Waste,Environmental Politics and Dis/Engaged Publics

Introduction

The Anthropocene captures an emerging recognition of, and interest in, the specificity of human geo–social formations; that is, the simultaneous operation of human-created infrastructures and global politico–economic practices characteristic of industrial capitalism, and geological processes stretching back through deep time. The Anthropocene as concept must convincingly navigate between, on the one hand, a coming-to-terms with industrial capitalism’s relentless consumption and utilization of planetary resources as inaugurating a distinctive epoch; and on the other hand, recognizing that over the many epochs that mark our planet’s deep time, humans are but marginal players.

In 2000, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s term captured an idea that had been circulating for years; signaling the end of the Holocene, and the point at which human activity has intersected, in its significance and magnitude, with planetary, geophysical forces. When, exactly, we entered this era remains a matter of some dispute. Some say it was the late 17th century – the point at which the Industrial Revolution and the accelerated extraction and burning of fossil fuels began to take place. Others place it some 8000 years earlier in the Neolithic, with the clearing of forests for agriculture. These origin ‘signals’ (to borrow from Szerszynski, 2012) instantiate the extraction and use of fossil fuels as the central event to be considered in what Yusoff (2013: 780) terms ‘geologic life’. Fossil fuels are a form of necro waste (Olson, 2013), formed from the mainly anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms. Here, bacterial metabolism engages with life’s remains, heat, pressure and deep time to form solid and gaseous geologic strata. Fossil fuels speak to the longue durée of life and nonlife’s secular transubstantiation.

Until recently, Crutzen had been of the opinion that anthropocenic time began roughly 200 years ago, but recently changed his mind. He now places ‘the real start of the Anthropocene’ on a specific date: 16 July 1945 – the Trinity detonation – and its signature, invisible: radioactive decay. Once again, waste – this time nuclear – instantiates the Anthropocene. How has waste inaugurated an epoch, and the only epoch that centralizes humans? How has waste as a remainder, a fallout – a waste – become a signifying layer – Crutzen’s ‘golden spike’ – that defines our species’ legacy?

I want to draw the two sides of this planetary–human equation together in a consideration of waste. Whether in the form of mining, nuclear, industrial, hazardous, sewage, or municipal, and whether it is landfilled, incinerated or buried deep underground, waste constitutes perhaps the most abundant and enduring trace of the human; a major human-instantiated planetary de- and re-stratification.

Waste actualizes as a signifying layer in particular ways in Canada, a country known for its abundant and diverse geological strata, and technological and entrepreneurial ‘innovations’ in resource extraction and utilization, but less well known for its lavish production of myriad forms of waste. This article focuses on three case studies of waste’s ‘management’ (WM): practices that change both pedosphere and geosphere, which in turn rework the biosphere. Each case study exemplifies the simultaneous operation of global politico–economic practices characteristic of industrial capitalism, and complex metallurgic, mineral, and biological processes interacting over time. While each case differs substantially in the particulars of territory, waste material, and governance, they share a sense of the mundane, as the business-as-usual approach to waste as a technological matter, with disquieting consequences.

The banality of waste undergirds the politics of the Anthropocene in a particular way. Far from the international concern aroused by climate change, waste rather silently, and thus all the more inauspiciously, moves us towards a state whereby our only solution for dealing with the toxicity our relentless consumption and planetary depletion generates is by producing permanently temporary waste deposits for imagined futures to resolve. As such, we are not so much leaving behind our waste for some imagined future humanity to decipher our history as we are bequeathing a particular futurity through a projected responsibility. I will consider waste as an Anthropogenic signature through Isabelle Stengers’s provocation to reconsider democratic engagement around environmental and other public concerns.

