How can we stretch our thinking about place relations?
Shared by AFFRICA TAYLOR
How can we stretch our thinking about place relations? I’ve just been on a very provocative Alberta road trip, called the BITCHumen salon, with Narda Nelson, Randa Khattar, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Lesley Instone. We traced the Athabasca River across Cree and Dene lands, from its Rocky Mountain source near Jasper to Fort McMurray in the remote north. Within Jasper National Park, the Athabasca Falls is a protected site and a revered tourist destination. About 1,000 kms downstream it’s a different story. Past Fort McMurray, in a vast public no-go area called the Athabasca Tar Sands, this same river is used to extract oil from mined bitumen in one of the largest industrial mining complexes on the planet. Toxic waste waters stagnate in huge tailings dams at the mining sites, but pollutants also leach back into the river as it continues to flow downstream into the world heritage listed Wood Buffalo National Park
This journey prompted us to stretch our thinking about place relations – in particular about the relations between ‘special’, valorised places that are deemed worthy of ‘protection’ and interconnected but degraded places that are solely regarded as resources for human use and exploitation. Val Plumwood (2008) warns against the tendency to valorise our dwelling places – those in which we live and with which we identify – and to dissociate from and forget about the shadow places – those which bear the brunt of our ecological footprint. Once registered, the Athabasca Tar Sands is an unforgettable shadow place of immense ecological scale and impact. But all the places we live in and visit, in our immediate common worlds work with children, have their own shadow places. Finding them, visiting them, keeping them ‘in mind’, is one way we can extend our thinking about common world place relations.
References
Firempong, J. (2018) ‘Everything you need to know about the tar sands and how they impact you’. Green Peace Canada Website, https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/3138/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-tar-sands-and-how-they-impact-you/
Plumwood, V. (2008). Shadow places and the politics of dwelling, Australian Humanities Review, http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2008/03/01/shadow-places-and-the-politics-of-dwelling/