Out of Site, Into Mine

out of site, into mine the regeneration of a coal mine

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2020 B. Arch thesis Jennifer Mahan

out of site, into mine the regeneration of a coal mine

2020 B.Arch thesis Jennifer Mahan

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Bachelor of Architecture Thesis Advisor | Karen Lange College of Architecture and Environmental Design at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California © 2020, Jennifer Mahan / Cal Poly Architecture Department All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the direct wrtitten consent of the author.

All content not produced by the author is believed to be either in the public domain or used appropriately according to the standards of “fair use” and attribution.

Errors or omissions will be corrected in future editions.

Printed and bound in the United States.

Blurb Publications First Edition, 2020

dedicated to those who upheld hope & endured & loved strangers as friends //////////////////////////////////// in this time of most uncertainty.

2019 – 2020

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acknowledgements.

Throughout my architectural education, my ultimate goal became learning how to love through design. Though realizing this will take my lifetime, I would like to acknowledge several individuals in particular who helped me along this journey.

First, my mother and father. You modeled how to unconditionally love the other through your selfless nurturing of my very being. I only hope that I may do the same.

Saksham Tikekar, for being one of my first friends in this Wild West, and proving to be one of my deepest. You have always challenged me to meditate on our lives’ greatest questions, and I truly thank you for all our nights at SLO’s dimly-lit coffee shops.

Michael Palmer, for pushing my tremendous appreciation of ecological well-being, and giving me a sense of man’s immense capabilities of leaving positive traces on this earth. I moreso thank you for becoming the steadfast vessel accepting my pursuits of the meaning of love, and for allowing the space to intertwine your soul with mine.

And though I could individually thank every member of the Cal Poly Architecture department, we must eat our meat & potatoes to get to the good stuff in the this book. So I will first thank Professor Michael Lucas, for entertaining and encouraging my weekly existential crises in these past five years (and even still – remotely & in spirit), and finally, my thesis advisor Karen Lange, for encouraging me to embrace uncertainty, pushing me to abandon notions of architectural should be’s, and for believing in me.

It’s cliché, but true; this work would not be possible without the guidance of you most wondrous human beings.

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“People have forgotten this truth...

But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.” _Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

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contents.

section _00 introduction. section _01 the beginning. the day god left the city. nature’s aestheticization. america’s domestication.

section _02 the first wounds. nature’s commodification. case study, into yosemite. the birth of consumption. case study, the carlin trend.

section _03 unhealed scars. the remaking of ecology. case study, after chernobyl. the death of nature. case study, the west, burning.

section _04 reconnection. surviving vs thriving. case study, fresh kills. case study, oystertecture.

section _05 experiment.

vellum competition, requiescat. abs[tract],

mementos mori. creation machine. rebirth.

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section _06 into site.

the reign of king coal. hobet 21 mining complex. site mapping.

section _07 a proposal.

the birth of a park. tending the land. disturbing the disturbance.

when the beginning began.

section _08 thesis.

life of the (un)abandoned. intro to (re)assembly. restoration & remediation. an empathetic ecology.

section _09 finalĂŠ.

life, pre-quarantine (bookshow). life under quarantine, final show. life, after.

image index.

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“What is left if we aren’t the world?.

Intimacy. We have lost the world but gained a soul.” _Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

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0.0_ introduction.

America has been engaged in a nefarious relationship with its environment since the birth of the nation – a widespread trend that has resulted in extreme ecological degradation. This new country, undergoing rapid continental expansion, became hungered for fuel: a greed largely satisfied through mass extraction of natural resources.

Cities expanded into vast collections of people, structures, machinery, noise, and waste, eventually becoming places from which one often wished to escape. This so called “progress” effectively distanced Americans from their environment – creating a view of Nature as an untouchable, holy entity to be preserved, as well as an exploitable “other” intended solely to serve man.

The American marriage to its coal industry is particularly controversial, as it fueled the country’s prosperity into one of the major global capitalist superpowers, but at the cost of environmental health; both humans and nonhumans now pay for this decision. The exploitation of old-growth forest habitats through the process of mountaintop removal has proved particularly detrimental to the ecological well-being of mining sites, and the concentration and long history of coal mining in Appalachia is a symptom of the human exceptionalism that prioritizes man in the greater ecological web connecting all biotic and abiotic systems. The parasitic relationship of mountaintop removal coal extraction for human gain must instead transition to a more equitable relationship of mutual co-evolution.

This investigation reviews how the detachment of man from his environment has enabled mass resource depletion through mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, resulting in unbridled environmental degradation.

Through regenerative design, this exploited ecosystem can be reestablished, and this process can offer an alternative means for man to reconnect with his ecological foundation.

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america’s domestication.

nature’s aestheticization.

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the day god left the city.

section _01

the beginning.

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“America was being desecrated by what was called improvement.” _Thomas Cole

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“Nature used to be perceived to be good and intrinsically worthy of respect and concern.... the current configuration of technocentrism and consumerism may not encourage such experiences. _Ted Toadvine

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01 Central Park, Frederick Olmsted, 1858.

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1.1_ the day god left the city.

In the mid-19th century, American civilization entered into an unprecedented race of nearly unchecked westward expansion and growth. Land was cheap and plentiful, open to most with the dream of a new life. The Romantic movement simultaneously exploded on the scene, fueling the imagination of writers and artists alike. “Nature” became the unifying matter to fuel a widespread reaction against the industrialization, urbanization, secularization, and consumerism that plagued the nation’s cities. The Romantics’ idealized Gardens of Eden were becoming irreparably altered into a sensible, sterile, and bureaucratic nightmare1.

Though Western culture had long looked to God as the liberating answer to this oppression, God had largely been lost within this civilization after centuries of devotion. Americans in major cities were becoming trapped in a promisedland-turned-concrete-jungle darkened by factory smoke. Massive forests were leveled to dust to accommodate agricultural fields. Rails and roads connected more cities, and canals replaced rivers. The West was left without a guide, lost in “progress.”

A new vision of God was needed – one sited in the anti-city. Poets, philosophers, and artists alike assumed the role to find it, and decidedly located this antithesis in Nature. A collective of Romantic -------------------------

1 Burgum, Edwin Berry. “Romanticism.”

The Kenyon Review, vol. 3, no. 4, 1941, pp.

479–490. JSTOR.

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thinkers – The Lake Poets and Hudson River School, and individuals like William Wordsworth – successfully painted Divinity as interminably tied to spaces of the Natural, where the sentiment of God lay in the rejection of a planned and languid civilization. Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau further supported Nature as the dwelling place of the divine, contrasting the depraved city with a wild, passionate, and sublime world2.

This fabled rawness somewhere beyond seduced American readers, who adopted an abiding hatred for the technologized world looming ever closer. They sought a closeness to the Natural, reflected in the modernized view of uncharted territories as beautiful rather than terrifying. Nature metamorphosed from fear into deity – both in distant dream worlds and within developing metropolitan areas.

City-dwellers resisted the reality of increasing urbanization3 by suppressing industrialized terrains into this romanticized view of Natural. This tempered land manifested in idealized gardens like Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in the center of New York City – an attempt to capture the picturesque essence of Nature and inject it into the unhealthy metropolitan environment.

Olmsted sought to “transcend all human concerns2” and pressures of urban life, and the park illustrated Nature as metaphor of hope and God in the city.

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2 Cox, Thomas R. “Americans and Their Forests: Romanticism, Progress, and Science in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Forest History, vol. 29, no. 4, 1985, pp.

156–168. JSTOR. 3 National Parks Service. “Chapter 9: Familiar Themes, Traditional Battles, and a New Seriousness.” The American Experience. U.S. Department of the Interior, 17 Mar. 2004.

4 “Albert Bierstadt Biography.” National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, 2019.

02 (right) Valley of the Yosemite, Albert Bierstadt, 1864. Bierstadt Pushed forth the idea of an untouched Nature.

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1.2_ nature’s aestheticization.

The Romantics forged visual descriptions of previously uncharted natural grandeur, and these vivid narratives popularized these burgeoning Romantic and Transcendentalist ideas.

Artists like Albert Bierstadt sojourned through the uncharted sections of American cartography and captured the neo-divinity in paintings of ragged mountain ranges and pristine valleys.

It was the manifestation of spirituality, proven accessible. To be romantic was to take the side of the Natural against industrial, and great wonders like booming waterfalls, looming granite slabs, and hungry chasms finally became forces to be reckoned with. Sublime phenomena

gained an alternative recognition; they became worthy of preservation. Bierstadt, among others, captivated American minds and Congress enough to spur a new age of western monumentalism and the ensuing creation of National Parks – Natural areas designated as untouchable by the oily hands of man4.

Widely displayed imagery and poetry directly led to the development of Yellowstone National Park in 1872. It was the first of its kind – a baptized immortalization of the nonhuman.

The romanticized steaming mud vats and erupting geysers escaped man’s settlement and development. Other parks

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03 Old Faithful in Yellowstone, Albert Bierstadt, 1881

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followed suit; in attempts to prevent the complete desecration and preserve the high country within the California Sierra, Yosemite was set aside for use by expanding American public. Inspired by the romantic sentiments of his predecessors, conservationist John Muir was greatly moved by this land’s spiritual qualities upon visiting the valley; he widely disseminated Yosemite’s superlative beauty to American citizens through his writings – convincing even Congress to take notice5. In efforts to make the pristine place indelible, Muir helped pass a bill in 1906 for Yosemite to be “the property of the United States government, under the protection and preservation efforts of government stewardship6” and to be officially assimilated into the National Parks System.

Sequoia gained attention as equally primeval and “outstandingly superior in beauty to average examples” of nature – and publicized enough to evade the intrusion of civilization7. America’s first National Parks christened Nature from unattainable heaven into earthly haven – a tangible hope for the depraved city-dwellers.

Estranged from the traditional deistic God, the Romantic God was more concerned with the self and with feeling over reason, and was immediately present in the Natural universe. As the aesthetic and glorified value of America’s natural landscape became increasingly recognized, the Romantics became increasingly anxious about the expanding economy and industries.

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5 Weston, Jessica. “Yosemite.” Religion in the American West, Hamilton College, Dec. 2015.

6 The History of Yosemite National Park.

National Park Reservations Inc. 7 “Brief History of the National Parks.” The Library of Congress, USA.gov, 2019.

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1.3_ america’s domestication.

The prospect of taming the wilderness and making it safe for man’s occupation gave even more reason for Romantic illustrations to popularize Nature, and for city-dwellers to seek an escape from their oppressive situations. “Manifest Destiny” allowed Americans the justification needed to tear out of suppressive urban areas, and to quickly fill and claim ownership over the unknown landscape.

The term, coined by magazine editor John L. O’Sullivan in 1845, declared that the spiritual power of nature validated western land acquisition: “... the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent, which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us9.”

The Homestead Act of 1862 solidified this sentiment from American minds into US law. Claims to 270 millions acres of property were given to anyone who “improved” the land9, which was defined as farming and development. Urban implementations like Central Park – a mere sample of the tamed wild within city life - became insufficient excuses for accessing the Natural when compared -------------------------

8 Heidler, Jeanne T., and David S. Heidler.

“Manifest Destiny.” Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 18 Nov. 2019 9 “History and Culture.” National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2019.

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04 American Progress. John Gast, 1872. Manifest Destiny subjugated Nature to the will of man.

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05 (top) The Oxbow, Thomas Cole, 1836. The left of the image shows an unruly Nature, untouched yet by man’s hand. It portrays the sublime, while the right paints a bucolic image of the peace Nature could bring once tamed.

