Contamination
We learn place. We make and remake places. And places make and remake us.
Contamination is shared. Everything that breathes is exposed and interconnected.
As anthropologist Anna L. Tsing reminds us: "Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others."
To be part of the Mossrock field is to share in vulnerability. This calls us into a material, ecological ethics. A form of love.
Humans alter places. We have polluted, extracted, poisoned, deforested, moved lands, blocked water flows, burned, overfished, strip-mined, paved, and built to suit our desires. As contaminants like plastics spread, they also enter our bodies. Contamination teaches interdependence. One of the best sites to explore contamination is the feral atlas.
Practicing with waste and contamination:
If you don't already know, find out where your garbage goes. Take a fieltrip to the city dump, incinerator, barge, or landfill. Spend some time there.
We do not have to ignore or look away. Bring a present, non-judgmental awareness to this experience. Notice thoughts and emotions that may arise.
This is part of becoming intimate with place. This is the Mossrock field, too. This is a teacher.
When you get home, observe if this experience changes your relationship with the garbage in you home or other places. What do we waste and why?
What broader systems and habits are in place that encourage a disposable society? How does a global economic system make a material impact on place? You as an individual did not create these systems. It's not your fault!
How does this waste affect birds, other critters, and the watershed in your eco-regions?
Patchy Anthropocene
Human activities impact much of our planet. This is why many now call our age the "anthropocene:" a time in which humans shape our climate and geographies.
Yet this impact is not spread evenly around the planet. Instead there are "patches" or zones of contamination, extraction, and loss. There can also be patches of healing, protection, and bioremediation. Anthropologist Anna L. Tsing coined the term "patchy anthropocene." This is another aspect of place. Another dimension of becoming intimate with place. Our immediate place may seem protected and uncontaminated. But this may be because waste and contamination is shipped or piped to other places.
The most contaminated patches are often Indigenous lands, brown and black communities, and the global south. In other words, contamination is mapped onto economic, political, and racial divisions. Rich and dominant places ship their contamination to other places.
If we also include the more-than-human world, and consider non-human animals, we can see other "patches" or zones of unequal ecological injustice.
We are all vulnerable to contamination. But that vulnerability is nor shared equally.
Ecological patches can spread. Ecological care and healing can spread. Ecological contamination and destruction can spread.
The Mossrock field is therefore also political and socio-economic, as much as it is ecological.
To lean more about the "patchy" anthropocene, click here for an academic lecture describing more about this concept.
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