Ecstatic Agendas

astral editions, energetic transmissions

Superfunding the Sacred

Dear friends,

As I’ve mentioned in past blog posts, I’m currently pursuing a Master of Science degree in Emergency Management.  As my second year begins I am immersed in a curriculum of environmental science, climate adaptation, and ecological restoration.

My classes this semester are bringing these professional pursuits and my personal magical path into closer alignment, as evidenced in a paper I recently submitted. The assignment was to respond to a particular chapter in indigenous ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s well known book Braiding Sweetgrass. If you watched the video linked in my last post, you may recognize some of that content here again. This piece is written in more of an academic voice than my usual essays on this platform, but I hope you will enjoy it nonetheless.

A note on vocabulary: For those unfamiliar with the term, “Superfund” refers to a site designated by the US Environmental Protection Agency as severely contaminated, and mandated for cleanup. More info on that is available here: https://www.epa.gov/superfund/what-superfund

Very Best,

Jason Triefenbach, 

HFHR MSG

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The Sacred and the Superfund: a personal reflection on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s account of Lake Onondaga including counterpoint data from government, media, and industry

This paper attempts to synthesize my personal understanding of ecological devastation enacted upon a particular site – Onondaga Lake – and to correlate my reflections on this case to further develop my thinking on concurrent issues of restoration, empathy, and the personhood of non-human beings and landscape features.

In The Sacred and the Superfund, one of the final essays included in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer provides a stark and, frankly, gut wrenching historical overview and assessment of Onondaga Lake in central New York state. Beginning with a personal and poetic account of her own home some miles upriver from the site, she addresses pre-colonial characteristics of the place as central to the identities of indigenous peoples of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy and narrates a touching and bittersweet acknowledgment of the sentience of natural forces such as water, trees, and animals. Kimmerer writes how, with the arrival of industry to the site in the mid-1800s, Onondaga Lake was transformed into a dumping ground for chemical waste –  burying the soul of the lake beneath many tons of toxicity in a century- long cascade of poisons. In her unique storytelling style, Kimmerer weaves data and despair into a suggestion of humanity’s precarious redemption as the lake, by the end of her tale, has begun to shuffle painfully toward a sort of healing-through-permutation.  Kimmerer pulls no punches in naming specific culprits in this sad saga: the State of New York, the City of Syracuse, and several industrial corporations including the currently incorporated Honeywell International.

Not surprisingly, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s web page for Onondaga Lake collapses the story into a single bloodless sentence before moving on to restoration efforts: “Over time, industrial development and a growing population led to increases in sewage and industrial discharges that took their toll on the water quality of Onondaga Lake.” (New York DEC, para 3)  The page enters into more detail under the heading Main Sources, Responsible Entities and Cleanup Status, wherein it lists several areas of concern, Potentially Responsible Parties (PRPs), and a variety of mitigative measures that are underway or have been  taken.  These fall into the categories of Industrial Pollution, Wastewater Pollution, and Polluted Runoff, listing such contaminants as mercury, ammonia, phosphorous, untreated sewage, fertilizer runoff, and more.  Perhaps under threat of potential  litigation, wording on the page is careful to mention the Honeywell corporation with a light touch: “Honeywell… plays an instrumental role in the remediation efforts.” (New York DEC, para 7)  Other parties responsible for court- ordered restoration activities are Onondaga County, vaguely identified local, State, and Federal entities, and “everyone who lives, works, or plays in the Onondaga Lake watershed.” (New York DEC, para 11.)  For their part, the Orwellian-named Honeywell states, “Honeywell has finished implementing New York State’s cleanup plan for Onondaga Lake using technical excellence and innovative approaches. About 2.2 million cubic yards of material were removed from Onondaga Lake and pumped to a consolidation area at former industrial property off of Airport Road for drying and safe isolation long term. About 2.5 billion gallons of water were treated. Approximately 475 acres of the lake have been capped to provide a new habitat layer, prevent erosion, and isolate remaining contaminants. About 1.1 million native plants, trees, and shrubs are being planted and about 90 acres of wetlands created or enhanced.”  (Honeywell, para 1.) The final November 2017 update made by Honeywell, which declares their restoration work at Lake Onondaga to be complete, includes two maps of which I take particular note, showing minimal areas of the lake to have been dredged and capped.

Figure 1. Author’s screenshot. Dredging and Capping Progress Maps, Honeywell International.