The rich literature concerned with consensus building and democratic engagement strategies already points to many of the challenges such engagements entail (see, for example, Wynne, 2006; Cooke and Kothari, 2001). Stengers (2005) is wary of all forms of public engagement: ‘the consensual transformation of the “ignorant public” masterworld into the “citizens” masterworld is an Empty Great Idea. It will not work’ (pp. 159–160). As Adrian Mackenzie (2013: 484) points out, ‘any public that is completely identified and defined by pre-given processes and forms falls short of democratic political practice’. For Stengers, any hope exists in the form of objection because it ‘rejects the differentiation of ignorant publics and knowing science’ (Mackenzie, 2013: 481–482). What Stengers (2005: 160) refers to as ‘objecting minorities’ produce ‘not as their aim but in the very process of their emergence the power to object and to intervene in matters which they discover concern them’. This is the difference, argues Stengers, between a public concerned with validating and participating, and the ‘potentially most interesting possible public of all: a verifying public’ (Mackenzie, 2013: 491). Such an objecting minority would have to work against the assimilation of public consultation and democratic engagement with WM, and this is difficult to envision since protests all tend to engage with the assessment exercises set up by government and industry. ¹ This is the case, I will argue, with much of the system of WM in Canada. The following case studies consider participating publics and their possible opposite, an objecting public and, indeed, an objecting bio-geology.

Case Study 1: Participating Politics

Canada is the world’s highest per capita municipal solid waste (MSW) producer (Conference Board of Canada, 2013). Canadians produce well over a tonne of waste per person annually (Statistics Canada, 2008: 7) – most of which is landfilled – and municipalities across the country are grappling with landfill saturation. Many municipalities export their waste to other Canadian regions, to the United States, and other countries such as Mexico, China and Korea.

My research collaborators and I completed an empirical study of WM governance in a medium-sized city in southern Ontario. This city, like many in Canada, has already faced landfill closure, and is currently transporting the entirety of its waste (and most of its diverted waste) to other provinces and countries. With transportation costs increasing, public memories of a landfill in the vicinity leaching contaminants, and a municipal City Council intent on making the city the most ‘sustainable’ in Canada, the city is primed for public consultation and engaged citizenship.

Our study found that WM, like that in most southern regions of Canada, is largely a banal, mundane, and highly routinized practice (see Hird et al., 2014). Indeed, WM is a particularly robust site of neoliberal governmentality, or as Latour (2007: 817) would have it, Politics-5, which describes

all those institutions [that] appear on the surface to be absolutely apolitical, and yet in their silent, ordinary, fully routinized ways they are perversely the most important aspects of what we mean by living together – even though no one raises hell about them and they hardly stir congressmen out of their parliamentary somnolence. (Emphasis in original)

Our empirical research corroborates existing analyses of various WM siting assessment exercises to suggest that WM industries operating in tandem with municipal governments increasingly ask members of the public to accede to prescribed assessment exercises that circumscribe the parameters to, for example, discussions of ‘end-of-pipe’ responses (i.e. disposal). Once this key parameter is set in advance, discussions are further circumscribed to decisions on a limited number of sites, technologies, consultation and discussion events, and consultation time frames (Ali, 1999; Coninck et al., 1999; Dodds and Hopwood, 2006; Einsiedel et al., 2001; Healy, 2010; Petts, 1998, 2001). Multinational corporations specializing in waste technology assessment, siting, construction, operations, monitoring, closure, and aftercare increasingly manage this framing. With on-site engineers and scientists, networks with government, and sophisticated, well-budgeted, in-house public relations management teams, these new brokers increasingly manage municipal and public discussions of WM through feasibility reports, town hall meetings, presentations, and other forms of consultation (Allen, 2007; Corse, 2012; Marres, 2005; Van de Poel, 2008). Indeed, neoliberal governance enhances industry’s monopoly by embedding techniques such as public consultations and feasibility studies within industry’s remit. In other words, geo-engineering and economics are the primary discourses through which waste operates.

Waste only tends to shift from being an object to an issue when municipalities consider increased user fees for waste disposal or declare the need to site a new landfill and/or introduce other WM technologies such as incinerators. This shift may also occur when landfill leachate breaks free of its constraints, particulates and organic compounds from incinerators infiltrate human lungs, composting sites emit nauseating odor, bioreactors malfunction, or the masses of waste necessary to ‘feed the beast’ of incinerators or waste-to-energy facilities lead to the importation of other municipalities’ (or countries’) waste. ³ And even in well-known cases, which galvanize protestors over extended periods of time, and may indeed halt the production of landfills, incinerators or waste-to-energy facilities, the success of these assembled publics is always mitigated by the fact that they inevitably focus on end-of-pipe issues, and that a successful protest that halts the siting, construction or operation of a WM facility also means continued waste transport and, eventually, another end-of-pipe facility.

