of the uranium industry by no less an authority than the President of the United States, the uranium industry continued to hobble along, following the imaginary carrot of the year 2000. This kind of guarantee, based on the logic of continued militarization, fueled things like in-situ leach mining technology development even as it looked like there was no way for the uranium industry to overcome the costs of good human and environmental health protection in order to achieve profitability; the only way any nuclear technology had ever been profitable in its short life span was because of the earnest efforts of government and industry people alike to keep the truth about its dangers away from the people working with these deadly materials (witness the virtual conspiracy to keep information about health hazards away from uranium miners). The short-sightedness of this did not predict—or, in the face of such intense short term profitability, did not care—that as soon as human health effects were felt in a people’s lifetimes, social movements for environmental justice would demand labor and environmental protection laws. This gamble, that people would either miraculously not get sick or that they would not connect their collective illnesses to labor in the uranium industry, was cynical, criminal, and disgusting. That the federal government continued to insist on keeping the industry alive is even worse.
Here is what is fundamentally wrong with capitalism as it is practiced in this country, and, increasingly, in globalized neoliberal markets: short-term profits are chased even when it is all but certain that they will end in human or environmental suffering and that the industry will then have to shut down or change drastically, and industries that should be let die because they are simply too expensive in terms of investment and human and environmental health—that they are simply bad ideas and always were—are given a public safety net even when individual citizens are not. This is corporate welfare. And these corporations are often thieves, murderers, hustlers, and liars. In short, if they were people they would fit every derogatory archetype of people who “shouldn’t” be “let” to live off the government’s dime. These are kinds of institutions that are guaranteed solvency, and investment, indeed are given a reason to live in 1984 when all signs point to their imminent death, by the office of the President. Something here is deeply, deeply wrong. Not least because the supposed governing ideology of our form of capitalism, so-called free market economics, posits first and foremost that the market is a rational and self-policing animal; therefore markets left alone by the government, by regulation, by federal meddling, will live and die according to their own laws and lives.
Military industries have no purpose, they have no place, in modern American life, other than to sustain themselves. Self-perpetuation with the enabling nature of the federal government and the fear-mongered American public is their MO. These are financial gambles based on political guarantees that are themselves predicated on the ability to keep the American public in a constant state of low-intensity conflict. And the promise—the reckless, dangerous promise—that we would again be in a global struggle for survival. The violence of this rationality, as described best by Chomsky, leads us to a question that should not be so hard to answer: hegemony or survival?
So in 1984 Ronald Reagan predicted the new uranium boom. He missed it by about six years, predicting that it would peak right around 2000, when the profitability of the industry, the amount of uranium being mined and milled, and the sales of uranium to energy industries would hit higher rates than even in the mid 1970s when the industry was at its height.
The 1980s were a low time for the uranium industry. This darling child of the US government, a global market “created solely by the US Department of Defense,” held strong and viable for really only 2 and a half decades, including its two incarnations as a defense industry and as an energy industry, before hitting the walls of anti-nuclear social movements and economic recession that prevented expansion of energy technologies—particularly ones wherein the public and environmental health aspects were both very expensive and relative unknowns. In fact, the only thing the uranium industry had going for it in 1984 was the federal government’s political investment in it, and the strange logic of free market economics that dictates that markets, mysteriously, will find ways to make themselves viable. The federal government’s prediction that the uranium industry would return to viability, unfortunately, relied only on two options. 1. on pro-nuclear energy industry moves in the marketplace (so-called “atoms for peace” applications of nuclear technology, dependent on the hazy presupposition that technology advances can make this kind of energy “clean”—technology development that would be better spent on real green alternatives to fossil fuels, ones whose back and front ends don’t entail radioactive environmental and human health disasters) or on 2. (much more likely) a continuation of militarization of US foreign relations that would require another (or an extended) nuclear arms race.
Why would I emphasize the latter when considering what the Reagan Administration’s logic might have been in virtually guaranteeing a year 2000 peak in uranium mining and sales? First, and most obviously because of the hawkish bent of the neoconservative movement, of which Reagan was the creepy uncle (Bush Sr. was the somewhat hesitant patriarch, and Bush Jr. was, of course, the blunt end of the stick wielded by the cruel, fat and acne-ridden tween, Dick Cheney). Reagan’s version of neoconservativism, this radical ideology’s first trial-run in mainstream politics, was fraught with sci-fi sounding, post-Cold War projects for world domination like the Star Wars program, as well as new (improved! Now fought against poor brown people!) options for military industry in a post-Cold War world: namely, the War on Drugs, which effectively turned Latin America into a playground for US military personnel, CIA training programs, neoliberal political economic zealotry, and military toys.