06 (bottom) The Course of Empire: The Savage State, Thomas Cole. 1834.

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to the prospect of possessing a piece of the sublime. The possibility of urban escape, gifted to man by God, rendered the previously unexplored West as economically valuable. The conservative intentions of many American Romantics backfired within the coal-fueled combustion engines that raced across the West. The vice of New York sprawled into the Hudson Valley, into the rural, and into Nature. The “right to possess the whole of the continent8” greatly devalued the land in a preservationist sense.

Unlimited growth promoted the thought of having a bucolic, personalized place intended for self-reflection, and the transcontinental railroad connecting the two coasts finally made Western domination fully possible. The final railroad spike pierced through and destroyed any remaining notion of the pristine American West.

The burgeoning history of mankind fearing the untamed world validated the need for its conquering. And so began the idealization and subsequent vindicated exploitation of Nature.

Like Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole – the father of the Hudson River School – was an extremely popular artist who held a self-proclaimed concern for the land and transcendentalism.

Cole criticized industry, unchecked American expansion, and ecological destruction at the cost of Nature. He wanted to support the conservation of the land in his paintings, but this idea was actually misunderstood, and perhaps misrepresented. As Romantic paintings of a wild world proved the wild scenes accessible, the representations of a demystified beyond encouraged the occupation of Nature as advertised. Many of Cole’s and Bierstadt’s followers supported the domestication of the Natural, and re-imaged the meaning of their works to fit this model.

Meier, Allison C. “When Landscape Painting Was Protest Art,” JSTOR Daily, JSTOR, 13 April 2018.

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// the beginning.

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case study, the carlin trend.

the birth of consumption.

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case study, into yosemite.

nature’s commodification.

section _02

the first wounds.

“The human... acts as the conqueror of nature, removing material from its location and from the cycles of growth and decay in order to make enduring things. It is in respect of [man] that the idea of the end of nature can even arise.� _ Bronislaw Szerszynski

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01 A pile of American Bison skulls.

On an early visit to the new Yellowstone National Park 1903, American journalist Ray Baker described incoming tourists as: “remain[ing] pretty snugly in their coach-seats or near the hotels. One meets them in great loads, some wrapped in long linen coats, some wearing black glasses, some broad green-brimmed hats.... Occasionally one sees them devouring their guidebooks and checking off the sights as they whirl by [in tourist coaches], so that they will be sure not to miss anything or see anything twice.”

Cox, Thomas R. “Americans and Their Forests: Romanticism, Progress, and Science in the Late Nineteenth Century.”

Journal of Forest History, vol. 29, no. 4,

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2.1_ nature’s commodification.

1848, San Francisco. “Gold! Gold from the American River!” excitedly echoed through the city’s streets1. Riches were suddenly readily accessible, promising unencumbered profit to brave colonists.

The ensuing Gold Rush enabled the West’s conquering – both spatially and economically – as the United States became the world’s leading industrial capitalist nation; the land’s further settlement made the world simultaneously known and opened to exploitation.

The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill coaxed more colonists towards California, which ultimately fated native dwellers to eradication. Murdering any idea of Nature became a game. Indigeous peoples were legally exploited and slayed, and most wildlife skipped the status of being worthy of preservation; cattle and farmland were prioritized over native life. Thirty to sixty million buffalo that once roamed the plains also endured mass genocide, as thousands of men occupied the transcontinental railcars in massive hunting parties which left only 300 buffalo left in the decimated plains – the bones to either be ground up as fertilizer to feed the pastoral landscape beginning to constitute America, or piled together as monuments to man’s domination1. Any conquerable life in the West encountered genocide at the expense of capitalism and ownership. Nature – and those previously living peacefully within it – became not only pacified, but also commodified.

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1 King, Gilbert. “Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 17 July 2012.

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2.2_ case study, into yosemite.

I drive past the entry gates well before sunrise after sleeping on a thin, gravel pullout a few miles outside the Park. The few scattered lights from headlamps on two of Yosemite’s preeminent walls – El Capitan and Half Dome – are the only suggestions of human presence at this hour. They remind me of the absolute privilege it is to be in Yosemite – to be able to freely roam north, east, south, west, through, and skywards within these granite towers. This freedom is largely due to the National Parks Service (NPS), which propagates that early western heroes recognized the value in conserving our natural areas and nobly established America’s National Park System. The parks were established to be “dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people2.” But those people – hordes of tourists who have no idea how to respect the land and desecrate it simply with their overwhelming presence – omit consideration of who and what occupied Yosemite before the Cruise America RVs and overfull parking lots monopolized the Parklands. While the Jeeple, German tourists, and even myself are allowed almost full access to the park, we bring with us destruction by simply existing en masse and using the trails, climbing routes, and constructed amenities. One must wonder where evidence of the previous inhabitants is, and if they were allowed the same ability to freely roam the parklands that we have been gifted via the American government.

I question the history of Yosemite National Park, and how my feelings of place-sharing with others represent a much larger issue that wasn’t mine in the first place. The Native tribes and biologic species who once roamed this area have certainly pondered

his for over a century. They have been subject to an extreme denial, of which I certainly lack understanding.

The Park’s now grossly crowded roads and overpopulated tourist traps string throughout the valleys; the amassing infrastructure within Yosemite slowly impinges on Americans’ original attention to the land’s conservation and on the lives of the orgiginal inhabitants.

The Government’s control of the parklands has continually ignored the historic means of Yosemite’s acquisition, imposed unfair restrictions on the indigenous Miwok tribe who once claimed ownership of the area, suppressed the routine flow of ecologic selfstabilization, and increasingly restricted access to parts of the park in attempts to sustain the environment. The rampant commercialization stemming from American (mis)management of the Park tells a familiar story; it has resulted in an immense lack of environmental stewardship and accessibility within Yosemite for the public, for the indigenous Miwok people, and for the myriad interconnected biotic and abiotic actors of the region.

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2 Dilsaver, Lary M. Americas National Park System - the Critical Documents. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, pp. 84. Print.

02 (left) Map of the Yosemite Valley shows how the National Park Service touted indigenous imagery to advertise the park, even as Native American residents and wildlife were being forced out, c. 1921.

03 (next) A poster advertising Yosemite’s Indian Field Days in 1929, and tourists pose in front of a Miwok u’macha.

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Yosemite Valley is undeniably a sacred space; however, “sacred” denotes conflicting approaches and means of recognition towards the land depending on cultural tradition and viewpoints regarding its ownership. As sentiments of Manifest Destiny and gold mining swept the nation, settlers paved way for tourists and journalists to enter the valleys and establish permanent homes after Yosemite’s public designation as open to visitors3, made possible after establishment of a “pioneer village” consisting of cabins, a tourist hotel, and a ranch4.

Much of Yosemite’s grandeur is thus credited to the hands of western man; namely, John Muir had proved instrumental in the park’s founding. He became known as the Father of America’s National Parks, becoming the namesake for the John Muir Highway from Yosemite to San Francisco, the 200-mile long John Muir Trail that snakes through the Eastern Sierras, and the John Muir Wilderness area in Inyo National Forest. These, and hundreds of other memorials to Muir around California alone, are annals testifying to the deification of American civilization for land acquisition. However, these accounts omit much of Yosemite’s historic establishment, and prioritize a reductionist history that recognizes only the present-day land managers. In reality, any strife with the original inhabitants of the land is intentionally left unadvertised.

The foundational myth of America’s National Parks revolves around the heroic preservation of “pristine wilderness,” but “uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved5.”

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3 Oatman-Stanford, Hunter. “From Yosemite to Bears Ears, Erasing Native Americans From U.S. National Parks.” Collectors Weekly, Auctions Online USA Ltd, 26 Jan. 2018.

4 “Galen Clark.” National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 15 July 2019.

5 Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks.

Oxford University Press, 2000.

6 George, Carmen. “American Indians Share Their Yosemite Story.” Fresnobee, The Fresno Bee, 27 June 2014.

7 Romero, Ezra David. “Yosemite Is More Than Outdoor Adventure. For Native Americans, It’s Sacred.” CapRadio, Capital Public Radio, 22 Aug. 2018.

8 Bullinger, Jake. “Yosemite Finally Reckons with Its Discriminatory Past.” Outside Online, Outside Magazine, 23 Aug. 2018.

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This quieted history of Yosemite Valley centers on exclusive occupation by the Southern Sierra Miwok Tribe. The Ahwahneechees, a subset of the Miwok people, had been stewards of the land for an estimated 8,000 years before the first traces of western men who entered present-day California with the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. In a battle for resources, the mining settlers brutally raided Native American villages in attempts to force the indigenous peoples off the gold-laden land6, and discovered Yosemite during an Indian hunt.

To defend their ancestral land, the Ahwahneechees attacked a post managed

by General John Savage, who led a series of removal and extermination campaigns against the Valley people in revenge. Some tribespeople hid in the mountains, but those captured were coerced into working the mines or onto distant reservations in the Central Valley6. Other Ahwahneechees were not spared: they were either shot and killed or hung from Trees in Yosemite Valley7.

After most of tribe was relocated or murdered, tourists began to trickle into the Parklands. The few Valley people that were allowed to return became laborers for the increasing tourism industry, as the parks service encouraged Native assimilation into western culture through American clothing, food, dwellings, and work opportunity4.

The Miwok people also served as “exotic” attractions for tourists in the early Yosemite through the “Indian Field Days,” wherein park administrators would dress locals in Plains Indian regalia to perform caricatures of traditional ceremonies to visitors8.

Despite these shows, the parks service preferred to keep the Valley people and their mistreatment hidden, confining their existence to a separate Indian community now home to current-day “Yosemite Village” (which now includes a large gift shop, market and pizzeria).

The governmental management of the land has also only worked to support an increasing amount of tourism into the park, leading to overcrowding and (over) development. A century ago, Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane defined Yosemite as a “national playground system9.” This is reflected by the Parks service “build[ing] right on top of areas that have grinding rocks and pounding holes, or spiritual and cultural areas that our people used long ago3.”

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04 (previous) Miwok people shown off in plains indian regalia.

05 (above) A crowd waits to ascend Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. The queue was limited to 400 hikers per day in 2013.

06 (right) “Pave it and Paint it Green,� a parking lot in Yosemite.

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A descendant of the Southern Sierra Miwok noted that “[the Parks Service] consult[s] with the tribe before doing this, which is required by law, but they usually just take the information we provide and do it anyway3.”

Infrastructure like the Wawona Tunnel was blasted through solid granite to make way for the infamous “tunnel view” of Yosemite Valley, and more campgrounds and hotels (supported with deforestation and vast paved parking lots) were built to increase park accessibility to tourists8. It has become obvious that Yosemite was not meant to accommodate millions of visitors each year, especially when the vast majority of those tourists spend their time overcrowding Yosemite Valley – the original home of the Ahwahneechee people – and grossly mistreat the land like a garbage bin10.

This history of systemic removal is standard among most of America’s original National Parks, and the Miwok are among the major facets of Yosemite’s parklands that have quietly been mismanaged and abused. Their commodification stems from the western view of ownership and acquisition – the larger question being dissent between opinions of who deserves the freedom to the land, leaving America with little means of justifying their claims to ownership.

Capitalist gain pushed forward the psychology of the Natural as an outsider – the same ideology which permitted the “savage” exterminations allowed by Manifest Destiny. This dissociation of humankind from his environment rendered the Natural an exhibition. Any territorial temperamentality represented in the Romantic Painting’s of the West showed land primed for domestication, ready to accept anthropocentric technological stabilization.