The point is that, unlike phenomena like climate change that are readily identified with the Anthropocene as constituting a ‘time of great peril’ (Szerszynski, 2010: 8), waste flows in southern Canada are remarkably out of sight, and largely out of mind. Geo-engineering WM technologies do not garner the same media and public attention as those being proposed to mitigate the effects of global warming. So while I agree with Nigel Clark’s (2013: 1) interesting provocation that geo-engineering is ‘extending the reach of politics’ (in new ways in the case of climate change, emphasis in original), this constitutes the business-as-usual politics of neoliberal governance in the case of WM. I certainly agree that it is geo-engineering that is ‘most directly and practically geared towards the prospect of transgressing thresholds in earth systems’ (p. 5), and this is precisely the worry. By the time municipalities consider a WM technology, the need for this technology has already been established, a site has been selected, risks have been identified and assessed to be within acceptable values, and often an (industry-determined) developer has been chosen. The increasing hegemony of multinational WM corporations – corporations adept at managing public involvement – means that industry increasingly defines the parameters of assessment and ipso facto what may be examined, discussed, deliberated, and agreed upon. The industry-produced WM feasibility studies that increasingly inform government deliberations and decisions are focused on economic sustainability and are supported by in-house science and engineering reports that emphasize techno-scientific responses with known short-term risks (see Hird, 2012).

As such, multinational corporations have become vital allies through which municipalities attempt to turn an emerging issue into a technical problem governed by a clearly demarcated general will and common good. Like Adrian Mackenzie’s (2013) analysis of public participation in scientific and government discussions of synthetic biology, WM works in similar ways. WM may not be touted, as synthetic biology is, as a ‘vehicle for global salvation’ (p. 483) but it is discussed in terms of solving a public need. Working with Stengers’s flat rejection of a participating democratically engaged public, Mackenzie points out that a public governed by pre-defined parameters obviates democratic political practice (p. 484). In the case of waste then, an objecting public would need to work against the assimilation of public consultation and democratic engagement with WM, and this is difficult to envision since protests tend to engage with the assessment exercises set up by government and industry. ⁴ For Stengers (2005: 160), an ‘objecting minority’ would need to refuse the insidious normality of waste’s management as such. Such a public would need to not only refuse to participate in the established democratic process, but through action, would need to ‘intervene in matters which they discover concern them’. This is the difference, argues Stengers, between a public concerned with validating and participating, and the ‘potentially most interesting possible public of all: a verifying public’ (Mackenzie, 2013: 491). This verifying public would be an uncertain public, one ‘haunted by uncertainty’. This public ‘might do more than validate’; it may ‘risk saying or doing something different’. For all its claims, Mackenzie argues there has been negligible verification or objecting to synthetic biology, and I argue the same is the case with WM in Canada’s southern communities. That is, with regard to WM, there seems no more than a ‘slender hope’ for a verifying or objecting public. And perhaps, as Stengers notes, we would even find it difficult to see what an objecting public would look like. In the following case study I propose that Inuit people in Iqaluit and elsewhere in Nunavut may constitute just such an objecting minority.

Case Study 2: Objecting Politics?

I always thought as an Inuk kid growing up in an Inuit world that I had my own land. I always thought that. But then one day we were asked to vote for Nunavut. And then I asked: ‘Why?’ They said to me that we are selecting some of our land, some of our land that was to become ours. (Anonymous, in Henri, 2012: 117)

Nunavut communities produced little material waste prior to European contact but are now the largest producers of waste in Canada’s territories (Van Gulck, 2012). Waste did not emerge as a controversial issue until the early 1990s when the Nunavut Land Claims Act prioritized the clean-up of waste sites in communities throughout the Territory and, as a result, brought attention to hazardous and non-hazardous WM practices.

