On What We Bury
By Rebecca Altman
For CR and MS
From my kitchen window near Boston, I can see a hill where I otherwise shouldn’t. It stands at the center of a park that also has a playground, two ball fields, and some skate ramps. Its scale always strikes me as disproportionate to the more gradual rise and fall of our eastern New England landscape. Nevertheless, in the winter, my sons march up one side and sled down the other. When they look back on their childhood, this “hill” will serve as landmark.
It is the summer of 2012 and I am at this playground with my sons. The other parents complain about the odd weather. Hurricane Sandy hasn’t arrived yet to churn the conversation into something more gritty and real. She’ll come in the fall. So for now, the weather is a common topic of small talk. And to many parents here, the weather seems strange, but it’s my experience that these conversations never go anywhere, which is why playgrounds are the place I feel most estranged. Climate and environmental issues, as pressing as they are, are subterranean here, which, at this park, strikes me as especially ironic. This park, you see—the one visible from my house, the one on which my sons now play—was once the Reed Brook municipal landfill, which explains the “hill” as a mound of our forebears’ trash.
I can remember other play-spaces reclaimed from wasteland. Take, for example, the public pool in the northern New Jersey suburb where I grew up. My mother wouldn’t let me run around barefoot. Too many glass shards had worked their way to the surface. But who talks about such things? We bury these, too, don’t we?
Here’s another thought that surfaces at the park: Before it was a park, before it was a landfill, it was farmland. Prized celery was raised here. This is a place where human hands have planted and interred. I get to thinking how similar the acts of burial and planting are, and what they reflect about our relationship with the Earth and with each other. We open the Earth and place into it seed. We place into it our deceased beloved. We ask the Earth to take what we bury and to give us the solace that comes from cyclical conversion of dormancy and death into transformation or new life. And yet, we also open the Earth and bury what we’ve wasted, or what we want to hide, and then bury the thought of it. With our landfills, and our mines backfilled with tailings, our deep injection wells, our caverns of radioactive waste, our faith placed in underground reservoirs of sequestered carbon, we ask the Earth to hold our waste when the Earth isn’t static or fixed. It is flux and system and process. There are things that cannot be contained, like glass shards or radioactivity or grief. What I am grappling with here is how we came to believe that certain things we bury could remain outside the cycle of life, or that they would stay where we put them.
When our ancestors uncover these artifacts of our civilization, when they exhume what we’ve buried, I wonder what conclusions they will draw about who we were. I have a hunch that what we bury, and how we buried it, will reflect our relationship to time. I can see the park and its mound from where I now write and I wonder if burial, in this sense, is our attempt to arrest time, or to deny its perpetual creep. Perhaps it is our refusal to look forward, as if our actions would have no consequence to some remote time or place, as if the future would never arrive.
* * *
Twice my silhouette has come to resemble the rolling landscape that is common to New England—my belly round with child, my chest swollen with milk. I have birthed two sons. In fall 2012, I weaned my younger son so that I could travel to dry, arid red rock country, to Moab, Utah, an old mining town flanked by two national parks. I had never been away from my children.
In Moab, I am to attend a working congress on the rights of future generations and the responsibilities the living hold to them. I will be one of a hundred people, mostly women, who have come to Moab to begin drafting a bill of rights for this too-often forsaken and voiceless group who will bear the consequences of their forbears’—of our— decisions. It is to be a daunting task. It will stretch my moral imagination the way the horizon will stretch my understanding of scale and geologic time. What might life look like millennia from now? How might one serve as sentinel and guardian? How might we become, as Carolyn Raffensperger would ask in her opening remarks to the Congress, “beloved ancestors?”
Before the Congress opens, I visit Arches National Park, just north of town with two friends and fellow Congress attendees, Madeleine and Bindu. Arches National Park sits in the Paradox Basin in the heart of the Colorado Plateau. In our rental car, we pass through the gates and ascend the steep switchbacks that lead into the park. As we crest the top, the parkland reveals itself. It fills the horizon. I think of Terry Tempest Williams who marveled how this land “is red is rose is pink is scarlet is magenta is salmon,” (136) as if, she wrote, the rocks might bleed (23). The road through Arches winds for miles around giant red rock monuments, each with names like the Courthouse Towers, the Organ, and the Three Gossips. These stone monoliths, with their windows and hollowed arches and boulders balanced atop spires, were created by incremental acts of wind and water, and by a restive Earth, forever shifting underneath.