Controlled, secure access to any remaining ‘wilderness’ was increasingly manifesting in escapist resorts and estates across America. The psychology of Nature as pristine promoted the fantasy of parklands as “other,” only to be touched if tamed.

The grandiose National Parks became but outdoor museums. As the American spirit of individuality and nationalism demanded more territory and lives, National Parks responded with the guise of safety. Though native human populations were not spared from dis-/re-location, Congress outlawed the killing of any wildlife within park bounds1, caging in the last remaining buffalo herd within the most spiritual of places.

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9 The History of Yosemite National Park. National Park Reservations Inc. 10 Johnson, Eric Michael. “How John Muir’s Brand of Conservation Led to the Decline of Yosemite.” Scientific American Blog Network, Scientific American, 13 Aug. 2014.

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“We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.... it is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value.� _ Aldo Leopold

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2.3_ the birth of consumption.

The increasing populization of urban areas was directly related to American industrial establishment – and the need for more resources to support this onset of growth.

The debated damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley, essentially a second Yosemite Valley, in 1915 is a particularly notable example.

The valley contained the Tuolumne River – a sizeable water source – which could either remain as wilderness, or serve the infrastructural needs of a growing San Francisco. A battle between conservationists, who then argued Nature should be allocated for the greatest good and benefit society, and preservationists, who thought nature should be protected from human interference, ensued. As the valley was within Yosemite National Park, the federal government held the power to decide its fate. The same American Congress who initially approved the first nationally protected areas ultimately decided to dam(n) Hetch Hetchy, redirecting waterways away from fish and wildlife to feed the hungry and distant city, even though other equally viable sources existed11. This allocation was a perverse violation to the young park system.

Americans’ love affair with large-scale environmental degradation was birthed in this manner – in the name of capitalist profit.

It introduced new landscapes of balding treeless terrain, lakes of toxic orange sludge, vacant riverbeds, atmospheres polluted with byproducts of industrialization, and otherwise scarred landscapes that displaced both human and non-human communities. The Nature established by Romantics was becoming less healthy, less pristine, and less “beyond.”

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11 “Hetch Hetchy.” Sierra Club, Sierra Club.

12 “Mining 101.” Earthworks, Earthworks, 11 Dec. 2017.

As the mystery of the West vanished – its landmarks quickly populating the world’s atlases – a new cartography was underway: mapping the underground.

The discovery of coal, stone, iron ore, natural gas, gold, copper, uranium, silver, and diamonds hidden from plain sight prompted the wresting of these resources from otherwise unsuspecting surface landscapes. Industrialization pre-dating the discovery of California gold persists into today, as environmental groups battle privatelyinterested governments who support the exploitation of the underworld, and the taming of Earth’s resources for profit.

Rooted in an increasingly capitalist culture, common Americans became indirectly supportive of devouring the landscape for consumerism. Society relied heavily on burning ore to fuel its sprawling cities and transportation, and needed heavy metals to support the domestic goods and inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Gold rush was only the beginning of a tangled history of raw resource extraction, and the 1872 Mining Law was written to promote and protect these industrialized developments.

It allowed federal land managers to trump all other uses of public land (recreation, conservation, renewable energy… etc.) to gain extricable resources. As the law was conceived in an era of pre-environmental protection, it contains no ecologic safeguards12, and has allowed secretive operations to unfold in underground mines and the annihilation of surface topography through surface mountaintop removal.

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07 (top) Hetch Hetchy valley before being dam(n)ed.

September 1917.

08 (bottom) Hetch Hetchy reservoir. November 1933.

Preservationist John Muir, who fought against the dam alongside natural protection groups like the Sierra Club, was appalled

by Congress’ decision. He is quoted: “Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

John Muir, “The Yosemite,” Century, pp. 249-62.

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2.4_ case study, the carlin trend.

The Carlin Trend is an exemplary gold ore deposit established in the nineteen sixties, and contains over 25 mine sites throughout its prolific 60 km district. It is “actually a thermal aftereffect of the still-nomadic Yellowstone hotspot that once pulsed and geysered beneath Nevada” – a depleted “geochemical ghost” and neighbor of America’s beloved first National Park13.

But it wasn’t preserved for tourists like Yellowstone; rather, it was condemned to a different type of commodification and exploitation, proscribed as the most productive gold mining region west of the prime meridian. It is one of the US’ many sites subjected to the carving of entire mountains above microscopic deposits of precious metals and fossil fuels.

The Carlin Trend is not alone in harvesting heavy metals from America’s mountains. Over 1.5 million tonnes of material have been removed the 1600-foot-deep Berkeley open-pit mine (a gaping wound called the “richest hill on earth14”), and Appalachia is littered with hundreds of thousands of subterranean and surface coal mines. These mines opened for capitalist gain, and they have since fueled the world’s urbanized (& suburbanized) sprawl. But they have a limited life span; the resources being extracted are finite. While corporations would willingly rip through the entire viable stratigraphy of the planet given the means and returns, mining operations are coming to a close partially because of industry-wide cut-throat competition.

09 - 11 Aerial images of the Carlin Trend in Nevada.

China, who accounts for half of the world’s coal consumption, promises to dissolve coal use by 2025 in lieu of natural gas and renewable power sources15. US companies sourcing global dirty energy are facing skyrocketing production costs, declining profits, reduced electricity consumption, reduced employment due to mechanization, as well as facing rivalries with cleaner and more efficient power sources16. And despite American President Trump’s efforts to revive the industry during his term, four of the largest American coal companies declared bankruptcy under his leadership from 2015 to 201817.

While their failings may seem like a victory for post-romantic environmentalist groups and the delicate ecosystems engulfed by mine sites, their closure should not be wholly rejoiced. Surface mining allows for massive swathes of forestland (among other habitats to be chopped and burned in return for the ore underfoot. They devour all topsoil and vegetation in sight, and leave only eroding slopes in their wake.

-------------------------

13 Ernst, Richard E., and Kenneth L. Buchan.

“Deep Mantle Plumes and Ore Deposits.”

Mantle Plumes: Their Identification through Time.

Geological Society of America, 2001.

14 “Berkeley Pit.” Montana, Montana Office of Tourism, 15 Xu, Muyu, and David Stanway. “China’s Coal Demand to Peak around 2025.”

Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 23 Aug. 2019.

16 “Understanding Why Coal Mines Close.”

Resources for the Future, Resources for the Future, 4 Apr. 2018.

17 “What’s Driving the Decline of Coal in the United States.” Climate Nexus, Climate Nexus, 21 Mar. 2019.

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Subsurface rock often contains extremely reactive minerals and chemicals which, when extracted and exposed to atmospheric oxygen, create acidic mine waste18 that is dispensed through the watersheds of local ecosystems. Mining processes in examples like the Carlin Trend have likewise discharged tons of cyanide, mercury, and sulfuric acid into nearby groundwater19. The Berkeley Open-Pit Mine contains innumerable toxins which have leached into its orange bath of severely poisoned water and killed all waterfowl resting from their long northward migrations20. And the carcinogenic heavy metals released by coal mines in Appalachia have both mutated and decimated fish populations in two thousand miles of streams21, and destroyed a forested area the size of Delaware22. These externalities account for mining being the United States’ most toxic source of pollution8.

To maintain the guise of pollution control, mining companies adhere to federal laws requiring the management of toxic byproduct and efforts of remediation during and after closure of mining complexes. Congress enacted the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Land Reclamation Act and Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program to ensure that these polluted sites are cleaned23, but the laws are just vague enough for companies to use convenient loopholes to limit the scope of their restorations to much less than Nature intended. They call for a return to the “approximate original contour” of -------------------------

18 Ayangbenro, Ayansina S et al. “SulfateReducing Bacteria as an Effective Tool for Sustainable Acid Mine Bioremediation.”

Frontiers in microbiology vol. 9 1986. 22 Aug. 2018.

19 Maisel, David. “American Mine.” David Maisel, 2007.

20 “Berkeley Pit.” Montana, Montana Office of Tourism.

21 “Mountaintop Removal Mining Toxic to Local Streams, EPA Data Shows.” Yale E360, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 16 Mar. 2010.

22 McQuaid, John. “Mountaintop Mining Legacy: Destroying Appalachia’s Streams.” Yale E360, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 20 July 2009.

23 Patterson, Brittany. “Portal 31: How A Closed Mine Opened New Prospects For One Coal Town.” Ohio Valley ReSource, Ohio Valley ReSource, 8 Nov. 2019.

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12 Retention ponds at the Gold King Mine, 2015. These are holding back and filtering through water contaminated with chemicals and heavy metals. A Spill has stained rivers and streams in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah with 3 million gallons of spilled wastewater. 48 mines are included in the more than one thousand “Superfund” sites in the US. Elliott, Dan. “EPA Sets Long-Term Goals for Colorado Mining Superfund Site.” The Salt Lake Tribune, 14 Mar. 2019.

The sites call for the most highly toxic and improperly managed hazardous sites to be returned to “productive use” & cleaned. “What Is Superfund?” EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, 30 Nov. 2018.

These are among hundreds of thousands of abandoned American mines that will cost $32-72 billion tax dollars to clean, cumulatively creating 50 million gallons of toxified water daily and tons of displaced earth. “General Mining Law of 1872.” Earthworks, Earthworks, 6 Aug. 2019.

“We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard.” _Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

affected mountains before mining, and ask that destroyed terrain be restored to forestland or a “higher and better use1.” But American government has never been separate from mining, and it protects corporations both outwardly and under the table. Companies have used these loose definitions to acquire exemptions from the rebuilding or restoration requirements if they present an alternative “higher value” (like commercial and industrial development or “wilderness” areas)24. But this rarely occurs. Most surface mines end up as barren, disused grassland capped with lifeless or nonexistent topsoil – claimed to be productive grazing pastures. It allows mining companies to avoid any reclamation efforts that even remotely nears pre-mining levels of wilderness or biodiversity.

The 1977 law is already insufficient in its regulation of wasted mine sites, and is set to expire in 2021. It is currently funded by operational mine corporations as a tax on each ton of coal extracted. But mining will die – it is dying. Just as the tens of thousands of abandoned coal mines in Appalachia12 and 500,000 deserted metal mines in America have perished25. To evade this funeral, corporations have attempted to “[master] geology and chemistry in order to engineer the retardation of time’s passage26.” The marriage between the governmet and mining companies has allowed the circumvention of many reclamation efforts. Some of these corporate captains of industry appear to be blinded by their egocentric pursuit of money, power, comfort, and

convenience. In turn, they sacrifice small but significant parts of the very planet that led to their personal creation. They forget or deny that their own children and grandchildren will inherit this devastation.

But the acceleration of the surface world’s degradation can no longer hide under the time machine that mining uncovers. Human preservation cannot be sustained by any amount of coal energy, or copper wiring, or adornment with gold. The invincibility of the human is a myth, and man’s search for eternal energy sources at the expense of healthy ecosystems has only created an environment far more toxic than has present-day agriculture and urbanization.

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24 Olade, Mark. “What Happens to the Land After Coal Mines Close?” DeSmogBlog, DeSmog, 25 Mar. 2018.

25 “Green Remediation Best Management Practices: Mining Sites.” Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, United States Environmental Protection Agency. Sept. 2018.

26 Mattern, Shannon. “Extract and Preserve: Underground Repositories for a Posthuman Future?” New Geographies 09: Posthuman Vol. 09, edited by Gomez-Luque, Mariano, and Ghazal Jafari. Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Actar, 2018, pp. 60.

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// the beginning.

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the death of nature.

case study, after chernobyl.

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the remaking of ecology.

section _03

unhealed scars.

