Abstract+(2)

At sites like the Hanford Nuclear Reservation on the banks of Washington State’s Columbia river, radioactive and toxic wastes from the cold war nuclear complex have been intentionally and unintentionally released into the soil and groundwater, and even more rests precariously in various tanks and other structures. Since the fall of the Berlin wall, the Department of Energy has been tasked with undertaking some of the largest remediation efforts to “cleanup” these sites, many of which also serve as waste sites for the nuclear energy industry. Through an ethnographic engagement with “stakeholders,” scientists, engineers, activists, and policymakers involved with the cleanup efforts at Hanford, this project will investigate the explicit and tacit conceptions of the site’s history and future produced around this site and radioactive “wastelands” more generally, how these evolving modes of governing the future and remembering the past are continually reshaping Hanford materially and socioculturally, and the ethical imaginaries and implications that are at work in these “future geographies.” Particular attention will be given to the role of intergenerational ethics in nuclear and environmental politics, as well as its implications for environmental justice, the environmental movement, the sociotechnical systems of environmental remediation, and the use nuclear technologies. It will also place Hanford within a broader contemporary and historical landscape of intergenerational environmental relations through examining efforts to institutionalize intergenerational ethics, as well as efforts, like those proposed for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, to build monuments or markers to warn future generations about dangerous waste sites.
 * Abstract**

Central to this project will be the question of how future generations are conceptualized and represented, how ethical proximity and obligations are structured through these representations, and how these implicated future subjects help to shape the present. It will also explore timespace of “wastelands” by examining the creation and remediation of landscapes in terms of processes of valuation, the use of the future as a kind of “wasteland,” and the impact of the legacy of settler colonialism in the U.S. west on environmental justice. Finally, this project will attempt to use insights gained from an ethnography of the Hanford nuclear reservation to ask how existing deliberative processes deal with multiple and heterogeneous timescales, particularly as it relates to nuclear technologies, as well as what kinds of environmentalism are capable of responding to the “mutant ecologies” of the nuclear age.


 * Intellectual Merit **

This project will draw upon literatures from the social sciences about risk, disaster, future geographies and temporality, technology studies, environmental justice, and ethics to further recent work on modes of governing the future, the politics and ethics of intergenerational relations, as well as environmental justice in the context of contaminated landscapes. The project also hopes to further bridge aspects of science and technology studies, sociocultural anthropology, critical geography, and environmental justice. Finally, this project aims to add to our understanding of the legacy of the cold war, the politics of nuclear and toxic wastes, and the politics of environmental remediation.


 * Broader Impacts **

As much of the literature on intergenerational ethics tends to come from the fields of law and philosophical ethics, a more empirical approach to the subject will be valuable towards intergenerational justice. By investigating these issues in relation to the Hanford nuclear reservation, this project may also contribute to thinking about other large-scale environmental remediation efforts, as well as the larger risks presented by radioactive and toxic contamination.