We park at the trailhead for Delicate Arch, a likeness of which adorns Utah’s license plates, and follow the red rock cairns that mark the path to what has been called a sacred place. It’s a modest hike, more than a mile, some uphill. The trail winds past an ancient Ute petroglyph, itself a marvel. Sandstone slickrock tower above us, and we slide along a narrow path that hugs a cliff ledge until, finally, we round a corner and there, teetering on the edge of a great red bowl, on the lip of Salt Valley, stands Delicate Arch—red and regal—with clouds sweeping across a cerulean sky in arch formations of their own. The La Sal Mountains (which include some 12,000 foot peaks) are plum purple in the distance. We walk the rim and photograph one another with the arch rising 50 feet over our heads, while a line of tourists, who arrive by the busload, curve behind us waiting for their iconic moment beneath the arch.
We slip behind a sandstone dome, smooth like a church bell, and sit on the edge of the rim, its walls striated, and each striation a chapter in its history. To look down into the canyon is to look back through time. My friends lie with their bodies sinking into the contours of the warm, rust-colored rock. I drop to my knees. We do not speak. The tourists murmur. Two ravens call. The wind chants through the canyon below. I unfold the pamphlet the ranger handed us when we entered the park. It explains how everything we see was once buried beneath an ocean, and how the ocean deposited the sand and salt that surrounds us now as exposed sandstone, as red rock. Is there a more humbling experience than to kneel in a desert where an ocean rose and receded, and where humans have roamed for 10,000 years?
I sense the depth of geologic time—time measured in millennia. I sense the continuity of life, the passing of generations, one to the next. I sense the scale of earthly devastation and what is at stake. These rocks stood here before humans evolved to measure time, and I know they will outlast us. They will withstand droughts and fire and storms and floods, as they will withstand human ambition to develop other public lands for oil and gas extraction at a time when scientists tell us these are things best left unearthed.
Time feels present here, like it is holding court, as if only here, could I speak to it. This place feels like a portal, a confessional, and I feel like a pilgrim. And so, on these ancient, numinous rocks, I find myself in prayer. A prayer to time. A prayer for time. It feels like union.
I realized I am like the Earth. I, too, am a waste receptacle. A landfill. A vault. A burial plot for a class of industrial chemicals called bioaccumlatives and persistent pollutants, some of which may well be timeless. Our industrial waste tinkers with the chemistry of our bodies and the chemistry of our climate. And our bodies reflect the state of our environment, and like these rocks, tell stories about our collective history of desecration, both what we inherited and what we perpetuated. But I am not a static container. I am flux and system and process, too, which means nothing stays embodied or buried forever. As a mother, I have bequeathed this history to my children. I have passed it along against my will. Such is the legacy of our time: heavy metals, pesticides, and some classes of long-lived pollutants that did not exist when our grandmothers swam in the interior oceans of our great grandmothers’ wombs.
And yet, the question I am trying to ask is: how do I respond?
How do I bear this? How do I bear witness? And I ask one more question: Will I bear another child?
* * *
When the Congress opens, we acknowledge the environmental legacies we will leave behind. It is a truth telling, a reckoning, a reconciliation. As women within the environmental movement, we weep at the coming change as we weep at the chasms that exist between us. We share stories of miscarriage and intolerance and infertility and racism and loss and stagnation and injustice. We ask: what is the future of our fragmented environmentalisms and what is the role of women in carrying them forward? And finally, we draft a document that we call a living declaration of the rights of future generations. It is not a static document to be displayed as a monument, but one to be amended by women from around the world, passed on and changed, incrementally transformed like the red rock around us. We labor to leave an alternative legacy, one that is flux and system and process, too.
On our last night in Moab, we gather to watch the moonrise on a footbridge spanning the Colorado River. Taiko drummers perform as the moon rises from behind the red rock. The rhythms of the drummers ricochet off my ribcage and down the canyon. I can hear them still—the deep plaintive beats of the bass drum, the wail of sticks against the rims.
Beneath us flows a river that won’t finish its journey. The Colorado no longer reaches the sea. It accumulates stories about the industries that have lined its banks, but who hears what it whispers to the sea it can’t touch? Are we to be like the Colorado?
