Toxic Sublimity and the Berkeley Pit as Pharmakon

• In Event: The Body as Environmental Sensor - II

Abstract

The Berkeley Pit ‘Lake’ is much less a ‘lake’ than a colossal wound of industrial extraction – an open pit of toxic mining waste, which began to fill with polluted groundwater following the cessation of copper mining in Butte, Montana in 1983, and in which a deadly happenstance encounter with a flock of snow geese led to the discovery of a gooey black yeast with anticancer potentials. The wastescape has since become a local tourist attraction and, as this paper argues, a site of the ‘toxic sublimity’ and disruption to commonsense notions of geological time, the poles of ‘waste’ and ‘resource, and imaginations of (toxic) futurity in contemporary Western lifeworlds circumscribed by impending ecological disaster. I turn to the body of the sightseeing tourist, the resident, and the few remaining workers who care for the continuously rising pit and the population it threatens. By taking seriously the undulations of vitality alongside Butte’s mining history, this paper interrogates the corporeal experience of the toxic sublime as an encounter at the site of temporal rupture – a moment of glitch that apprehends the body amid the fissure of wilderness and wasteland, boom and bust, life and death.

Author

• Julia Huggins, Brown University