/

“The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened Americans.... the gap between what the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing.” _Abrahm Lustgarten, NY Times

////////////////////////////////////

“Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?” _Rachel Carson, the Silent Spring

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BIOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS species A

species B MUTUALISM

{BENEFITS} +

COMMENSALISM

{UNAFFECTED} O

+ PARASITISM

NEUTRALISM

O

AMMENNSALISM

{HARMED}

-

COMPETITION

-

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A diagram relaying possible outcomes resulting from ecological interactions between any organism or groups of organisms. These relationships vary between harming or benefitting another species with or without also receiving harm or benefit.

1 Swyngedouw, Erik. “More-Than-Human Constellations as Immuno-Biopolitical Fantasy in the Urbicene.” New Geographies 09: Posthuman Vol. 09, edited by GomezLuque, Mariano, and Ghazal Jafari.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Actar, 2018, pp. 21.

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3.1_ the remaking of ecology.

Man has prevailed throughout the Holocene, only recently acquiring enough geophysical agency to validate the birth of a new geologic epoch: the Anthropocene. He had previously assumed a non-dominat role among global biotic communities, and was subject to co-evolutionary adaptations demanded by Earth’s ecological systems.

But his current modes of existence have spurred an extremely unequitable shift in the relationship between living systems and their abiotic environments.

Man has accepted a new role: one where parasitism and commensalism define his ecological position, and where he lives to ensure only his benefit (see diagram at left).

Man has bypassed the temporal trial and error formerly necessary to adapt to environmental shifts, instead harnessing the power of technological advancement to dictate what lives, dies, and thrives.

He has tapped into the complexities of Earth as a “complex, non-linear, and indeterminate system with multiple feedback loops and heterogeneous dynamics” – now so dominant that many “human activities [have become] an integral part of terraforming” the abiotic world1. Man has forged new ecological structures from biologic, geologic, hydrologic, radioactive, and meteorologic processes otherwise nonexistent without human hands. And in a ceaseless hunt for more energy, more space, and more power, man has parasitically and irreversibly wounded his environment – leaving global scars and mass biological euthanasia that time will not heal, but will accept.

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3.2_ case study, after chernobyl.

In April of 1968, a failed experiment testing a USSR-era nuclear reactor in current-day northern Ukraine unraveled into the world’s worst nuclear accident.

The reactor, designed to heat steam for electricity generation, exploded and expelled uranium into the atmosphere.

The Soviets evacuated over three hundred thousand people from a 30 km ‘exclusion zone’ poisoned by spilled radiation, which contained sections of land estimated to remain uninhabitable by man for 20,000 more years2.

It has been reported that over 6,000 youth developed thyroid cancer as a direct result of the accident, and the forest surrounding the reactor turned red as trees died after absorbing fatal amounts of radiation2. Invertebrates in the soil and many mammals perished in areas containing the highest contamination3, and the only humans permitted to enter the area must don haz-mat suits to research the aftermath.

Despite the unsettling silence of man’s retreat from the exclusion zone, local wildlife has actually reclaimed the area.

The absence of the 120,000 humans who previously inhabited Chernobyl and Pripyat has enabled beaver, badger, lynx, elk, deer, boar, and bison populations to actually increase within the radiation zone, with wolf populations seven times as abundant as other nearby wildlife reserves2. (Other studies show almost no difference in the abundance of small mammal species within or outside of the affected area3.) To note, these populations are not necessarily thriving – one researcher who spent 15 years exploring

the effects of radiation on local wildlife reported that “in almost all cases, there is a clear signal of the negative effects of radiation on wild populations ... even the cuckoo’s call is affected2.” Detrimental mutations and altered chromosomes have proven the genetic consequences of even low doses of radiation poisoning, which has manifested in “elevated levels of cataracts and albinism, and lower rates of beneficial bacteria3” in many mammal populations living in the affected areas.

It is an overstatement to declare that Chernobyl is a flourishing wildlife refuge – although native populations have measurably rebounded because of man’s disappearance, numerical data does little to prove ecological thriving.

Human mistakes have caused genetic consequences for its own populations, in addition to all other local flora and fauna, that will lead to ever-more degenerated ecosystems for generations.

This case is but one of thousands in which anthropocentric demands for energy production resulted in catastrophic and irreparable damage to the environment.

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2 Ludwig, Gerd. “The Chernobyl Disaster: What Happened, and the Long-Term Impacts.” National Geographic, National Geographic Society, 20 May 2019.

3 Barras, Colin. “Earth - The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Is Arguably a Nature Reserve.” BBC, BBC, 22 Apr. 2016.

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01 (above) Herds of wild horses occupy the Chernobyl exlclsion zone in the wake of human absense from the area.

02 (next page) A fox finds refuge in an old school inside the Chernobyl exlclusion zone.

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61

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03 Ok funeral. August 18, 2019. 200 people hiked for two hours through Iceland’s mountainlands in somber silence to attend the funeral of Okjökull (“Ok”) glacier. Scientists pronounced the glacier dead after it melted so extensively that it couldn’t move under its own mass. A plaque was made to commemorate the first death of an Icelandic glacier. Similar global commemorations ensued that follow this model.

Bouhassira, Elza. “The Funeral for Iceland’s OK Glacier Attracts International Attention.”

GlacierHub, GlacierHub, 28 Aug. 2019.

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3.3_ the death of nature.

Humans are clearly responsible for the mass disruption of Earth’s ecologies; man’s wielding of biopower has ended Earth’s ability to holistically self-regulate its systems in means that will sustain humanity.

Among countless other destructive resource extraction operations, mining processes have unleased toxic pollution and caused environmental genocide, and burning coal for energy has caused global temperature rise and the death of keystone glaciers. The compassion towards all life and land that defined the Sierra Club, John Muir, and other early conservationists has been replaced by the desire to sustain an anthropocentric habitat built on selfish degradation. Indeed, this results from the view that Earth is intended for domination; within it exists is a Nature separate from man, and this Nature is meant for man’s taking. But as ecologicallyand object-oriented-philosopher Timothy Morton has claimed, “there is no “pristine,“ no Nature, only history. Indeed....Nature is only reified history4.”

This posthuman view of man and Nature presents man as but another prominent and incalculable actor in the geophysicality of the planet – merely one of the many destructive and creative agents which have terraformed the earth for the past four billion years. “[Humans] are not the only agent in [their] habitat, but are the primary one. The substance of this great transformation is humankind’s creation of a new habitat, which humans dominate but do not control4.”

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4 Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2014, pp. 58,13,101.

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The posthumanist denies the psychology of Nature that Romantics had spent centuries building, who advanced the estrangement of man from statedly divine places. Just as human exceptionalism rationalized Americans’ mass murder and manipulation of Native humans and wildlife populations in its emergence as a nation, Nature had been distanced to the point of ignoring the large-scale erosion, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification that have been allowed by the construction of surface mines, dams, energy plants, and agriculture. It is no longer true that one can wholly exploit the other without consequence in complete parasitism – and according to Earth’s inveterate network of living systems, it never was. Man’s effects are finally encroaching upon even the most pristine of Romantic habitats.

The rampant toxic air pollution, blazing fires, and rising seas destroying the anthropocentric built environment respect no man-made boundaries. The GISconstructed borders of National Parks and city lines do not impede the looming destruction of the human and nonhuman environment. Progressively frequent human-spurred “disaster” scenarios end the guise of Anthropocentric invincibility.

Morton claims that this Natural “world as [separate] – not just a specific idea of world but the world in its entirety – has evaporated. Or rather, we are realizing that we never had it in the first place4.”

Nature is not owned by man, nor is it somewhere over there; it is immediate. If the earth – itself vital, and an ever-evolving home for all life – dies, man as selfproclaimed master of the house perishes just the same. There is no separation of sentient or non-sentient, human or nonhuman. There is no Nature.

The mysterious, unknown, bucolic, and exploitable have dissolved into a singular entity, finally escaping from the ruse of human dominion over Earth’s web of

interdependent living systems. Man is not the sole species capable of preventing his death – he is rather the product of a multitude of relations, and must not forget that nonhuman forces provide the basis for all human life and thriving.

The enduring disengagement from man’s manufactured landscapes cannot continue. The laws of biotic and abiotic interactions prove that “the past, the present, and the future are caught in a ceaseless beconjugation and redefinition of each other5,” demonstrated by the ecological reaction and collapse of healthy ecological adaptation. Humans no longer exist as biologically divergent, transcending the order of evolution at the expense of the planetary host.

Man now recognizes that he must face the consequences of his unbalanced dominion in an inevitable greeting – returning the greasy handshake of the dirty and blurry terrain he has created.

-------------------------

5 New Geographies. Inverview with Cary Wolf. “Critical Ecologies of Posthumanism.” New Geographies 09: Posthuman Vol. 09, edited by GomezLuque, Mariano, and Ghazal Jafari.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Actar, 2018, pp. 178.

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04 - 05 Two identical views of Mt. Trumbull in Grand Canyon National Park , 2016. Shows air dirtied by emissions from the nearby Navajo Generating Station coal plant. The plant visibly pollutes the air for up to a third of each year.

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06 Haze at Joshua Tree National Park, 2019. The National Parks Conservation Association reports that air pollution from cities is leaking out of urban areas, noting that 96% of America’s 416 national parks have significant air quality issues. Further, 88% of parks contain sensitive plants and animals affected by poor air quality, and 85% have air that is unhealthy to breathe.

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3.4_ case study, the west, burning.

Western man’s first entry into Yosemite National Forestland gifted a sense of “pristine” – pines were spread evenly throughout the Valley and framed by rolling meadows that supported wildflowers, grasses, and wildlife.

However, this picturesque view of “nature’s landscape garden, at once beautiful and sublime6” popularized by Muir was only made possible by both Miwok land stewardship and selfsustaining environmental systems. For thousands of years, the Ahwahneechee had been instigating controlled burns to manage underbrush and recycle nutrients to the soil – an act seen as savage by the white man, who believed that fire was to be feared. When the Miwok were expelled and their practices punished, the park became overgrown and experienced disastrous fires within 40 years of their removal7, and fell prey to pesticide use and the hunting of predators to increase the amount of game7.

These practices realize Romantic America’s aversion to the untamed; even the naming convention of these events themselves – “wild” fires – have separation and fear embedded into their etymology.

Fire suppression is not unique to parklands, the quenching of all fire predates to the 1910 “Big Blowout” fire, which devastated 3 million acres in Montana, Idaho, and Washington in two days. Foresters managed lands based on the philosophy: “why create national forests if they were going to burn down8?” And thus the US Forest Service was tasked with complete and immediate suppression of all forest fires, believing it was the only path away from civilization’s complete annihilation.

The USFS’ knowledge of the ecological role of fire was limited at best; their ability to execute this gross mismanagement was was anything but. The USFS adopted the 10am Policy – demeaning that all fire must be extinguished by 10am the morning following a fire report – and created Smokey the Bear to instill the ideology of fire elimination into the public’s mind8.

Total suppression continued until the sixties, as evidence pointed towards fire being crucial to maintaining healthy forest ecosystems9. It is an agent of renewal, and can be largely responsible in regulating soil biota. This informed and revised the USFS’ methods towards a “let-burn” policy8, and the Service must now attempt to correct the devastating mistakes of half a century’s efforts instead of allocating more funds towards habitat restoration.

The let-burn policy blurs the encroaching boundaries of the “wildland-urban interface” (WUI), the edge of exurban sprawl wherein man-made structures lie --------------------------

6 The History of Yosemite National Park.

National Park Reservations Inc. 8 Romero, Ezra David. “Yosemite Is More Than Outdoor Adventure. For Native Americans, It’s Sacred.” CapRadio, Capital Public Radio, 22 Aug. 2018.

