Canada’s Waste Flows: Erratic Reflections
“Waste is an inherently ambiguous linguistic signifier: anything and everything can become waste, and things can simultaneously be and not be waste, depending on the perceiver” [Hird 11]
Canada is facing a waste crisis. But what is waste? In her recent book, Canada’s Waste Flows (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2021), Queen’s professor of Environmental Studies Myra Hird argues that waste is many things— a material practice, a cultural idea, a form of self-surveillance—but primarily, waste is a social justice issue related to Canada’s ongoing settler colonialism. For Hird, these are the real stakes of waste, and they are political, ecological, and, increasingly, existential. While garbage dumps might be unpleasant reminders of our consumerist habits and disposable lifestyles, it is the relationships these places represent between human beings and the earth, between humans and other humans, between humans and nonhuman life, that is truly of concern. Her argument for this expansive notion of waste unfolds through a series of case studies divided between Canada’s southern and northern geographies, as well as through a range of concepts that help us think about waste beyond narrow, human-centered frameworks.
In Kingston, the author and her research team find a city that has outsourced its waste management to a private company with little meaningful public consultation, while in the Arctic, the asymmetrical power relations of waste are explicit with legacies of Cold War militarization and settler mentalities, producing a scarred landscape of contaminated soils and open piles of garbage that are sometimes literally on fire. Throughout the book, Hird also pays close attention to the impact of waste flows on nonhuman life, drawing out key differences between Indigenous ways of knowing (and relating to land) and settler colonial logics, where materiality implies not a set of relations, but simply the physical composition of matter that can be “out of place” [106]. Uniquely, she expands this line of thinking to speculate on what all the mixing and moving of materials could enact at the microbial level, considering, for instance, how bacteria, operating at scales of life that typically go unseen, might combine in experimental ways in the making of a future earth.
This is a deeply researched, timely and polyvalent book that can be read from many points of departure and that can generate various lines of inquiry. Below I offer a set of short, themed, and highly subjective reflections on the observations, connections, and provocations I found most compelling. Call them geologic erratics, circulating fragments of thought slightly out of place.
Waste Moves
Waste Flows refers to the multiple ways that the materials that come to be considered garbage move through space. Many of these circulations are set in motion by an increasingly privatized waste management industry, which often seeks out the cheapest solutions, even if that requires shipping waste across vast distances. As we come to learn, with no locally licensed sites for disposal, Kingston’s municipal garbage is landfilled hundreds of kilometers away, dumped and flattened in other communities who reap the short-term benefits, and bear the long-term costs, of storing our discarded stuff. Yet the materialities of Kingston’s waste extend also in reverse, as tracing the production of now unwanted or unneeded objects along (supply) chains of manufacture and distribution, from the mining and refining of, for example, the rare earth metals used in our smart phones, to the fossil fuels burned to deliver them, reveals. Tellingly, even when waste is supposed to be fixed in place, using “leave it in” technologies such as the frozen-block method Hird describes (where waste is temporarily frozen to be thawed at a later data), it exceeds always this imaginary of containment: now or later, it will continue to flow.
Waste, Time, and the Colonization of the future
Below ground at Giant Mine. Freeze technology testing. (Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada)
The blocks of frozen collections of toxic arsenic—a dangerous byproduct of gold mining, as Hird explains—will have to melt at some point, and this speaks to the intergenerational nature of waste. What is created in the past, and moved and stored in the present, will reveal itself again in a future that is in part determined by this legacy, or what Hird might call a waste inheritance. She writes that “inheriting waste is more than just a relay of potentially indestructible waste materials from past to present to future: through waste, we bequeath a set of politically, historically, and materially constituted relations, structures, norms, and practices with which future generations must engage” [128]. Modern landfills are designed to last several centuries, and nuclear waste remains radioactive for thousands or tens of thousands of years. These temporal scales exceed the scope of our current thinking about waste, and for those who inherit these materials, they will also be inheriting the underlying logics, colonial and capitalist, that prioritize extraction and the accumulation of wealth at the expense of lifeworlds to come.
Upstream/Downstream
Hird characterizes our waste problem as an upstream/downstream dynamic. Downstream is where and when waste has already been created and become a social and environmental issue to be solved. Downstream, we rarely think about why the waste was generated in the first place, instead focusing on how to make it go away. According to Hird, thinking of waste as an isolated environmental issue is misleading, a “downstream effect” that obscures the political, economic, legal, and historical circumstances through which it came into existence. This is the upstream of waste: its preconditions. The implication here is clear: to meaningfully address the problem of waste we need to travel upstream, to reconsider the very conditions through which waste, as a material practice and a cultural idea, is made and upheld.
Southern Wastes, Arctic Wastes
Smoke rises from the Iqaluit dump on August 7, 2014. The fire has been burning since May 20, 2014, but the Fire Chief says it could have been smouldering deep within the pile for months or even years. (Vince Robinet/CBC)
Piles of waste take different forms, and are more or less hidden from view, depending on where they are located. In the populated south, waste and wasting are concealed, and individual consumer choices become the critical node in the production of waste. A “good consumer” recycles, a “bad consumer” throws their plastic straight into the garbage, and in both cases the material is picked up curbside and rapidly disappears. In the more remote north, such delusions of concealment and personal responsibility are rendered largely meaningless, with less regulation creating scenarios where, on the one hand, close daily exposure to waste sites makes communities more vulnerable to health and safety hazards, and on the other, proximity also materializes visibility, laying bare in at times spectacular fashion the lasting impact and scale of past and current wasting practices. The geography of waste is unequal, materially, in the sense of how garbage is managed, but also symbolically and politically, in terms of what is deemed acceptable by the public within and a beyond a certain spatial imaginary. In urban areas such as Kingston, where open pit garbage dumps have been shunned as unsafe and unseemly conurbations, waste management has become a techno-science of just-in-time operations—weighing, measuring, calculating, and ultimately moving and entombing garbage at distant locales (currently Kingston’s waste is landfilled in Twin Creeks, Ontario... we think! See here for our first adventure with Kingston garbage last summer). This is in stark contrast to northern communities such as Iqaluit, where in 2014 the “dumpcano” garbage fire was allowed to burn, out in the open, for months.
Waste: A Settler Colonial Cosmology
View of waste mound at Belle Park in Kingston. Fall 2022. (Image by author)
Whether it’s in the high arctic, the Twin Creeks landfill (which you see from the air on the splash page for this post), or Belle Park and its surrounds of legacy waste, waste and wasting are produced within and by a settler colonial cosmology that separates materials from relations, and humans from their surrounding environment. The production of waste and wasting is systemic: as Hird writes “waste and wasting exists within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neocolonial structures.” Focusing attention on these processes, this cosmology and its upstream institutions and practices, is a way to begin challenging their dominance, and moving towards other cosmologies and perhaps entirely new definitions of waste.
— Noah Scheinman is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University and a Research Assistant with the Belle Park Project. See http://www.noahscheinman.com/.