Abstract_pedlt3

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. Yet, completely removing radionuclides from these sites is an impossible task, which has led to a tension between long term stewardship, based on restricting future land use for thousands of years, and intensifying remediation efforts, which may still be inadequate to protect human and non-human health far into the future. Through an ethnographic engagement with “stakeholders,” scientists, engineers, and policymakers involved with the cleanup efforts at Hanford, this project will investigate both the explicit and implicit role of intergenerational ethics in nuclear and environmental politics, as well as its implications for environmental justice, the environmental movement, 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 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 what agency or efficacy these represented future subjects exert in the present. It will also examine how technoscience both generates and responds to questions of intergenerational ethics. 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 legacy of settler colonialism in the U.S. west. 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 thorny issues that involve multiple and incommensurable 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.

This project will draw upon literatures from the social sciences about risk, disaster, anticipatory governance, technology studies, environmental justice, and ethics, this project will attempt to introduce several orienting concepts for dealing with 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.
 * Intellectual Merit **

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.
 * Broader Impacts **