However, there are other reasons I think Reagan would lean toward new government purchases of uranium rather than uranium for the energy industry (that is, assuming that Reagan did not have in mind the massive privatization of defense—if he did, then uranium would be bought privately, but still for the purposes of “defense.” Also if he did then the neoconservative movement was way more prescient and frighteningly ideologically organized and disciplined than I ever would have thought.). These revolve primarily around the logic of Akum’s Razor: the philosophical truism that the simplest answer is usually the right one. In the ideological world of the neoconservatives, public access to cheaper energy options is rarely the first priority. In fact public anything is rarely the first priority, except for perhaps public deception or public control. Despite their tendencies to protect industry at all cost, even when that industry is criminally negligent, incompetent, or stupid (witness not only the financial bailout of 2008 but also the pandering to impetuous and insolent American carmakers, who dug their own deep graves and then crawled out by making a ladder of 8-miles-a-gallon Hummers) the rhetorical misnomers “defense” and “national security,” which both refer to massive militarization, military industrialization, and militarized imperialism abroad, occupy center stage on any neoconservative agenda.
Therefore in 1984 Ronald Reagan's guarantee of a return to solvency of the uranium market, when it was quite clear that the American public had very well reasoned and evidenced mistrust in nuclearism in energy or defense, and that the government had already stockpiled enough nuclear weapons to cause global apocalypse some 500 times over, what he was actually guaranteeing was a continued escalation of the neoconservative politics of political isolationism, neoliberal globalization of market forces, and a continuation of the ever-so-profitable us versus them global model of struggles between Good and Evil—the Evil would likely no longer be the Soviet Union, that much was clear in 1984, but there were plenty of other Evils, many of them quite a lot easier to motivate the public against given the US’s history of waging racial wars. The War on Drugs, the War on Terror—these both fit the US’s historical discourses of power, conflict, threat, and domination much more snugly than the USSR ever did. Red Scares just never were quite as powerful as the racial terrors of white Americans.
Okay, so back to 1984: there’s good news. The uranium industry, left to its own market potential, was nearly dead. Without the intervention of hawkish politics and the habit of the US government to come down on the side of industry, no matter how useless or unwanted it is, the uranium industry would have sunk under its own weight and probably never resurfaced. But since this industry was born, it has relied on the welfare given it by the government and/or military. It was a born addict, sucking on public funds, that was never successfully weaned, even when, in the early 70s, the government ceased to be the sole buyer of uranium.
But because of this prediction of a resurgence of the uranium industry by no less an authority than the President of the United States, the uranium industry continued to hobble along, following the imaginary carrot of the year 2000. This kind of guarantee, based on the logic of continued militarization, fueled things like in-situ leach mining technology development even as it looked like there was no way for the uranium industry to overcome the costs of good human and environmental health protection in order to achieve profitability; the only way any nuclear technology had ever been profitable in its short life span was because of the earnest efforts of government and industry people alike to keep the truth about its dangers away from the people working with these deadly materials (witness the virtual conspiracy to keep information about health hazards away from uranium miners). The short-sightedness of this did not predict—or, in the face of such intense short term profitability, did not care—that as soon as human health effects were felt in a people’s lifetimes, social movements for environmental justice would demand labor and environmental protection laws. This gamble, that people would either miraculously not get sick or that they would not connect their collective illnesses to labor in the uranium industry, was cynical, criminal, and disgusting. That the federal government continued to insist on keeping the industry alive is even worse.