The Canadian North, where I am conducting research on waste in Iqaluit, has become a priority for research and resource extraction, and an increasing number of southern researchers, government, and industry representatives live in the North on a temporary basis. As Iqaluit is the main entry point to, and the largest community within, Nunavut, non-permanent residents make up a distinct subset of Iqaluit’s mainly Inuit population. With at least two flights in and out of Iqaluit per day, there is a constant flow of southerners. The socioeconomic status of Iqaluit’s transient population contrasts with that of its permanent residents; Inuit in Nunavut have amongst the lowest household incomes in the country (Statistics Canada, 2012) and communities face myriad social issues. Along with being the highest producers of waste, Iqaluit ranks as having the highest rate per capita of smoking in Canada. Iqaluit residents also have high levels of diabetes, heart disease and other diet-related illnesses. Much of the food in Iqaluit’s two grocery stores is highly processed, packaged, and expensive. Everything from the south arrives by air or sea, as there are no roads connecting Iqaluit to the south (as there are for Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories). Most Inuit children do not graduate from the city’s only high school. Violence against women is a major issue, and the single women’s shelter struggles to meet the overwhelming need. Substance abuse is a major problem, and alcohol can only be purchased in restaurants and hotels without an individual license. Suicide rates are by far the highest in Canada.

Waste is endemic to Canada’s North and proliferates on and in the landscape. The Distant Early Warning (DEW) line, set up during the Cold War to detect incoming Soviet bombers and sea-land invasion, left in its wake 63 abandoned sites contaminated with various toxic chemicals, portions of which have had to be removed – square inch by square inch – to the south for treatment. The numerous military stations littered across the Northern landscape also present various waste issues, from abandoned equipment to leaking chemical containers and brownfields. ⁵ This pales, however, in comparison to the monolithic mining, oil, and gas drilling operations in the North, that some predict will constitute a ‘Warm War’ over dwindling resources (Stankievech, 2009).

A unique assemblage governs Iqaluit’s waste landscape: recent colonial and neocolonial histories; government policies and initiatives; treaty rights; physical geographies; corporate interests; physical and cultural wellbeing; devolution agreements; climate change (i.e. melting permafrost); southern Canadian influence; globalization; socioeconomics; and the material characteristics of waste.

The city currently practices open dumping and the city’s landfill, which has caught fire several times, grows just across the bay. People tell me the dump is like an iceberg: people gravitated towards this site because of its deep ravine, which means the giant mound I stand on conceals two-thirds of the garbage that is below ground level. The city’s open sewage lagoon is at the side of the road on the way to the dump. A number of materials (tires, refrigerators, and so on) have been collected over time with some idea of transporting these materials to the south for reprocessing, and they lie abandoned on the tundra outside the dump. ⁶ Contractors over-order materials since the cost of transporting further material is prohibitive. Unused materials are either abandoned on site or taken to the open dump. Composting was tried but is currently not practiced.

There are myriad challenges facing southern practices of WM in Iqaluit. Territorial legislation requires new landfill development to occur at least 450m away from remediated and un-remediated waste disposal sites, which means siting is a major issue. Six of these sites surround the city of Iqaluit. Moreover, landfills in the North require particular geo-engineering: there is no soil, and tundra is hard to move. There are no trees for aftercare (i.e. no hope of phytoremediation), and all the equipment to site, build, maintain, close and provide aftercare for the landfill must be flown or shipped in.

In keeping with southern forms of governance, the City of Iqaluit has commissioned and prepared over 30 reports, sustainability plans and so on. In one of these documents,What We Feel: Sharing Our Stories (2013), Inuit Iqaluit residents expressed their concern with being over-consulted about sustainability issues and asked government representatives to ‘review previous studies and to reuse previous consultations, so that we don’t repeat the past’ (p. 4). And I think this is a key part of understanding how the politics of waste in Iqaluit differs from that of the south.

Claire Colebrook’s (2012: 185) claim, that ‘none of the terms of our ethical vocabulary – justice, fairness, respect, forgiveness, hospitality or virtue – are up to the task’, could not be more apropos with regard to waste in Canada’s North. These words, repeated in government and industry reports, community meetings and so on to characterize the opportunities for growth, exploration, and prosperity have done little to change the neocolonial structure and practices in Nunavut. And this, combined with the inexpressible and unaccountable legacy of colonialism, suggests Iqaluit’s majority may perhaps be Stengers’s ‘objecting minority’. To illustrate this point, I turn to a discussion of birds and their particular relationship with waste.