At our backs stand mounds of uranium tailings piled along the riverbank. They sit near the gates where my friends and I entered Arches two days prior. The Department of Energy is relocating these mounds by rail for reburial farther north of Moab. To this landscape of geologic shrines and sacred sites, our civilization has added abandoned uranium mines, uranium mills, and radioactive wastes. And despite grand feats of engineering and imagination, we can’t inter these with any certainty that harm will not befall those living 100,000 years—a hundred millennia—from today. How do we warn them? This is a unique problem never before confronted by human civilization. That final night in Moab, we stand in a place of ruins and the ruinous, and that juxtaposition provokes a sorrow that can surface even now, a year later.
* * *
After the Congress, Madeleine and I drive from Moab to Denver to catch our return flight to Boston. We detour to Rocky Flats, the site where fissionable cores for every nuclear weapon in the United States’s Cold War arsenal were made. Plutonium-239 is the primary isotope used in bomb making. Like uranium, it is a reproductive toxicant. The word irrevocable comes to mind when I think of plutonium-239. It has a half-life of 24,000 years. That means plutonium atoms will linger in the environment long enough that one might as well call it forever. They can also take up residence in lungs, in livers, in bones, and once inside, they are hard to evict (see Iversen, 2012).
As we approach, the clouds hang thickly off the foothills just east of the Rockies. They splinter the sun into broad columns of light and shadow across the gently sloping hills called the flats only in relation to the Rockies behind which the sun will soon set. The weapons factory had been nestled among these hills, so that it couldn’t be seen from the road, so that its presence would remain secret. The buildings have since been demolished, the foundations interred, and the majority of the site—though presently closed to the public—is slated to become a wildlife refuge, a place for school fieldtrips to the Colorado foothills. Like the Chernobyl exclusion zone, wildlife has returned.
I’d read that in the 1980s, when the factory still made bombs, 17,000 people attempted to encircle Rocky Flats in a ring of interlocked hands. We drive that same perimeter looking for any sign that might mark the history of this place. We seek a place to stop, to get out of the car, to bow our heads in remembrance. But as Kristen Iversen (2012) warned in her memoir of growing up nearby, we would find little on the site that memorializes what has happened here, what is harbored here, the legacy left in place just below the surface where prairie dogs still burrow. The next generation won’t know what lies in this unmarked grave, unless history is exhumed from archives or memory, and preserved, and passed on, too.
As we turn back toward the airport, we cross Woman Creek, which drains Rocky Flats into nearby Standley Lake, its sediment laced with plutonium, its water piped to faucets across the region. We pass a woman standing at the entrance to a development. She holds a sign, one of the few we find near Rocky Flats. It reads: “new homes for sale.” Her hips sway slowly as she holds the sign aloft, waving it right, left, right. Behind her, new asphalt climbs the hill to where the homes stand, skeletons of steel and wood. I later learn that this is a masterplanned community. According to the developers’ website, the community will include a few thousand homes, parks, and a mix of retail, office, and industrial space. The developers call it a place for “life wide open.” The photographs on its website are alluring—who in Metro Denver wouldn’t be attracted to this majestic landscape? Except one must accept that officials and experts have correctly accounted for plutonium’s legacy, when a single particle of plutonium is sufficient for harm.
The woman holding the sign is dancing, mechanically, slowly, like a metronome marking the rhythm of a requiem or one of those haunting carnival songs—the sound of the calliope always struck me as eerie and out-of-place.
How could she know that in a year’s time Woman Creek would overflow its banks, that floodwaters would stream across Rocky Flats? In September 2013, an unprecedented storm flooded the Colorado Front Range and the communities just east of the mountains. It was called the hundred-year flood. It was called the thousand-year flood.
That floodwater would inundate the monitoring equipment and distribute plutonium farther afield. How much? To where? Of what consequence? It would take weeks to gather and process the data and possibly years to begin formulating an answer. The legacy of this place will take generations to unfold. Will future generations know enough to keep looking, to stand guard?
“Live forward,” the developers’ website beckons. But I suspect they mean something else entirely.
The woman is dancing. I am crying. We drive away leaving Rocky Flats behind us.