Here is what is fundamentally wrong with capitalism as it is practiced in this country, and, increasingly, in globalized neoliberal markets: short-term profits are chased even when it is all but certain that they will end in human or environmental suffering and that the industry will then have to shut down or change drastically, and industries that should be let die because they are simply too expensive in terms of investment and human and environmental health—that they are simply bad ideas and always were—are given a public safety net even when individual citizens are not. This is corporate welfare. And these corporations are often thieves, murderers, hustlers, and liars. In short, if they were people they would fit every derogatory archetype of people who “shouldn’t” be “let” to live off the government’s dime. These are kinds of institutions that are guaranteed solvency, and investment, indeed are given a reason to live in 1984 when all signs point to their imminent death, by the office of the President. Something here is deeply, deeply wrong. Not least because the supposed governing ideology of our form of capitalism, so-called free market economics, posits first and foremost that the market is a rational and self-policing animal; therefore markets left alone by the government, by regulation, by federal meddling, will live and die according to their own laws and lives.
Military industries have no purpose, they have no place, in modern American life, other than to sustain themselves. Self-perpetuation with the enabling nature of the federal government and the fear-mongered American public is their MO. These are financial gambles based on political guarantees that are themselves predicated on the ability to keep the American public in a constant state of low-intensity conflict. And the promise—the reckless, dangerous promise—that we would again be in a global struggle for survival. The violence of this rationality, as described best by Chomsky, leads us to a question that should not be so hard to answer: hegemony or survival?
On Archives
Bleached paper, carbon copies, the blunt clack of typewriter keys. The lipstick-smudged teeth of a woman receptionist, tatting out the endlessness of mimeographed colonial bureaucracy.
Sitting in the archives, it all comes back so effortlessly: the totems of metal filing cabinets, the bitter coffee, the tedious meetings. And, always, the correspondence: unending, unforgiving correspondence. This is what the landscape of colonial bureaucracy is made of. With its shag carpets and wide dusty desks.
The memoranda. The replies-to. "This letter acknowledges the receipt of your missive of 20 October," etc. The English language boiled down to a taut poetry of redundant phrases and cliches, and the richness of the earth is pored through it onto paper, letter-headed, date-stamped, copied, blind-copied, mailed, and filed. This is how things come into existence in bureaucracy: midwifed by bespectacled middle-aged men assisted by armies of shiny-heeled receptionists.
And sitting in the archives, up to my elbows in the minutia of the 1950s-era Department of the Interior land use policy, it all comes back so easily--in part because federal bureaucracy and archives are themselves related. They speak the same language, and worship the same demigods of organization and record-keeping. They both carry the talismans of sharpened pencils and staplers.
The narrative of my dissertation should be more exciting, but I find myself continually drawn to the quiet spaces of archives to bear muted witness to the decades-old violence of bureaucratic repetoire. Land isn't always seized at the muzzle of a gun; it is much more often taken through the movements of ink across paper, lines drawn on maps, and titles written into and out of existence. This is the magic of the archives: to reveal that our stories are carved out of mountains of paper, filed away in the colonial archive--just so.
Sitting in the archives, it all comes back so effortlessly: the totems of metal filing cabinets, the bitter coffee, the tedious meetings. And, always, the correspondence: unending, unforgiving correspondence. This is what the landscape of colonial bureaucracy is made of. With its shag carpets and wide dusty desks.
The memoranda. The replies-to. "This letter acknowledges the receipt of your missive of 20 October," etc. The English language boiled down to a taut poetry of redundant phrases and cliches, and the richness of the earth is pored through it onto paper, letter-headed, date-stamped, copied, blind-copied, mailed, and filed. This is how things come into existence in bureaucracy: midwifed by bespectacled middle-aged men assisted by armies of shiny-heeled receptionists.
And sitting in the archives, up to my elbows in the minutia of the 1950s-era Department of the Interior land use policy, it all comes back so easily--in part because federal bureaucracy and archives are themselves related. They speak the same language, and worship the same demigods of organization and record-keeping. They both carry the talismans of sharpened pencils and staplers.
