Reading Places of Ruin: Hanford and the Need for Decolonization in Environmental Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: Decolonizing and Historicizing Narratives of Place

Abstract

Within environmental education, spaces like Hanford, the U.S.’s largest nuclear clean-up site, might seem like an obvious focus for curriculum. Yet, many environmental educators have turned away from such sites of devastation, and instead toward optimistic solutions that operate as a greening of the status quo. This project calls attention to how such hopeful approaches to environmental education necessitate an ahistorical and apolitical understanding of place, which ignores the structures of colonial violence that enable ecological destruction. Through an examination of Hanford, I argue that ecological futurity depends upon decolonization, and thus environmental education must turn toward, rather than away from, places of ruin, which make visible the interconnected colonial logics of enslavement, settler colonialism, imperialism, and forced migration.

Author

• Jenne Schmidt, Colorado State University