1st Edition
Toxic Heritage Legacies, Futures, and Environmental Injustice
Toxic Heritage addresses the heritage value of contamination and toxic sites and provides the first in-depth examination of toxic heritage as a global issue.
Bringing together case studies, visual essays, and substantive chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume provides a critical framing of the globally expanding field of toxic heritage. Authors from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies examine toxic heritage as both a material phenomenon and a concept. Organized into five thematic sections, the book explores the meaning and significance of toxic heritage, politics, narratives, affected communities, and activist approaches and interventions. It identifies critical issues and highlights areas of emerging research on the intersections of environmental harm with formal and informal memory practices, while also highlighting the resilience, advocacy, and creativity of communities, scholars, and heritage professionals in responding to the current environmental crises.
Toxic Heritage is useful and relevant to scholars and students working across a range of disciplines, including heritage studies, environmental science, archaeology, anthropology, and geography.
Toxic Heritage: An Introduction
ELIZABETH KRYDER-REID AND SARAH MAY
SECTION 1: Introduction: Framing Toxicity
1 Toxic Legacies of Slickens in California: A Mobile Heritage of Hydraulic Mining Debris
GARETH HOSKINS
Visual Essay 1: Extraction Old and New: Toxic Legacies of Mining the Desert in Southwestern Africa
MIKE HANNIS AND SIAN SULLIVAN
2 Of Blaes and Bings: The (Non)toxic Heritage of the West Lothian Oil Shale Industry
JONATHAN GARDNER
3 When Toxic Heritage is Forever: Confronting PFAS Contamination and Toxicity as Lived Experience
THOMAS W. PEARSON AND DANIEL RENFREW
4 Plasticity and Time: Using the Stress-Strain Curve as a Framework for Investigating the Wicked Problems of Marine Pollution and Climate Change
JOHN SCHOFIELD AND CELMARA POCOCK
SECTION 2: Introduction: The Politics of Toxic Heritage
5 Heritage-Led Regeneration and the Sanitisation of Memory in the Lower Swansea Valley
SARAH MAY
Case Study 1: Ghost Wrecks of the Anthropocene: An Enduring Toxic Legacy of the Pacific War
MATTHEW CARTER, ASHLEY MEREDITH, AUGUSTINE C. KOHLER, RANGER WALTER,
BILL JEFFERY, AND PAUL HEERSINK
6 Military Legacies and Indigenous Heritage in Canada’s Newest National Park Reserve
LISA K. RANKIN, JULIA BRENAN, DAVID M. FINCH, SCOTT NEILSEN, AND ANATOLIJS VENOVCEVS
Case Study 2: Trash Fires as Toxic Heritage in Palestine
SOPHIA STAMATOPOULOU-ROBBINS
7 Politics of Mining: Toxic Heritage in the Atacama Desert
MARINA WEINBERG AND VALENTINA FIGUEROA
Case Study 3: Sticky, Stinky, Squalid: The Toxic Leachate of Households’ Waste in an Area of Urban Decay in Tehran (Iran)
LEILA PAPOLI-YAZDI
8 Toxic Landmarking and Technoprecarious Heritage in Ghana
PETER CARSKADON LITTLE AND GRACE ABENA AKESE
SECTION 3 Introduction: Affected Communities, Activism,
and Agency
9 Reluctant Returns: Repatriating a Poisoned Past
HOLLY CUSACK-MCVEIGH
Case Study 4: Public Memory of Toxic Displacement: Heavy Metal Contamination and Superfund Remediation in Federally Assisted Housing Communities
ELIZABETH GRENNAN BROWNING
Visual Essay 2: Translating and Transforming Toxicity: Moving Between Ethnography and Graphic Art
AMELIA FISKE AND JONAS FISCHER
10 Preservation by Demolition: Toxic Heritage in Contemporary China
LORETTA I.T. LOU
11 Unwanted Legacy and Memory of the Milieu: Toxic Materials, Remediation, Habituation (Estarreja, Portugal)
FABIENNE WATEAU, CARMEM REGINA GIONGO, DANIELA FIGUEIREDO, JOHNNY REIS, AND MANUELLE LAGO
12 Environmental and Embodied Agro-Toxic Heritage in Rural Uruguay: From Recognition to Transition to Sustainability Among Dairy Farmers
VICTORIA EVIA, SANTIAGO ALZUGARAY, AND JAVIER TAKS
SECTION 4 Introduction: Narratives of Toxic Heritage
13 Dirty Laundry: The Toxic Heritage of Dry Cleaning in Indianapolis, Indiana
ELIZABETH KRYDER-REID, OWEN DWYER, AND GABRIEL FILIPPELLI
Case Study 5: When Cleaning up the Battlefields from When Times of War Have Polluted Soils in Times of Peace: A Case Study of a Silent but Visible Toxic Legacy from the Great War
DANIEL HUBÉ AND TOBIAS BAUSINGER
14 Toxic City: Industrial Residues, the Body and Community Activism as Heritage Practice in Glasgow
ARTHUR MCIVOR
Case Study 6: Rubber as (Toxic) Heritage: Amazonian Knowledge and the Rubber Industry
TIAGO SILVA ALVES MUNIZ
Case Study 7: Three Memory Frameworks on Chernobyl
MATTEO BENUSSI
15 The Toxic Anthracite = Toxic Heritage
PAUL A. SHACKEL
SECTION 5 Introduction: Approaches and Interventions
16 Environmental Justice Tours: Transformative Narratives of Struggle, Solidarity, and Activism
ANA ISABEL BAPTISTA
Visual Essay 3: Getting the Lead Out, One Community at a Time
GABRIEL FILIPPELLI
Case Study 8: Climate Museum UK: Practices in Response to the Traumasphere
BRIDGET MCKENZIE
17 Toxic Heritage and Reparations: Activating Memory for Environmental and Climate Justice
LIZ ŠEVČENKO
Case Study 9: From Leftovers to Takeover: Latent Insurgency Amidst the System’s Remnants
ANA VALDERRAMA
Visual Essay 4: Taking Care of Nuclear Waste
CORNELIUS HOLTORF
18 Toxic and Wasted: Artists Thinking About How to Engage With Material Futures
ROSEMARY A. JOYCE
Conclusion: Why Toxic Heritage Matters
ELIZABETH KRYDER-REID AND SARAH MAY
Index
Biography
Elizabeth Kryder-Reid is Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies and director of the Cultural Heritage Research Center, Indiana University, Indianapolis.
Sarah May is a Senior Consultant in Cultural Heritage at the sustainable development consultancy, Arup.