* * *
The following year, just before the floodwaters in Colorado rose, my belly, which had just begun to show, would cramp then flood, too.(1)
It would begin as startling scarlet droplets, but within a day, it would rage like a river down my legs. Then clots the size of split tomatoes would splatter red against the bathroom tile, then the toilet. I would plunge my hand into the bowl searching for fetal tissue, except I wouldn’t know what to look for because I would only be 11 weeks pregnant and what does a being look like then? My husband would cry out: “the things women endure.” And I would bleed. And I would bleed. And for hours, I would bleed, and I would wake up in the emergency room confused about where I was and what had happened and how much time had passed. I would bleed because my body needed to flush my womb, but my womb wouldn’t release the fetal sac, though two internal ultrasounds had confirmed death. And so I would bleed until there was no blood left to shed. Or I would bleed until the doctors stopped me from bleeding. And I would wrestle against the anesthesia as the scrub nurse fastened the restraints against my forearms because I would want to see what the obstetrician would extract from me to stop the blood. I would want to witness the passage from one stage to another. I would want to hold the fetal tissue in my hands. I would want something to bury, to remember this by. And this would be an act of burial, so I wouldn’t forget.
But there wouldn’t be anything to bury. So instead, I would plant.
Three weeks after the miscarriage, my parents and oldest son would help me plant a hydrangea bush with white flowers that would flush crimson at the close of summer. And I would think this an appropriate memorial to the soul that had chosen me but never got to inhabit a human body. I couldn’t bury a grief of this magnitude. I could only sow it and hope it would someday transform into something I could live with.
* * *
The winter before, over Presidents’ Day weekend, 40,000 gather at the Washington Monument before assembling to march up 15th Street toward the White House. I take my oldest son, just five. The temperature is below freezing and the wind burns our cheeks. The crowd is bundled in thick, multichromatic layers, in wool, in costume (polar bears and grim reapers were popular choices). Parents lug kids in red radio flyer wagons. A family peddles a four-seat bicycle. Some chant, others sing. Some beat pots, though more march in silence. They carry signs that show their communities encroached upon by expanding refineries and tar sands extraction, by pipelines and melting permafrost, by oil and gas rigs and oceans.
I marvel at the thought of all who have walked this same historic route. The crowd stretches from curb to curb, and they fill the entire route of the march. I know this because my five-year-old, recovering from strep, only made it a couple blocks before begging to sit. It’s all too much for him—the crowd, the cold, the emotion coursing through the crowded streets. So we watch from the curb, my son huddled against my chest, crying to go back to the hotel where my husband stayed behind with our also sick two-year-old. A man steps from the procession to photograph us. I stare into his lens and hold my son tighter. I hold back tears. I hold our sign. “Forward,” it commands, like the slogan of the development south of Rocky Flats.
As I watch from the margins, I wonder how to feel about my presence. The papers would pronounce this the largest climate rally in US history. The pundits would argue over its specific versus symbolic significance. I had felt so strongly that I wanted—needed—to be present, and yet it had been costly to go, especially in the ecological sense. Before the march, writer, Dianne Dumanoski, one of the co-authors of Our Stolen Future, had been telling me about the remedies we seek to ease, or bury, the pain we feel about the environmental and climate crises, especially when we face our own culpability and futility. Certain forms of activism, she noted, were palliative, were anesthesia, were defense mechanisms: a way to busy ourselves and to avoid the more important work of sorting through the complexity of grief and loss and complicity.
But on the curb, clutching my son who couldn’t understand what was happening, I felt the antithesis of numb. I felt a stirring, a churning, a thrumming, a throb that came from me and through me. It was a rite, an equinox, a solstice, a rising, a turning, a tilling, a sowing. It was seed. It was a transformation, a passage, from one stage to another.
Afterwards, my son and I retrace our steps to the Washington monument to join as the march processes down 17th Street. Surplus Forward on Climate signs tumble across Constitution Avenue, the wind pinning them against the bowed temporary fencing erected to mark where we first assembled. He chases after the signs, and jams them into overstuffed trashcans, and I wonder about their ultimate fate. He tells me, “We have to protect nature,” before scampering after another. And another.
“What now?” he asks. I ask myself the same question.
* * *
The march happened after Hurricane Sandy swallowed the Atlantic and spat it across the Caribbean, the East Coast, and deep inland. Everyone—including the President and the other parents at my neighborhood park—was talking about the super storm, and finally, about the climate crisis.