The modern landfills servicing southern Canadian communities, like those in North America, generally have a particular relationship with birds. Gulls are most certainly the lowly, senseless and reckless underclass of the modern landfill, or ‘bird buffets’ as they are colloquially called. Landfills are a primary food source for the gull: in under 15 minutes at a landfill, seagulls are able to satisfy their daily nutritional requirements (Department of Environmental Protection, 1998: 4). And then some: gulls are also vectors for various diseases, and their excrement can contaminate public water supplies with coliform and other materials. According to a Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection report, the goal of any landfill is not only to completely prevent gulls from feeding but also to ‘eliminate or reduce the suitability and attractiveness of the facility for other gull activities, such as resting, roosting, or loafing’. In my numerous trips to landfills, I do not witness much gull ‘loafing’. Indeed, modern southern landfills in Canada and elsewhere have a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to gulls, which is why they have introduced falcons and hawks to replace or supplement the guns, pyrotechnics, propane canons, balloons, and dogs that used to patrol the landfill landscape. These birds of prey have become part of WM big business. According to hawk handlers, they are allowed to eat any gull they catch, although this is not particularly good for the hawks because the gulls can carry contaminants through their contact with leachate. ⁷

Juxtaposed against these ‘trash animals’ (Nagy and Johnson, 2013) are Iqaluit’s ravens. As I stand on Iqaluit’s dump, there must be dozens if not hundreds of these birds casually circling the dump, swooping leisurely to land on fresh piles of discarded food that the steady flow of trucks deposit on the colossal dump. The ravens are not in any hurry to grab the wasted food and fly off; they take their time. This is, in some ways, their dump, and no one attempts to scare them off. When I ask why, I am told the ravens are part of the community.

Ravens are the most common birds in Northern communities, and remain in the far North throughout the winter. According to Inuit creation narratives, Raven made the world and the waters with the beat of his wings (Blake, 2001; Asatchaq and Lowenstein, 1992). In these narratives, ravens possess the ability to transmute; presently, it seems, into garbage pickers. Raven the trickster is respected for his resilience, intelligence, and sociability. Raven teaches children how to live in community, and newborn Inuit boys are clothed in raven skin to help them become successful hunters (Polarlife, 2013). Ravens follow polar bears and scavenge leftover carcasses, and Inuit mimic the raven’s ‘caw’ to attract polar bears when they hunt. Ravens also call wolves to dead animals so they will make the carcasses more accessible to the birds. Perhaps they now call humans to dumpsites to leave fresh trash.

Gulls and ravens may be invoked as metaphors for various human relations such as neocolonialism but I suggest a more literal reading of birds and the landscape. Neoliberal governance organizes southern WM, and WM industries – always keen to demonstrate their public responsiveness – heed community complaints about the bird multitudes that fly to and from landfills, and the excrement they leave behind. People do not like the gulls’ smell or sounds. Enlisting hawks to terrorize and kill gulls makes good entrepreneurial sense: the hawks have silenced community complaints. The hawks, then, become part of the geoengineering architecture that encourages people to forget about waste beyond their curbside. Waste is something we do not want to remember, or be remembered for (Van Wyck, 2012). It is difficult to take responsibility for forgotten actions, and waste requires relentless remembering of practices prior to our industrial past and far into the future.

The ravens in Iqaluit operate within, it seems to me, a very different political economy. If western landfilling depends upon a kind of forgetting, then an ‘Aboriginal cosmopolitanism’ is about remembering (Clark, 2008). Connecting with the environment, in other words, requires remembering the experiences and sensations of others. Some indigenous cosmology includes in this experience that of nonhuman animals as well as the inorganic – weather, climate, mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes –which all make up remembering (Assembly of First Nations, 1993; Atleo, 2004; Cajete, 2000). This sense of remembering calls an unknowable future into the present, and remembering, in this sense, is as much about the future as it is about the past.