8 “U.S. Forest Service Fire Suppression.”

Forest History Society, Forest History Society, Inc., 9 Apr. 2020.

9 “Fire Effects on the Environment.” Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, USDA.gov. 2020 10 “New Analyses Reveal WUI Growth in the U.S.” Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, USDA.gov, 16 July 2018.

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07 (top) Yosemite Valley before major fire suppression tactics, supporting wide grasslands, 1899.

08 (bottom) Yosemite Valley with doubled tree coverage, creating a tinderbox, 1994.

Les James, a tribal elder active in Yosemite’s native community remarked that “[the Parks Service] destroyed something that we preserved for thousands of years. In 150 years, [they]’ve ruined it.”

George, Carmen. “American Indians Share Their Yosemite Story.” Fresnobee,

in or adjacent to areas wildfire-prone lands.

According to the USFS, the WUI increased by 41% in homes and 33% in land between 1990 and 2010, turning 189,000 km2 into a quiet tinderbox10. Immediate effects on human life are obvious, such as the burning of vacation homes and communities which lie along forest bounds; the smoke, poor air quality, and emittance of carbon dioxide resulting from these interactions cause intensive malignant health effects felt on a national scale. As the USFS has stated, “what happens in the WUI does not stay in the WUI10.”

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09 (above) Smoke from western wildfires traversing the nation, 2017.

10 (left) California Wildfire smoke and corresponding fires, 2017.

11 (next page) The SCU Lightning Complex wildfires burn southeast of San Francisco on Aug. 22, 2020, in California.

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“To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.” _Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

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// the beginning.

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case study, oystertecture.

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case study, fresh kills.

surviving vs thriving.

section _04

reconnection.

“Utilitarian selfinterest takes us to the point at which we realize that we are not separate from our world.

Humans must learn to care for fatal substances that will outlast them and their descendants beyond any meaningful limit of self-interest. What we need is an ethics of the other, an ethics based on the proximity of the stranger.� __Timothy Morton

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4.1_ surviving versus thriving.

“EXISTENCE IS COEXISTENCE1.”

This is Timothy Morton’s graceful summary of ecological webs – balanced networks which reinforce man’s movement towards an equitable existence among myriad co-dependent entities.

His environmental exploitation has only recently also afflicted homo sapiens, and he must now face the consequences. He is realizing that anthropocentric geotrauma is inextricably inseparable from human livelihood, and that civilization’s current models of feeding on the destruction of nonrenewable resources are unsustainable. The levels of urbanized comfort that allow ever-increasingly amounts of consumption cannot be maintained at equally increasing rates, and “sustainability” is a paltry excuse for continuing man’s present industrialized structures.

Instead, every destructive act of man inflicted upon his environment now requires an even more far- reaching opposite reaction if he is to continue any Earthly existence. Rather than outright exploiting his shared habitat, and rather than capitalizing on the environment in its degraded or pseudo-pristine state, the future of man’s place on Earth lies in ameliorative ecologies – acts by mankind which actually improve the environment.

This position converts the anthropocentric perception of domination into a recognition of man’s dependence on -------------------------

01 Interconnective ecology diagram.

1 Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2014, pp. 125.

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other systems – a position as participatory with (but not wholly controlling) all living systems. It is a position of human regenerative action.

Regenerative responses allow human co-evolution alongside the nonhuman, forming constructive relationships that create positive change within habitats2.

This notion demotes man from the throne of anthropocentrism in favor of a biocentric and holistic place among global ecological systems. Surpassing efforts of reversing damage or merely surviving, man can improve deteriorated environments to create an ecosystem capable of thriving – even among human presence3. This approach taps into interactions between living and nonliving systems on earth and the interdependent nature of biotic and abiotic factors.

This mutually beneficial relationship of man and community is anything but neoteric, and was in fact examined by Aldo Leopold – the father of wildlife ecology – in 1949. His holistic approach intrinsically valued all beings and their environments without regard to their utility to man. His understanding of community extended “to include soils, waters, plants, and animals; or collectively: the land.” Leopold found that misappropriation of the environment has occurred because humans view land economically – as property, “entailing privileges but not obligations.” He instead believed “we can only be ethical in relation to something we can see, understand, feel, love, or otherwise have faith in” – an attitude which intertwines care for people with care for the land4.

Similarly, regenerative design denies human domination of the ecological web, and restores his position within feedback loops which equitably benefit and disadvantage other pieces of the whole. Man’s role shifts from domineering his environment to “collectively focus[ing] on enhancing life in all its manifestations – humans, other species, and ecological systems – through an enduring responsibility of stewardship5.”

Man may abandon his purely parasitic relationship with the nonhuman, trading for a commensal or mutualistic partnership with other species. This network of variable beneficial, neutral, and harmful relationships defines the very dynamism necessary for ecosystems to self-sustain and thrive.

Shifts in global urbanization and recognition of man’s destructive impacts have spurred a typology of regenerative landscape design projects. These often take land recycling into account, and re-introduce the nonhuman into the manmade built environment. The reclamation of heavily degraded sites creates a communal habitat for codependent species, and allows biodiverse ecosystems to thrive within usable urban space.

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2 Cole, Raymond J., et al. “Regenerative Design, Socio-Ecological Systems and CoEvolution.” Building Research & Information, vol. 41, no. 2, Mar. 2013, pp. 237–247.

EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/09613218.201 3.747130.

3 Cairns, J. (2007). Sustainable co-evolution.

International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology, 14, 103–108.

4 Leopold, Aldo, and Michael Sewell. A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation.

Oxford University Press, 2001.

5 Nugent, Sarah, et al. “Living, Regenerative, and Adaptive Buildings .” Whole Building Design Guide, National Institute of Building Sciences, 8 May 2016.

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“In many ways, the environmental crisis is a design crisis. It is a consequence of how things are made, buildings are constructed, and landscapes are used.

Design manifests culture, and culture rests firmly on the foundation of what we believe to be true about the world.� _ Sim Van der Ryn & Stuart Cowan

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02 Capped landfill in the west section of Freshkills in 2014.

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4.2_ case study, fresh kills.

Fresh Kills (as in “kille”, the Dutch word for riverbed) was originally a freshwater coastal marsh occupied by Native American groups and a healthy ecosystem near Staten Island. When New York City became a modern industrial and urban hub, Robert Moses determined that these biodiverse tidal creeks were a suitable location for New York’s primary landfill in the 1940s, and planned to cover the wetlands with trash and use the resultant infill as developable land. Staten Island locals fought to block the landfill and hold Moses to his promise that the dump would be temporary, but their decade-long struggle was ignored and the dumping continued. Only 17 years after its conception, Fresh Kills Landfill accepted 29,000 tons of waste every day and became the world’s largest trash heap.

The fill contained well over one thousand acres of urban refuse and the detritus from the September 11, 2001 catastrophe, and rose 200 feet above the surrounding sea6. In 2002, New York City held a design competition to convert the landfill into a public park – a process predicted to span over half a century. Landscape architecture firm Field Operations won, and subsequently took on the largest public land project since the creation of Central Park. The design includes building hundreds of miles of trails among 2,200 acres, and restoring wildlife habitat atop soil, geotextiles, and a plastic geomembrane that trap and cover the trash mountains.

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6 “Freshkills Park.” The Freshkills Park Alliance, Social Ink.

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Freshkills is being built and managed in phases, and as of 2020, the landfill-to-park project has already successfully created the largest grassland habitat in the region.

It is now home to native plants and an extremely biodiverse collection of song birds, water fowl, raptors, mammals, insects, reptiles, and aquatic creatures.

The surrounding water is clean enough for boating, kayaking and catch-and-release fishing, and the remainder of the park is scheduled to fully publicly open in 20367.

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7 “Freshkills Park.” Freshkills Park : NYC Parks, New York City Department of Parks & Rec.

(prev. page) 03 (top, left) Freshkills dump in the 1960s.

04 (bottom, left) People may safely enjoy sections of Freshkills park in this 2015“Discovery Day.” 05 (right, top) The landfill site in 1943.

06 (right, bottom) Growing a new parkland over time. current page 07 Proposed project as designed

by Landscape architecture firm Field Operations.

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“When one considers earth or the biosphere as a whole, pushing pollution ‘somewhere else’ is only redistributing it, sweeping it under the carpet.” _Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

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4.3_ case study, oystertecture.

The earth’s altering climate has spurred intensifying storms that are increasingly impinging upon coastal cities. In 2012, New York City was among one of many forced to encounter this encroaching reality with the floodwaters that Hurricane Sandy brought along with it, costing billions of dollars in infrastructural damage. Floodgates and seawalls were proposed to address the next superstorm, but architecture firm SCAPE developed a different scheme that harkened back to a historic food source for the burgeoning city: oysters8.

The estuarial environment that once defined New York was estimated to originally contain trillions of oysters that were particularly adept at controlling storm surges and coastal erosion. They naturally construct their colonies via an underwater architecture similar to the structure of coral reefs, which provide habitat for other aquatic species and dismantle bigger waves before they reach the shoreline. The city’s oyster population disappeared because of over-oystering, and the remaining populations were decimated from industrial pollution released into the city’s waterways – surrendering New York City, unprotected, to the whim of the open sea. SCAPE realized the importance of these species in the city’s ability to survive increasingly violent and devastating storm surges, and proposed the implementation of an underwater substrate for oysters to grow upon.

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8 FitzGerald, Emmett, producer. “OysterTecture.” 99% Invisible, Episode 282, Radiotopia, 31 Oct. 2017.

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08 (top) Reef building and attenuation.

09 (bottom) Oyster filtration mechanics.

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This “oyster-techture” involves constructing rocky jetties just off the edge of Staten Island inoculated with oyster larvae, allowing the growth of an artificial reef that also takes advantage of the mollusks’ capabilities as filter feeders to clean the coastal rivers. As of 2020, the project – “Living Breakwaters” – is deep in the design process. It creates a buffer zone for the next major storm to hit New York City, protecting the residents therein, as well as re-creates habitat for the native oyster species and other fish. It is a regenerative design that successfully revives a severely degraded ecosystem and protects the homes of millions of humans.

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10 (top) Rendering of regenerative habitat off Staten Island.

11 (bottom) Diagram of coastal area affected by regeneration efforts.

The proposal would collectively benefit human & nonhuman habitat.

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rebirth.

creation machine.

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abs[tract], mementos mori.

vellum competition, requiescat.

section _05

experiment.

/

“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?” _Rachel Carson, the Silent Spring

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“The problem of human society... is what to do with one’s shit.” _Timothy Morton

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5.1_ design competition, requiescat.

In the material world, our goods are often designed without thought of their afterlives. Products are fabricated with inseparable components or with chemicals, making it impossible to recycle or reuse the item when its singlular purpose has been completed. “requiescat” – a wish or prayer for the repose of the dead – instead takes advantage of its shifting base of 4 common consituents, which are all 100% compostable.

Each material takes on 4 different purposes, formed in alternative ways every life. The parts begin their in existences separately in their designed uses, are collected and assembled into a chair, become a funerary basket for the user when their life has ended, and ultimately become soil fertilizer – as the compostable materials work to decompose the human bodies that made the products to begin with. Requiescat aims to improve the environment where it finally lands, enabling useful afterlives with its materials and the people who interact with it.

Requiescat won an honorable mention award in the 2020 Vellum Design Competition.

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01 Finished chair.

02 Diagram detailing the four material lives.

04 - 09 Process images detailing the construction of cardboard and papier-mâché base, tea bag skin, and woolen cover.