The narrative of my dissertation should be more exciting, but I find myself continually drawn to the quiet spaces of archives to bear muted witness to the decades-old violence of bureaucratic repetoire. Land isn't always seized at the muzzle of a gun; it is much more often taken through the movements of ink across paper, lines drawn on maps, and titles written into and out of existence. This is the magic of the archives: to reveal that our stories are carved out of mountains of paper, filed away in the colonial archive--just so.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
On Legacies
On the 4th of July 2008, I pulled into Kayenta, Arizona, in the northernmost section of the Navajo Nation, on an empty gas tank, not 30 miles away from where I’d stopped on the side of the road to gape open-mouthed at the 200-yard section of the 4-mile-long coal slurry I could see from Highway 160. The slurry stretched forebodingly across the highway, angled up to a leering tower to the east (see Figure 1). To the west, it cut into the face of Black Mesa, stretching to the mesa’s horizon in the oddly linear negative space of cleared trees. Four miles to the west, at the intersections of Indian Route 41, Peabody Coal Company Access Road, and Haulage Road, was the Black Mesa headquarters of the coal mining operation—which I could not see, but knew was there from the crinkled topographic map spread out on my passenger seat. Making a sudden turn up a dirt road that sent my dog lurching onto the floorboards in the back of my truck, I wasted most of the ¼ tank of gas I had left seeking a better angle from which to view this coal mining monolith.
Thus I coasted into Kayenta on gas fumes to fill up my tank at the dusty 7-Eleven that presides over the town’s single major intersection. Filling a tank with gas, during this particular summer, was an even more politically charged activity than usual—especially in the Navajo Nation, where people regularly drive large pickups 50 miles or more to fill water tanks, get groceries, or attend to livestock located in remote parts of the country.
During the summer months of 2008, the price for a tank of gas shot up to almost five dollars a gallon; oil companies raked in record profits; and a barrel of oil cost an unprecedented 147 dollars. Global political-economic forces of resource extraction and transnational corporate capitalism occupied an elephantine presence in every gas station in the continental US, and this particular 7-Eleven was no exception. That summer the weekly Navajo newspaper was full of commentary on the impending Presidential election, and most articles and editorials had a central, driving focus: the incapacitating effects of gas prices on Navajos, despite the tragic irony that the Navajo Nation sits on land rich in energy resources from which they have never truly profited.
Kayenta is not just home to the Peabody Coal mine, but also to a handful of the Navajo Nation’s over 1,000 unreclaimed uranium mine sites, which were abandoned after the climax of the uranium boom and left unreclaimed, with the radioactive guts of the mines exposed nakedly to the surrounding air, earth, water, animals, and human population. Kayenta’s only other economy, besides resource-extraction industries, comes from its adjacency to Monument Valley and the tourists who pass through to see its breathtaking geologic formations on their way to or from the Grand Canyon; however, the history of underdevelopment of the tourist economy by the federal government has critically impaired Navajos’ ability to develop this resource, which depends, among other things, on well-maintained infrastructure such as roads.
The next day, I had an entirely different experience driving into the former uranium boomtown of Moab, Utah. Here, the gas was just as expensive, but the sheen of a thriving, well-developed tourist destination in the height of the summer season posed a stark contrast to Kayenta, despite the fact that both towns sit in equally gorgeous landscapes and each has intimate history with the mining industry. I drove through town and nearly careened off the road when I passed by the Uranium Bike Shop, with racks of high-end mountain bikes out front and a three-foot tall graffiti tag of its name on its outside wall.
Later, as I walked my dog up Main Street, dodging tourists and looking for an affordable place to eat dinner, I passed under an antique-looking sign on an office building that read matter-of-factly “Uranium Offices, 11 N. Main.” Perplexed, I looked for a uranium company on the list of occupants, but found out later that “Uranium Offices” was simply the name of the building—named thusly during the height of the uranium frenzy and left unchanged, presumably, out of nostalgia for those boomtown days.
These two experiences of two very different towns, so closely juxtaposed, would eventually come to frame my own personal take on mine country, and how uranium in particular was inscribed on landscapes and came to acquire very curious meanings. In Kayenta, and in the Navajo Nation in general, uranium is just one of litany of metals and minerals that have been extracted from the land to a devastating extent, leaving behind scarred earth and people alike. In Moab, and former uranium boomtowns like it such as Durango, Colorado, mining has assumed an almost kitschy affect, a history that lends local flavor to ski areas, camping hot spots, and mountain biking destinations. In the Navajo Nation, mining is a very contemporary site of struggle over land, jobs, and sovereignty; in other parts of mine country, it is a colorful narrative of national history, its museums offering tourists an alternative activity on rainy days. This difference is to a large extent the natural evolution of very different political-economic treatments of mining in different places by mining corporations and federal and state governments: in some places mining messes were cleaned up—in others they were not, leaving behind ravaged ecologies that pose a danger to human and nonhuman health alike.
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