It is this mode of remembering that provides an account of the Australian Aborigine way of leaving waste as it is created, on the landscape, in plain view. These acts, across generations, strike colonial settlers as the antithesis of civilization, where all waste must be scrupulously moved away from people and their communities as one of civilization’s key conditions (Freud, 2010[1930]). For Aborigines, argues Bird Rose (2003, 2004), this casting away from oneself and burying waste, this out-of-sight-out-of mind, amounts to ‘self-erasure’, the performance of a lie, a refusal to witness, and ‘the equivalent of sneaking around the country’ (Bird Rose, 2003: 62). She writes:

The remains of people’s action in country tell an implicit story of knowledgeable action: these people knew where they were, they knew how to get the food that is there in the country. The country responded to their presence by providing for them, and the remains are evidence of the reciprocity between country and people. In contrast, my teachers held self-erasure to be the equivalent of sneaking around the country. Antisocial people who do not announce themselves, and use special techniques to avoid leaving tracks or traces, are up to no good. These are people who intend harm and who have something to hide. Stories about them are well known, and the evidence of their activity, in the form of illness or death, is all around one. But the actual signs of their presence are invisible; self-erasure is part of their harmful art. (Rose, 2003: 62, emphasis added)

Contemporary Inuit communities continue to speak of nanuq as sentient beings who are ‘part of an integrated system of reciprocal rights and responsibilities between humans and animals’ (p. 171). When hunted in a way that demonstrates respect, nanuq respond by replenishing their numbers. For Inuit hunters, southern researchers do not respect polar bears, or other Northern wildlife, and resent regulations they believe will decrease bear populations. As one Inuit board member of a Hunters and Trappers Organization stated:

I notice something about Inuit and Qallunaat [white men] researchers. It’s that they can hardly understand each other …. Inuit believe that if they hunt more bears there will be more. But if they start leaving them, then bears will be gone. White people believe that polar bears will start disappearing if Inuit start hunting them too much. But according to Inuit way, it’s the other way around [laughter]. That is why they cannot understand each other. (p. 198)

Case Study 3: Objecting Bio-Geology?

Like waste in Iqaluit, Canadian mining is a case study in colonialism, varying degrees and times of under- and over-government involvement, treaty rights, shifting policies and regulations, science and engineering consulting and research, and the very real material, social, economic, and political effects of resource extraction and development, and its waste byproducts.

Canada is in its fifth century of mining, and industries are regulated by the ‘free-entry’ system, including the right to explore Crown lands – which at times has been done in secret (Duhaime et al., 2005). In 2011, Canada remained the top destination for mining exploration, accounting for 18 percent of global investment (not including Canada’s mining interests in some 100 other countries). Mining waste constitutes the largest proportion of waste in Canada. Approximately two million tonnes of mining waste is produced in Canada per day, and tens to hundreds of millions of tonnes per single mine’s lifetime.

Mining waste consists of any material that a mining company does not consider profitable. Between 95 to 99.9995 percent of mined ore is considered waste. Once extracted, waste rock is typically dumped outside the mine, and can spread over several kilometers. Tailings are typically put in ‘slurry’ composed of water, ground ore, and residual chemicals from mine processing (MiningWatch Canada, 2009). Various toxic heavy metals such as nickel, copper, cadmium, arsenic and selenium can be leached from mine waste.

Canada’s long history of uncontrolled mine waste dumping is now eclipsed by considerable geo-engineering involved in siting, building, and managing impoundments with raised embankments used to contain solid and liquid mining waste. These more exacting geo-engineering standards may not have been applied, however, to the approximately 27,000 abandoned or ‘orphaned’ mines in Canada. According to a recent inventory, more than 60 percent of orphaned mines ‘appear to have had field inspections, [but] most have had little or no work for physical or chemical stability’ (Mackasey, 2000: 4, emphasis added).

