Unmaking wastelands : inheriting waste, war, and futures at the Hanford site

Abstract

Hanford, located on the Columbia Plateau in Washington state, hosted plutonium production facilities for the U.S.'s nuclear weapons arsenal from 1943 until 1988. It is the site of one of largest environmental remediation efforts in the world. It is also a territory to which three indigenous nations hold reserved treaty rights, and a site that is increasingly becoming a site of national historical commemoration. It is, thus, a geography where the long-lasting material, cultural, and political legacies of nuclear weapons production is being negotiated, connecting policy, education, and advocacy to multi-generational environment-making projects and processes. Through both an ethnographic engagement with advocates, officials, educators, stakeholders, and others involved negotiating the extended legacies of nuclear production at Hanford, as well as the many texts they produce, I map out some of the key spatiotemporal conditions, fissures, and inadequacies surrounding the governing the deep times of nuclear sacrifice zones, as well as the active processes of “inheriting” and disavowing them. I make four key arguments: 1. Remediation is a geopolitical environment-making process that reorganizes remains to prepare sites of actual or potential injury ” for imagined futures. 2. “Un-forgetting” the key, structuring absences of national myths, as well as technological ones, is a vital political task, particularly around sites of “slow violence.” 3. The inheritance of sites of multigenerational slow violence spurs advocacy with a logic of iteration. 4. The governance of the far future inherent in many environment-making processes can only ever be incomplete, in part because existing repertoires of governance, representation, and advocacy are often inadequate for the task.