09 - 10 Finished chair.

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LIFE 1 // ORIGINAL

GREEN TEA

CARDBOARD

NEWSPAPER

SHEEPWOOL

• bioactive compounds: rich in polyphenols/ catechins (antioxidants to improve blood flow and lower cholesterol) • improved performance on working memory

• recyclable and reusable boxes • inexpensive packaging option • light weight • rigid with cushioning capabilities • recyclable and reusable • inexpensive/often free • platform for community voice • often used alternatively - as for shelters or blankets

• protection from temperature extremes as thermal barrier • can absorb 33% of its weight in moisture without compromising its insulating ability

LIFE 2 // CHAIR

SKIN

FORM

SUPPORT

BLANKET

after being used for their respective original purposes, the four materials are reassembled into floor furniture - tea bags become upholstery, laser-cut cardboard creates the form, paper maché newspaper (made from water + flour + compostable glue) reinforces the cardboard waffle structure, and the wool is sheared off a sheep and made into a soft fleece interface between chair and user.

L

MEM

BAS

BAS

SHR

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LIFE 3 // BURIAL

heir

mbled a tery,

er made

ard the sheep fleece air

MEMORY

BASKET

BASKET

in the third life, the assembled materials receive their namesake “requiescat,” which is a prayer for the repose of the souls of the dead.the wool now covers a human body, acting as a burial shroud, while the cardboard and newspaper form a basket to gently cradle the human body. the tea, originally consumed by the user with his/her community, act as a commemorative embellishment that celebrates the person’s life and relationships. the basket can be ceremonially buried into an area of earth which is nutrient - depleted, where it continues onto its next life of providing nutrition to soil from the human body and the materials decomposing with it.

LIFE 4 // REMEDIATOR 12 wk. to decompose • increases drainage & maintains moisture • rich in nitrogen

FERTILIZER 2-3 mo. to decompose • source of carbon • can be used as mulch • weed prevention

FERTILIZER 12 wk. to decompose • source of carbon • can be used as garden bedding

STRUCTURE 6 mo. to decompose • provides porosity • slug/snail repellant • nitrogen, P, K, Ca, Fe, S

SHROUD

FERTILIZER

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5.2_ abs[tract], mementos mori.

In this thought experiment, pieces of wasted human detritus have been sealed into blocks of coal (a pocketwatch, a tampon, cigarette butts, and pieces of a car engine).

They are all artifacts of the anthropocene that will take decades to degrade.

11 - 12 A taxonomy of human waste served as early explorations regarding environmental degradation.

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13

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5.3_ creation machine.

The leftovers of man ubiquitously populate the globe – and sometimes, they can still be useful in another life.

The structural material of this creative machine was taken from the Cal Poly campus “bike graveyard.� It is constructed of salvaged bike parts and powered by an arduino and stepper motor. The machine grabs paint already loaded into an arm and splats the pigments onto an adjacent piece of drawing board. It is an artistic device that creates both life and art from old waste.

14 13 - 15 Photographs and plan drawing detailing the creative machine.

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y clack

clickit

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swis

h sw

ish

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5.3_ rebirth, 24 hour project.

Man produces waste from almost all his creative processes. But unlike the ecological world outside his domain, human refuse is typically not effectively repurposed. Rebirth is an experiment that uses the greasy waste product from frying bacon as a glue for feeding birds.

After cooking the meat, the leftover hot grease is poured from a pan into a mold that already contains bird seed; when cool, the grease solidifies around the seeds, shaping into a molded figure that can be removed and placed outside for birds to enjoy.

This project was prompted and completed over 24 hours in conjunction with Jaynee Chwa and Geoff Sanhueza.

The mold was fabricated from plaster, & outer shell/holder is constructed from 3d printed PLA.

16 - 18 (left) Process photographs and diagrams.

/

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site mapping.

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hobet 21 mining complex.

the reign of king coal.

section _06

into site.

/

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” _Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, 1968

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“[This is] an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.” _Rachel Carson, the Silent Spring

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01 (above) Coal Fields of Appalachia.

02 (next page) Coal River Mountain Mine. The old Marsh Fork elementary school lies next to a prep plant and below a sludge pond containing tailings from the West Virginia mine.

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6.1_ the reign of king coal.

300 million years ago in the Paleozoic Era, tropical coastal swamps swallowed leafy ferns, dead mammal remains, and giant insects into a thick, oxygen-deprived sludge. The organic material was pressed into coal, and the force from colliding landmasses thrust up the coastal plains to levels as high as the Himalayas. Millions of years of sustained erosion, heat, and pressure solidified the bogs into coal seams, and baked them into today’s Appalachian mountains.

These water-carved valleys have been topped by the most productive and biodiverse temperate hardwood forest ecosystem on earth for millions of years.

The Neotropical birds and insects existing here for eons had blissfully remained unaware of the black gold that lay under the surface1. That is, until the discovery of coal in Appalachia in the 1870s.

The previously pristine, rolling mountaintops have become bald – the result of mountain-top removal coal mining. It renders mountains treeless, artificially carving the sloping walls with explosive blasts to get at the carbonrich remains of dead natural matter underneath. Earth-moving machines scrape, prod, pack, and punch mountains into the likeness of the animal carcasses that formed the coal eras of magnitude before. Since the late 1800s, surface mining has only increased its scope to -------------------------

1 Perks, Rob. “Mining the Mountain.”

NRDC, Natural Resources Defense Council, 15 Dec. 2016.

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match the energy needs of growing societies, and the Appalachias continue to be sliced by ever-more grisly methods as excavation technology improves.

America’s development was married to the coal mining industry, coal was used to generate heat for the increasingly populous cities and to power railroad engines. The intense reliance on coal continued largely into the 2000s for the nation’s current and future electric energy generation, and it became the principal energy source for a majority of the states – producing half the nation’s electricity at the turn of the century. In 2015, there were 400 coal-powered plants in the US that generated thirty percent of the country’s power that year2.

While coal was traditionally extracted from subsurface mines that were extremely hazardous to the employees, mountaintop removal (or MTR) of coal provided a more economic alternative.

Otherwise known as surface mining, MTR is an offshoot of strip mining, and was developed to reduce the amount of workers needed underground and to recover almost all the coal in a given seam.

MTR is accomplished in a series of components. First, forestland and any topsoil covering the underlying coal seams is cleared. All vegetation, including hardwoods, is typically burned or illegally disposed of as valley fill. Millions of tons of explosives then rip through hundreds of feet of mountaintops, which provides access to the resources underneath. The newly accessible coal and any leftover debris is removed with draglines – massive earthmoving cranes that rise hundreds of feet in the air. The leftover toxic “spoil” or “overburden” debris is legally dumped as waste product into neighboring valleys, which funnel the headwaters for local creeks and rivers.

This often causes widespread pollution downstream, as does the ensuing on-site processing of coal that creates a sludge of coal dust, water, and clay toxified with heavy metals. A homogenized and often contaminated ecosystem is left over after mining operations are complete.

Federal law requires coal companies to replant and re-contour the mountains to provide a topography suited for

reestablishing a healthy habitat3. These regulations specifically demand that coal companies return strip-mined land to its “approximate original contour” (or AOC), redevelop forests, control erosion, and construct filtration slurry ponds to contain any leaked chemical compounds and mining byproducts1.

However, the companies often take advantage of loopholes designed within regulatory laws that exempt them from any real reclamation efforts. The “approximate” in AOC is loosely defined, as is a conversion into “higher and better use.” While coal companies claim “higher use” includes dulling the preexisting forests into agricultural grassland, the flattened mountaintops are often too polluted serve this purpose, and remain ecologically barren and degraded1,4.

Surface mining is specifically extirpative to Appalachian ecosystems. Millions of acres in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia have been subject to the greed of coal companies via mountaintop removal – and the ensuing environmental pollution. Aside from the billions of tons of atmospheric CO2 that coal production releases each year5, toxic heavy metals like selenium, arsenic, lead, and mercury exposed from mining operations have been infused into the heavily biodiverse Appalachian ecosystems. The surrounding communities of people and wildlife are subject to critical and often fatal health issues, and flash floods rushing off the disturbed mountainsides destroy both human and nonhuman homes3.

Any misleading intent of environmental reclamation written into mining regulations is a myth that advances America’s sustained history of exploiting shared ecologies.

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2 Muyskens, John, et al. “Mapping How the United States Generates Its Electricity.”

The Washington Post, WP Company, 28 Mar. 2017.

3 “What Is Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining?” ILoveMountains.org, Appalachian Voices.

4 McQuaid, John. “Mining the Mountains.”

Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 1 Jan. 2009.

5 Fernando, Hiranya, et al. “Capturing King Coal.” World Resources Institute, World Resources Institute, 26 Sept. 2018.

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“The truth of the Anthropocene is less about what humanity is doing, than the traces that humanity will leave behind.� _Bronislaw Szerszynski

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04

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03 (prev page) The Hobet 21 mine leveled peaks in West Virginia as a result of surface mountaintop removal.

04 (above) Biodiversity Hotspots in the United States. Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse temperate environments in the world.

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6.2_ hobet 21 mining complex.

Hobet 21 Surface Mine is among the most sizeable MTR operations in the eastern US, and straddles the borders of Boone and Logan counties in southern West Virginia6.

It rests within a section of Appalachia regarded as one of the most biodiverse regions in the continental United States, due to its extensive evolutionary history dating to the last major glaciations in North America. The micro-variances within the soils, elevation, geology, and temperate climate have allowed niche wildlife and vegetative species to develop in isolation for millions of years. Vast old-growth forests and protective mountain slopes have supported the evolution of niche populations since then7.

The various mining companies that have claimed ownership to this 6,268-acre coal mining complex since 1974 are directly responsible for the dramatically declining well-being of the environment surrounding Hobet 21. The pre-ice age forests that have provided microhabitats for millenia were chopped and burned to access the thick coal seams woven into the mountains, fracturing forest ecosystems and impoverishing populations of native wildlife. Hundreds of feet of mountain debris were displaced and dumped into surrounding hollows, contaminating the local Mud River watershed and dropping the average slope of the land by over ten percent8.

More than 1,000 miles of streams have been buried and polluted with woperations at Hobet 21. These toxic valley fills have officially labeled

local watershed as biologically impaired, and have critically degraded and killed aquatic life in surrounding streams and rivers to the verge of collapse9. This gross mountaintop annihilation yields only one ton of coal for every sixteen tons of removed terrain1.

Federal law required the most recent owner of Hobet 21, Patriot Coal, to manage the site during and after mining had commenced. But when Patriot declared bankruptcy and abandoned Hobet in 2015, operations – and any scant efforts of restoration and management of leaked pollution – ceased4.

The site’s closure prompted statewide questions regarding the deserted land.

West Virginia’s governor at the time proposed residential, commercial, and industrial development on the site, noting that Hobet’s 12,000 acres contained: -------------------------

6 Beitman, Adam, et al. “Patriot Coal’s Hobet 21 Mine Wiping Out W.Va’s Mud River Watershed.” Sierra Club National, Sierra Club, 6 Apr. 2015.

7 Loucks, C., et al. “Appalachian Forests.”

WWF, World Wildlife Fund.

8 Manke, Kara, and Brian McGlynn.

“Central Appalachia Flatter Due to Mountaintop Mining.” Duke Today, Duke University, 5 Feb. 2016.

9 Lindberg, et al., “Cumulative Impacts of Mountaintop Mining on an Appalachian Watershed” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 108: 20929-34 (2012).

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“endless opportunities … [to build] virtually every major economic development project in recent history... with thousands of acres to spare10.”