According to MiningWatch Canada (2009) at least two major mining waste impoundment failures occur per year around the world, where toxic material flows downstream to rivers, lakes or oceans. And since 2002, mining companies have been allowed to use fish-bearing water bodies (lakes, wetlands, streams) as Tailings Impoundment Areas, which then exempts these companies from the Canadian Fisheries Act, which protects against the destruction of fish habitats (see also Canadian Broadcasting Company, CBC, 2008). Mining companies closer to oceans often prefer to dump their tailings via under-ocean pipelines where the waste is deposited on the ocean floor. Backfilling also occurs, in which mining waste is mixed with cement and open pits are re-filled. Dry disposal also commonly occurs, in which waste is piled in a designated area and eventually covered with soil (MiningWatch Canada, 2009).

The Giant mine, located on the Ingraham Trail, close to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, is the most well-known abandoned mine in Canada. Claims to the Giant mine were staked back in 1936, and the mine was brought into full production from 1948 to 2004, producing over 7 million ounces of gold. Mining gold at this site consisted of roasting arsenopyrite ore, which produces arsenic trioxide dust – a highly toxic form of arsenic – as a byproduct. ⁸ In 1999 the Royal Oak Mines Ltd., who had owned the mine since 1990, filed for bankruptcy, and the mine rights were sold to Miramar Mining, which with its environmental liabilities severed, then used the Reclamation Security Agreement to terminate its obligations when the mine closed five years later. After the mine was finally abandoned in 2005, it became the responsibility of the Ministry of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND). ⁹ That is, it officially became a public liability for which remediation is now estimated to cost 1 billion dollars (CBC, 2013). Besides the approximately one hundred on-site buildings, many of which contain hazardous materials, eight open pits, and contaminated soils and waste rock around the mine, there are some 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust to remediate. ¹⁰

After considering some 56 methods of ‘take it out’ versus ‘leave it in’ technologies, industry and government now favor the frozen block method (FBM). This is by no means an immediate solution, as it will take about 20 years to complete in various stages. The FBM is being used in several mines in Canada whereby mining waste (rich in arsenic and other dangerous elements, minerals and metals) is frozen in perpetuity, with the hope that a future generation will safely resolve this ongoing waste issue.

The in perpetuity time frame is alarming local residents, and the lengthy stages of the environmental assessment are by no means concluded (to date I count some 664 documents relating to the Giant mine waste remediation assessment). The board reviewing the plans noted public concern over the project’s indefinite time frame: ‘Given enough time, the project is eventually likely to cause significant adverse effects’ (Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum, 2013). In a similar vein, a petition from Alternatives North asks of the Office of the Auditor General:

Please provide a detailed justification for the trade-offs that were made in choosing the frozen block method for arsenic containment at the Giant mine even though it requires perpetual care forever and how the needs of future generations were considered. (O’Reily, 2013: 2)

Hedging their bets, Bach-Tech’s ‘Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements’ in their press release announcing their contract award to clean up Snow Lake’s arsenopyrite waste reads:

Certain statements included or incorporated by reference in this news release, including information as to the future financial or operating performance of the Company, its subsidiaries and its projects, constitute forward-looking statements. The words ‘believe,’ ‘expect,’ ‘anticipate,’ ‘contemplate,’ ‘target,’ ‘plan,’ ‘intends,’ ‘continue,’ ‘budget,’ ‘estimate,’ ‘may,’ ‘schedule’ and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include, among other things, statements regarding targets, estimates and assumptions in respect of gold production and prices, operating costs, results and capital expenditures, mineral reserves and mineral resources and anticipated grades and recovery rates. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties and contingencies. Many factors could cause the Company’s actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements made by, or on behalf of, the Company. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and, accordingly, investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein. Forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release and the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly such forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. (2013: 1, emphases added)

While acknowledging the speculative nature of forward-looking statements with regard to profits, little is said about the significant material uncertainties here. These uncertainties relate not only to the amount and severity of waste (contaminated or not) produced, but to interacting geological thresholds. These thresholds speak to a verifying or objecting bio-geology that interacts with complex thresholds. To take one example, global warming is melting the permafrost that was meant to keep mining waste frozen in Canada’s North, and upon which the FBM technology is in part based. Buried mining waste, not waiting inertly for future generations, is involved. Mineweb’s disclaimer inadvertently calls our attention to the inability to completely identify and define the pre-given processes that are not only affecting contemporary waste practices, but future ones as well.

Conclusions

The buffalo owes his extermination largely to his own unparalleled stupidity.