Later that spring, I visit my birthplace to conduct research on environmental legacy; to stand in the chemical corridor where my father once made polystyrene plastics; to stand before a memorial to the children of Toms River, New Jersey, who lived among its Superfund sites and were claimed by cancers with too complex-to-confirm causes; to stand on the ramshackle Jersey shore near Seaside Heights—where I hadn’t been since high school—and to watch the surf break against the footings of its iconic roller coaster, with its dormant arches and valleys of metal. My friend Kate, who lives nearby, reports that Sandy moved the coaster 14 blocks north from where she rode it as a child. Later, it would be pulled from the water and restored in time for the next beach season. It would go back to where it was, to the way it was.
I ache for the places that were in the path of Sandy. For Rocky Flats. For Moab. For forsaken mines. I ache for the place I live and for these places I am not from. For places like St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, where the community, Siberian Yupik, goes hungry as climatic shifts strip them of foods that have sustained their ancestors since time immemorial. And then I learned that this form of grief has a name: Solastalgia.
Glenn Albrecht (2007), an environmental philosopher who coined the term a decade ago, defined it as a homesickness we feel while still home, when our sense of home feels threatened. Albrecht’s work on solastalgia grew out of his observations in an Australian coal mining community where citizens were fraught by the expansion of mining projects. It now resonates with communities across the globe, especially those living along the fence lines of industry, climate refugees, and communities living on the frontlines of climate injustice. And it will continue to spread, as the consequences of a shifting climate become more tangible in more places and as our sense of connection reaches beyond our immediate communities to the places we come to know. He wonders whether there is a silent epidemic of solastalgia smoldering beneath the surface of our society.
Albrecht says that our ability to face the global environmental crises before us hinges on our ability to acknowledge this often unspoken grief and to reinvest ourselves in a deeper—and even wider—sense of place and the interrelationships therein. And so here I am writing this essay about the things we bury and trying not to let grief be one of them.
* * *
Here’s a story about sowing grief that I will retell for you (see Altman, 2012): my friend, Carolyn, the woman who inspired the Congress on Future Generations, once toured an abandoned gold mine in the Northwest Territories of Canada, which is another region, like Utah, heavily mined for its uranium and metal deposits. The mine operators left behind slack piles of long-lived arsenic trioxide that have wreaked havoc on the neighboring community of Yellowknife Dene, who invited her there because the arsenic will be dangerous in perpetuity unless these wastes remain sequestered and watched over. She came to work alongside them as they lay plans for its perpetual care. Together, they produced a landmark report, and it moved the Canadian officials to think differently about the long-term stewardship of desecrated land. But she also wanted to honor this place. So from her home in Iowa, she brought a gold ring.
The day she visited the mine, she climbed to its rim, and tossed the ring into the gaping wound gouged into the Earth. She returned its gold. I wonder at the possibility that someone in the remote future will find it and guess at its significance. Or that no one will find it and the rock will embrace it as its own.
NOTES
1. I don’t mean to imply through juxtaposition that my miscarriage was linked to uranium or any other environmental exposures. I could never know that. I don’t even suspect that, though I know human fertility and environmental health are inseparable. But in the same week I hemorrhaged, Colorado flooded. That was the context in which I came to understand both events. Water and blood, both vital, and yet destructive, are potentially fatal forces.
WORKS CITED
Albrecht, Glenn. “Solastalgia: the Distress Caused by Environmental Change.” Australasian Psychiatry 15 (Suppl 1) (2007): S95–8. Print.
Altman, Rebecca. “Deep Time Stretches Our Imaginations, Not Just Our Engineering Prowess.” Environmental Health News. 25 July 2012. Web. Accessed 5 March 2014. http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2012/deep-time.
Iversen, Kristen. Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Shadow of a Secret Nuclear Facility. New York: Random House, 2012. Print.
Williams, Terry Tempest. Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. New York: Vintage Press, 2001. Print.
“On What We Bury” originally appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 21, Issue 1, Winter 2014, Pages 85-95, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isu039
Published: 19 March 2014
© The Author 2014. Reprint of this article in the newsletter of the Science and Environmental Health Network is by permission of Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the author. All rights reserved. This article is not included under Creative Commons or any other Open Access license. For permissions please contact: journals.permissions@oup.com