But any such efforts have been ignored.

Plans for remediating Hobet 21 have been nullified. Most of the site remains empty pasturelands, and mining equipment and leftover structures supporting the extraction process lie forgotten across the barren plateaus. The minimal attempts at slope stabilization have been accomplished by planting expeditious invasive Asian grass, but the compacted soil is inept for regrowing native trees. What was once a maze of mountainous wilderness areas is now a fill site, and the destabilized terrain causes mudslides and flooding into nearby communities. The artificial lakes built to store poisonous mining byproduct have failed, leaking heavy metals into downstream water sources11.

The Mud River ecosystem – which “is on the brink of a major toxic event” – has become an oozing slurry that secretes selenium and causes extreme deformations in local fish. Lung and digestive cancers, reproductive issues, and chronic lung, heart, and kidney disease in nearby human populations are all dramatically elevated by the area’s high amounts of toxic barium and arsenic4.

Part of Hobet’s original pollution permit forbids contaminating local waters with “materials in concentrations which are harmful, hazardous or toxic to man, animal, or aquatic life,” or that cause “significant adverse impacts to the chemical, physical, hydrologic, or biological components of aquatic ecosystems6.”

But private companies lease their land & its mineral rights to companies like Patriot, and West Virginia mining -------------------------

10 Ward, Ken. “Tomblin Proposal for Hobet Mine Site Development a Long Way from Reality.” Charleston Gazette-Mail, 16 Jan. 2016.

11 McQuaid, John. “Mountaintop Mining Legacy: Destroying Appalachia’s Streams.”

Yale E360, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 20 July 2009.

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regulations protect corporate interests4, so nothing has been done to address the consequences of the radically altered geomorphology.

Hobet 21 has produced more widespread and destructive levels of water pollution than nearly any other mine in Appalachia, and the scale of geo-engineering and terrestrial alteration on the site is so vast that the ecosystem is nearly incapable of supporting a healthy forestland again. As with most surface mines in West Virginia and in the United States, those responsible for the degeneration have “created a landscape that [can] not return to a healthy, productive forest without serious human mitigation12.”

The neglected ecosystem leftover at Hobet 21 is a symptom of man’s larger lack of concern for equitable resource use, and of his globally futile push to advance increasingly obsolete human livelihoods at the cost of his entire ecosystem. Environmental degeneration in Hobet 21 must be addressed – actually ­addressed outside of Appalachia’s miserly mining laws – with positive holistic means that benefit more than those men blinded with biopower and capital. Action at Hobet 21 should instead adopt a regenerative approach, and channel human domination into the human stewardship necessary for all biotic life to thrive on this planet.

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12 Payne, Elizabeth E. “Reclaiming Mined Mountains to Beneficial Use.” The Appalachian Voice, Appalachian Voices, 15 Dec. 2016.

05 (prev. page) Collection of satellite imagery detailing the expansion of Hobet 21 from1984 to 2015.

06 (top) Map of flattened mine site.

In 2016, Duke University reported that certain sites in West Virginia have flattened by 40 percent since surface mining began in the seventies. Mining operations at Hobet 21 are no exception.

07 (bottom) Acid mine drainage dyes a West Virginia waterway orange, coating the stream bed with heavy metals.

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08 (top) Inside a deserted dragline on the Hobet 21 site.

09 (bottom) Abandoned and decaying coal sorting equipment.

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“... the language of natural history is inadequate for describing human history. its time constants are far too sweeping to fit the temporal scales of human experience. the evidence it seeks in stratigraphic and other geological markers rarely register struggles for power within the human species, much less the role of human consciousness in co-evolving with its habitat.� _Rosalind Williams

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“I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.� _E.B. White

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6.3_ site mapping.

The Hobet 21 Surface Mine had been operational for nearly 50 years, and its progression through the Appalachians has been aerially recorded via satellite imagery.

When the data became available in 1984, most of the old-growth forest habitat was still undisturbed. Since then, the mine has eaten through streams forming the Mud River headwaters and flattening all mountaintops and valleys it came across.

10 - 12 This experiment overlays the extent of Hobet’s operations over the site throughout time as of 2015 after the mine’s closure.

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A topographic map detailing the extent of degradation to the site.

nearby townships soil debris infill affected area

marked every 20 yrs

sphere of influence minig path pre-1975 waterway

//

// the beginning.

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when the beginning began.

/ ///////////////////

disturbing the disturbance.

tending the land.

the birth of a park.

section _07

a proposal.

“A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, & also respect for the community as such.� _Aldo Leopold

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01 "What's happened to our park in the last 34 days is irreparable for the next 200 to 300 years.” Joshua Tree National Park Superintendent Curt Sauer. He, among hundreds of volunteers, ralied to “Shutdown the Shutdown for Joshua Tree National Park” and repaired damage from illegal campfires, camping, and vehicle travel. The shutdown began as a result of President Trump’s refusal to concede his demands for $5 billion to construct a border wall between the US and Mexico.

Daley, Jason. “Joshua Trees Could Take 200 to 300 Years to Recover From Shutdown Damage.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 30 Jan. 2019.

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7.1_ the birth of a park.

The national parks we are most familiar with were established over a century ago, set aside for protection against a people hyper-focused on westward expansion and insatiable resource extraction. But they were also founded on the antiquated principles of being an ‘other.’ Today, some of the forests, meadows, and deserts endowed to the American public have suffered destruction and massive ecological imbalance as a result of being loved and used to death. During the recent US government shutdown at the turn of 2018, for example, National Parks were among the many public entities which lost funding – and thus manpower – to continue conserving the ecosystems therein. Careless tourists and thrill-seekers intentionally cut down age-old Yucca brevifolia, the namesake of Joshua Tree National Park, to carve paths through the virgin desert for their four-wheelers and invasive but instagrammable campsites. This is not so different than the very decimation these areas were attempting to avoid in their conception; much like the rest of the developed and developing world, the reality of parks in the past hundred years is that they have indeed become “heavily managed and technologized landscapes1.”

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1 Wolfe, Cary. “Critical Ecologies of Posthumanism.” New Geographies 09: Posthuman Vol. 09, edited by GomezLuque, Mariano, and Ghazal Jafari.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Actar, 2018, pp. 180.

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But what if instead of merely approaching parklands as preserving snapshots in time (which face inevitable dissolution of some fabled ‘pristine’ state), and instead of loving and using them to death, parklands were also entities nurtured into new life?

Rather than fearing what detriment man may yet inflict upon the land, park sites may be chosen because they have already felt the worst of man’s blows – and badly desire reparation. Addressing the future of Hobet 21 holds with it the potential to reimagine the purpose and means of contemporary land management and protection – while still being just as “technologized” as the nation’s 62 parks today. The Hobet site’s decimation can take advantage of the power of nationalparking: it may be set aside for public use and historic and scientific interests, but also redefine what parks afford to ecological webs within an increasingly civilized Earth. The 1916 Organic Act stated that National Parks’ “purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations2.”

With these founding principles in mind, Hobet 21 National Park can potentially serve as educational and research institution, delivering to the public an area to enjoy – but by understanding the history of the grounds. Contrary to the parks of today, in which landscapes and biota are struggling to be preserved in their pre-anthropocentrized state, Hobet 21 would undergo constant human-made disturbances to the land’s original destruction. This would create a new understanding of landscape: one which includes both human error and the whims of the surrounding ecology.

Hobet 21 National Park’s phasing

approach accepts the history of the site as transitioning from the least protected land in the US – a deforested and toxified surface coal mine – to a site loved into the highest safekeeping.

Under new protection of Parks-status, Hobet 21 may eventually welcome visitors and long-term residents in a process of comprehending the human experience in relation to his greater ecological web. The park will allow for the visualization and human engagement with an evolving biome throughout time, restore wildlife corridors to relink habitats across the nation, and advocate outdoor recreation. Soil will transition from being laden with heavy metals to supporting both healthy forests and agriculture for human consumption.

The park will openly teach both principles of regeneration and a holistic American history regarding the previously revered exploitation of our own country. It will be a manifestation proving that human history and environmental histories and futures are, in fact, not distinct.

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2 “Quick History of the National Park Service (U.S. National Park Service).”

National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 14 May 2018.

3 Rucker, Patrick. “The Rise and Demise of a West Virginia Coal Mine.” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 5 Aug. 2016.

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7.1.1_ the argument for participatory recreation.

More than displaying the detrimental human effects on environments, Hobet 21 as a National Park may also fiscally serve the local community seeking to fill the gaping wound left by the departure of coal. The surrounding towns of Danville and Madison had previously offered their citizens as a workforce to the nearby mining operations for decades. Mining defined the local economies, but at the cost of a series of union strikes, empty promises to the community, longer and more demanding hours, and the health and lives of many miners. Because “everybody just got caught up in the idea that high coal prices would go on forever,” as the founder of Alpha Coal Company stated, hundreds of millions of dollars of health benefits dissolved for former and current workers. The financial legacy of companies “doing away with everything we were promised,” including leaving a slurry pond instead of the wildlife habitat outlined in the original mine permit, left the community seeking alternatives after Patriot Coal’s final declaration of bankruptcy and subsequent termination in 20163.

Since the mine’s closure, residents of Danville and the surrounding areas have sought other means of supporting themselves. As townspeople remark that “everyone is kind of hanging their hats on Hobet,” they remember financial alternatives like the Coal River. Though it was labeled the dirtiest river in the country in 2002 by the American River Association, it has since been cleaned – and capitalized upon with kayaking and canoeing operations. While West

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Virginia government leaders proposed ending the maintenance of local parks

to counteract the multi-million-dollar financial loss of coal, small business owners are instead meeting ends by beginning boat launches, and increasingly cleaning surrounding rivers with the support of outside groups. They claim that “[leaders] need to support the boat launches [which] bring people in to spend money. You don’t want to cut back on something that you’re winning with4.” What was once a trash receptacle stained with slurry has now begun to serve as a lifeline – a model which can be scaled to the entire Hobet 21 site.

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4 Knisely, Amelia Ferrell, and Charleston Gazette-Mail. “Rivers Bring Stream of Revenue to Southern West Virginia.”

Herald, Gannett Co., Inc., 10 Sept. 2019.

02 (below) A map of the Coal Rivers trip guide. The river flows through Danville, and the majority of its traffic is downstream from the Hobet 21 site.

03 (right) 2018 “Tour de Coal” on the WV Coal River. Hundreds of kayakers attended the event, many picking up trash as they drifted down the river.

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04 An understory of cultivated American Ginseng in an Appalachian forest. Penn State researchers are successfully growing medicinal herbs with agroforestry.

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7.1.2_ the argument for protected regenerative agriculture.

Once-fertile land is subjected to desertification, pesticide and chemical use heavily contribute to a loss in biodiversity, the agricultural sector is increasingly responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, and forests are continually sacrificed for cropland. It is a fair statement that anthropocentric land use is severely mismanaged and has room for improvement. While parts of the carved mountaintops in West Virginia should be returned to a sloped state to encourage aquatic restoration, some of the flattened landscapes may also positively serve as pasture and croplands. The scalped land made available in the mining of Hobet 21 holds opportunity to reverse these effects though means of regenerative agriculture and agroforestry – while also reclaiming both the toxified mining land and the local community.

National Park site has the potential to take advantage of the same practices to bolster the local community’s resilience – both environmentally and financially.