(William Hornaday, US gaming enthusiast turned conservationist, 1889)

Waste brings into sharp resolution the interplay between geological processes stretching through deep time, and humanity’s short-run but significant activity. MSW, mining, and myriad other forms of waste constitute terminal capitalism’s profound fallout, ‘underwritten by ideologies of development and modernization’ (Sandlos and Keeling, 2012a: 5). Recent calls for, and mobilizations of, participatory and consensus-building publics – and even the possibility of an objecting public – take place within the context of neo-capitalism.

Unlike climate change and biodiversity loss – understandably high on the list of concerns – waste is not yet an Anthropocentric figure despite the close relationship between matters of acknowledged concern – fossil fuels, climate change, and biodiversity loss – and WM’s de-stratification of resources that requires the use of immense tracts of land, the destruction of habitats, contamination (from leachate, slurry and so on), and the colossal use of fossil fuels.

Discussions of the Anthropocene emphasize the bequeathing of environmental risk, thresholds, and crises to future generations, including the apocalyptic foreclosure of future generations themselves. Landfilled, mining, openly dumped, and other forms of waste and their environmental contamination are bequeathed from previous generations; gifts of leaking and spilling leachate, abandoned mines, arsenic trioxide tailings and so on. This dubious inheritance assumes a particularly troubling hue when we consider neocolonialist inheritance in Canada’s North. Experts estimate the longevity of the landfills we are building now in terms of less than a hundred years (if every step of the siting, construction, maintenance and aftercare process is followed according to the strictest regulations), after which levels of toxicity are hoped to have dissipated. Mining waste remediation does not even carry this anticipatory promise – as landfilling and nuclear waste repositories do – of decreasing danger. And further, unlike climate change, where a sense of urgency provokes geo-engineering proposals for mitigation, there is no sense from industry, the government, or most members of the public that any abatement to waste is coming, or should come, soon.

Clark and Yusoff (2014) argue that we must find ways of recognizing ‘geologic processes as subtending biological possibilities’. Through landfilling and technologies such as the FBM we are recomposing strata we have disturbed, but not with the original ingredients. And with the increasing use of abandoned mines as landfills, as well as the mining of landfills for reprocessing materials – both increasingly common practices in Canada – different waste forms are merging in complex and unpredictable ways. And yet unlike climate change modeling, we have little idea of waste’s bio-geological thresholds; not just in terms of sheer volume, but in terms of the heterogeneous mix of ‘unknown unknowns’ in landfilled materials that bacteria metabolize into new entities, or what landslides, avalanches, earthquakes, floods, and melting permafrost will make of re-stratified mining waste. The need to store forms of mining waste in perpetuity speaks to its degree of toxicity.

And unlike climate change mitigation, where technologies are the subject of debate – where they have not yet settled – there has long been a political sedimentation of WM technologies. WM technologies encourage more waste, further expansion, further de- and re-stratification, and further landscape transformation. And these technologies, as Melinda Cooper (2010: 184) argues, ‘may [themselves] be indistinguishable from the [thing we are trying to solve] – that is to say, equally unpredictable, incalculable and turbulent in its unfolding’. So while I agree with Clark (2013) that geo-engineering is ‘most directly and practically geared towards the prospect of transgressing thresholds in earth systems’, I argue this further solidifies publics to consensus building and democratic deliberation subtended by corporate and government interests. In terms of waste, transgressing thresholds largely substantiates Stengers’s participating public. Objecting to WM must therefore resemble something quite different; perhaps the kind of waste practices very visible in Iqaluit and other Northern communities, which might explain why southern Canadians typically appeal to the need to introduce ‘modern’ WM in Canada’s North. There is an understanding in these Northern communities – born from a starkly different environmental cosmology – that the landscape itself participates in and objects to human practices. To wit, Iqaluit’s municipal government is now engaged in yet another sustainability exercise centrally involving waste, and earnest government representatives are collaborating with WM industry in (yet another) attempt to modernize Iqaluit’s waste management structures and practices. So far, though, it has met with little success. The open dump receives round-the-clock deposits, waste is left on the landscape, and the ravens have free rein.