This confirms what Kimmerer writes of the process:  “After decades of foot dragging, the corporation has predictably offered its own cleanup plan, which involves minimum cost and minimum benefits. Honeywell has negotiated a plan to dredge and clean the most contaminated sediments and bury them in a sealed landfill in the waste beds. That may be a good beginning, but the bulk of the contaminants lie diffused in the sediments spread over the entire lake bottom. From here they enter the food chain. The Honeywell plan is to leave those sediments in place and cover them with a four-inch layer of sand that would partially isolate them from the ecosystem. Even if isolation were technically feasible, the proposal is to cap less than half of the lake bottom, leaving the rest to circulate as usual.” (p 321.)  Despite corporate and governmental barriers to restorative justice for the lake and for the generations of people whose connections to the site have been destroyed, Kimmerer’s essay ends on a somewhat upbeat note.  She indicates instances where ecological processes have begun anew to seed the sites of contamination with novel forms of resilience, and describes as well a water ceremony enacted by both (human) locals and international allies on the banks of the lake. These two forms of renewal illustrate perhaps a resuscitation of the coupled human – natural systems (to borrow a term from the social sciences) that could, as Kimmerer hopes, lead us back to the holistic relationship she remembers from the foundational stories of her own indigenous lineage.

In the paper “Cultural Keystone Species: Implications for Ecological Conservation and Restoration” Ann Garibaldi and Nancy Turner write, “We need to restore not only landscapes but also the diversity- enhancing capabilities of the human communities inhabiting those landscapes.” (Garibaldi and Turner, 2004) They continue by quoting another thinker, GP Nabhan who some years earlier wrote, “To truly restore these landscapes, we must also begin to re-story them, to make them the lessons of our legends, festivals, and seasonal rites …” (Nabhan 1991).  This seems to echo and reinforce the scene that Kimmerer lays out: that of an earnest effort to restore blighted landscapes by, in part, restoring the social context that would allow a community to see the inherent symbiotic value of existing not just in a place, but of a place. I would like to imagine that this is a solid supposition – that we can promote ecological thinking by making it the background and perhaps even the protagonist of new cultural stories, and perhaps through a fresh treatment of existing social rituals, holidays, ceremonies, milestones and the like.  By embodying a synthesis of our histories, the biosphere, and our own minds and bodies and spirits, we don’t have to be constrained by the past but can use it as a way to reignite our cultural connections with the biosphere. An example from closer to home comes to mind: a recent article in Portland’s Willamette Week periodical, “Celebration of Life Planned for Heritage Oak Tree in Overlook”. (Saslow, 2024.)  This story recounts the case of a 200+ year old tree in Portland’s Overlook neighborhood, the roots of which became infected with oak bracket, a deadly (for the tree) fungal virus. The city has mandated the tree for removal lest the fungus spread, and before doing so the property owners held a memorial celebration for the tree on October 6.  Inviting neighbors and community members to gather, make bark rubbings, tell stories, and bid farewell to the white oak, this event acknowledged the tree’s important place within the fabric of the community and the local ecosystem over the past two centuries. Is this social ceremony, this ritual event, somewhat sappy (no pun intended)?  Perhaps.  It’s hard to determine when community engagement with environmental principles really makes a difference and when it is just a metaphorical pat on the back to provide one with an escape from feelings of culpability.  But thinking of the tears that surely fell that day, the stories that were told between friends and strangers, and the children who were given a glimpse of life beyond the enclosure of anthro-centrism, Overlook’s celebration of life doesn’t feel shallow to me.  I believe that encouraging human beings to feel tenderness, empathy, grief, and neighborliness toward nonhuman features of our local landscapes can function somewhat like seeds in the cracks of a dry ground, puncturing, stretching, and opening the blasted surface of our current dire situation just a little bit at a time, to allow the possibility of something more holistic to grow. 

As Kimmerer writes in The Sacred and the Superfund, “Despair is paralysis. It robs us of our agency.  It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth.” (p 328.) Our pop monoculture paradigm often encourages us to feel helpless and powerless against seemingly unstoppable apocalyptic forces of breakdown and dissolution.  Some of the blockbuster stories of our time, coming to us as movies and tv shows but also through the onslaught of a panic- inducing 24 hr news cycle, are not imparting lessons of heroism and renewal but of greed and suffering and distrust and defeat.  In this historical moment I think it behooves us as individuals to recognize what sort of a diet we feed our brains, and to ask ourselves if we are nourishing our capacities for empathy and renewal and victory or if we are starving those higher aspirations of the human spirit.

~

CITATIONS

jason.triefenbach

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