The Dirt Beneath the Deed: Ecologies of Environmental Justice in the Calumet

• In Event: 41006 - Racial Capitalism and the Environment

Abstract

In this project, I excavate the marshy formation of the Calumet region of Chicago into a space for industrial urbanization, one that was constructed specifically as a wasteland for the debris and pollutants of expansion. Chicago’s experimentation with refuse disposal in the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in the complete transformation of the physical landscape. Beginning in the 1940’s, the majority of the city turned to ‘urban greening’ to transform dumping grounds into green space. Despite decades of environmental justice organizing and several attempts at industrial rezoning in the early 2000s, substantial efforts in the Calumet to build parks on previously contaminated land have only materialized in the last five years – an eighty-year delay by comparison. Examining the transformation of refuse disposal in this ‘post-industrial’ region, I ask: why was greening, as a mechanism for the de-contamination and beautification of former waste sites, so delayed in the Calumet? Using a combination of archival research and participant observation, I attempt to answer these questions by examining three distinct periods into the present of the Calumet in which land was actively being remade and revalorized, materially transforming the urban fabric for wasting and toxification rather than towards what we would now call sustainability. In doing so, I aim to draw out the ways in which the debate over industrial transitions becomes a space to further define environments of the 21st century.

Author

• Nina Olney, University of Chicago