Not only has West Virginia already seen success with recreational opportunity, but also with several examples of converting mountaintop coal mines into small farms that integrate regenerative farming practices. “Refresh Appalachia” is one exemplary social enterprise which offers employment to laid-off coal miners by using mine land for forestry and agricultural enterprises. They remove the invasive and failed plantings left by coal companies (which pass as meager reclamation efforts at best), then grow and sell livestock in the abandoned fields.

This enterprise has successfully created a closed loop between the animals and plants on-site – a mutualistic relationship – while also proving dramatically beneficial to low-income residents5.

A similar endeavor on the Hobet 21

Regenerative agroforestry combines yet more effective land management methods: this cultivates bioversity, soil health, and plant growth by spatially merging woody perennials with other means of agriculture like smaller crops. This practice approaches the less designed ecologies of “natural” environments, and can also serve as an alternative means of producing food, timber, and biomass for biorefineries. The two specific methods

Regenerative agriculture uses a combination of practices which build soil fertility, increase water retention and clean runoff, support ecosystem biodiversity and resiliency, and encourage means of carbon sequestration and reduction of harmful emissions. This can be accomplished by eliminating tilling, which pulverizes microbial communities and leads to chemical imbalance in soil, as well as by innoculating soil with compost and plant rotations6. These methods cater to more traditional ideas of managing agricultural land and can be extremely beneficial on the Hobet 21 site.

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5 Moore, Catherine V. “Turning Appalachia’s Mountaintop Coal Mines Into Farms.” Civil Eats, 22 Jan. 2018.

6 “What Is Regenerative Agriculture?”

Regeneration International, Regeneration International, 25 Feb. 2017.

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which could benefit Hobet 21 are employing agrisilvicultural systems, in which crops are planted among trees and perform well on small scales, and aquaforestry, wherein trees are planted near fish-filled ponds7.

These approaches all progress toward mutualistic ecological systems. Though these interactions begin as humandesigned solutions, they hold the capacity to quickly become self-sufficient habitats that catalyze the resilience of ecosystems within Hobet 21 National Park. The Park has the capability to financially revitalize the community within the constructive means of also cleaning damaged environments. The new typology of open space and selective occupation of these areas prove that the lands are not a distant ‘somewhere else’ – the exact nomination which allowed their decimation decades before. They are not an ‘other;’ rather, the lands are a major home for the larger community.

The new Hobet 21 National Park has the capability to serve as an example for the same action on the other hundreds (if not thousands) of damaged sites, presenting faith in both present and future generations of man, wildlife, and their consolidation.

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7 “What Is Regenerative Agroforestry.”

ReNature, ReNature.

05 Ramps (a leek-like vegetable) are grown in an Appalachian agroforestry production.

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7.2_ tending the land.

Two thirds of “reclaimed” coal mines in the US have been converted into disused grassland void of value. “It’s dead land… all the topsoil has been dumped into the valleys, and it’s just this barren landscape8.” This remark from a West Virginia local, whose family has lived near the Hobet 21 mine for eleven generations, touched on how his and other mining communities already hit by job loss in the 21st century are left without economic possibility. Cursory reclamation efforts imperceptibly approach the pre-mining levels of lands’ health and productivity.

Implementing more diverse plant life in conjunction with a plan for its processing may actually serve as an effective model for mine reclamation which benefits both local environments and local communities, both human and nonhuman. This manifests as phytoremediation, a process which uses plants to remove, transfer, stabilize, and/ or destroy soil contaminants.It can be used in conjunction with converting the Hobet 21 on-site coal refinery into a biorefinery – a facility which converts agriculture, forest, and waste feedstock biomass into fuels and power9.

Biorefineries use organic materials to produce energy typically made from fossil fuels like coal. They create a variety of fuels and power themselves and allow for economic growth in agriculture and forestry, thus creating employment in rural communities. Most importantly, biorefineries employ local agricultural byproducts to reduce disposal and waste – which would displace West Virginia’s coal consumption. Because agricultural

and forested land are the largest potential sources for feedstock, mine reclamation can employ the selective harvesting of grown organic matter with phytoremediative qualities. By planting vegetation capable of reducing the pH of contaminated soil and absorbing the released heavy metals, then using it to produce fuel for human use, the Hobet 21 site may both be cleaned and and productive for the entire ecological community.

Proper revegetation uses a combination of native woody species and grasses3. In the Hobet 21 site, plants with the largest phytoremediative capabilities will be planted first, stabilizing the soil pH and neutralizing the harmful effects of the released heavy metals. Soil remediation is the priority, but upon being stabilized, other native vegetation in the area attuned to the ecosystem will then be nurtured and planted.

-------------------------

8 Olalde, Mark. “What Happens to the Land After Coal Mines Close?”

DeSmogBlog, DeSmog, 25 Mar. 2018.

9 “Biorefineries Fact Sheet.” CleanEnergy.org, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Apr. 2008.

10 Priyadarshi, Apurva. “Which Plant Has the Highest Tendency of Absorbing Heavy Metals from Soil and Water.” ResearchGate, ResearchGate GmbH, 1 Jan. 2019.

11 “Willow Trees Are Cost-Efficient Cleaners of Contaminated Soil.”

ScienceDaily, ScienceDaily, Dec. 2014.

12 Williams, Marc. “Plant Talk 14 Plants for Phytoremediation.” Online Plant Talk Classes, Botany Every Day, 2013.

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“Whoever owns [the] soil, [it] is theirs all the way [up] to Heaven & [down] to Hell.” _Accursius, circa 13th century C.E

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The following is a collection of native or now assimilated Appalachian plant species particularly adept at purifying and restoring contaminated soils, and which can be used as raw material for energy production in biorefineries. Water plants, like duckweed, have a high capability of accumulating multiple metals. Subsets of vegetative families like Alyssum, Brassica, and Noccaea are highly capable of hyperaccumulating, removing, degrading, sequestering, transforming, assimilate, metabolizing and otherwise detoxifying heavy metals10. Flowering trees like willows have been proven to clean nickel and zinc from degraded soil within a decade, and chromium and copper within fifteen years11. These and dogwoods have shown success growing in highly acidic soils.

DAISY FAMILY(ASTERACEAE) Sunflower(Helianthus annuus)

LEGUME FAMILY (FABACEAE) Astragalus (Astragalus spp).

MUSTARD FAMILY (BRASSICACEAE) Penny cress (Thlaspi spp.)

Alyssum (Alyssum spp.)

ARUM FAMILY(ARACEAE) Duckweed (Lemna minor)

DOGWOOD FAMILY(Cornaceae) Dogwood(Cornus Florida)

WILLOW FAMILY(Salicaceae) Black Willow Tree(Salix Nigra)

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Though immediately planting a range of native flora would contribute to the biodiversity of the community and provide habitat for incoming fauna, certain species should be planted after the soil is stabilized. Some plant species, like pine trees, typically acidify soils and increase the mobility of heavy metals12.

The following is a collection of native Appalachian tree species to be planted in the later stages of site reclamation.

Yellow Birch (Betula alleghaniensis)

Red Spruce (Picea rubens)

Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum)

Table Mountain Pine (Pinus pungens)

American Beech (Fagus grandifolia)

Northern White Cedar (Thuja occidentalis)

Yellow Poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera)

Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra)

Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis)

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7.3_ disturbing the disturbance.

Complex ecological systems manage uncertain futures and evolve accordingly; built human environments must similarly adapt in order to survive. A regenerative co-evolution, similar to the land ethic proposed by Leopold, accepts that multiple species reciprocally affect each other’s development, and the resultant self-regulating system can maintain this dynamic equilibrium of uncertainty. Thus, the human-built adaptation to Hobet 21 is not a wholly anthropocentric implementation; rather, it is a migratory and phased alteration to the site – a re-introduction of ecological diversity which allows the ecosystem to thrive without constant active human maintenance. This implementation reconfigures mining equipment into machines of creation, rather than destruction. These are used to re-establish the ecosystem to self-sustaining levels useful to the entire ecological community.

The design phases focus on a process of land regeneration that aims to eliminate the cycles of “otherness” which have defined the Hobet site.

Although Hobet 21 and surrounding abandoned surface mines have been subject to extreme toxicity since their existences as surface mines, it is possible for the local ecosystem to become healthy and able to support integrated living systems again. The speculative development of the site is accomplished through several levels of environmental succession broken into two major stages: primary and secondary succession.

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PRIMARY SUCCESSION

FOREST SUCCESSION

Primary succession begins in barren areas. Small species capable of thriving in adverse condiditions like bacteria and fungi feed on the minimal existing compounds to survive. In the case of surface mining, these “pioneer communities� convert compacted, deficient, and toxic soil into a nutritious substrate capable of supporting simple plants. the human implementation introduces compost collected from substinence agriculture to aid in soil remediation.

as a more specific and cyclic process, forest succession may begin from primary or secondary succession (which begins from a site disturbance). it begins with decomposers that return nutrition from broken down plants to the soil. the species born of the increasingly viable substrate modify the soil further to allow more complex plant species to colonize. these feed fauna, which return the eaten nutrition to the ecosystem when they excrete and die. this propagates ever-larger vegetation and life, eventually creating a climax forest.

COMMUNITIES

AQUATIC

TERRESTRIAL

Pioneers or early colonizers: the first biotic group in a succession. include small, lower plants and highly tolerant organisms adapted to growing on bare surfaces. They require little space, substratum or nutrients.

DETOX STAGE

PIONEER STAGE

Developmental or intermediate communities: secondary series of communities that increasingly develop in compleixty with each succeeding community. include greater biodiveristy with larger numbers of individuals per species.

SHRUB STAGE

YOUNG FOREST

lichen switchgrass rhododendron moss inland sea oats laurel little bluestem dogwood evening primrose willow woodland sunflower field mouse spiders bats mites bacteria american robin ticks phytoplankton hummingbird beetles

crayfish mudminnows mountain chorus frog

DETOX STAGE

PHASE 1

PIONEER STAGE

bass carp catfish trout crappie

MATURE FOREST

CLIMAX FOREST

northern white-cedar owl table mountain pine hawks red spruce opossum yellow poplar alder vultures sugar maple wild turkey american beech elk striped skunk bobcats yellow birch gray squirrel coyote cottontail rabbit gray fox black bear white-tailed deer land snails skink copperhead snapping turtles

AQUATIC HABITATION

PHASE 2 PHASE 3

Climax community: final, stable community which establishes equilibrium with local ecological conditions. they have developed the most species complexity and diversity, and are typically the larger biotic lifeforms in an ecosystem.

PHASE 4

BIODIVERSITY THROUGH TIME

TERRESTRIAL INTEGRATION

PHASE 5

EQUIPMENT RE-ASSEMBLY REGRADING + SOIL HYDRO-BIOREMEDIATION EARLY OCCUPIED HABITAT CO-EVOLVING HABITAT

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PHASE 1 EQUIPMENT RE-ASSEMBLY STATIONARY PREPARATION. leftover building structures house workers during hacking of abandonded mining equipment for transformation into regenerative-site machines. subsistence agricultural operations begin to produce baseline compost source for fueling mobile equpiment.

REGRADING + SOIL RESTORATION

PHASE 2

PHASE 3 HYDRO-BIOREMEDIATION

RE(STOR)/(FORM)ATION. mobile equipment is occupied & regrading process begins to reintroduce water flow through site. phytoremediative bacteria and seeds are deposited into recontoured soil to dilute heavy metals. agricultural production increases to feed workers, and produce compost +

small phytoremediative vegetation begins growing from soil innoculated with seeds in groundwater supply. compost is deposited to aid in amelioration of depleted soil and to provide nutrients for early succession plants. heavy metals are extracted in plant rhizosphere and clean uncovered streams.

SEED DISPERSAL

PHYTOREMEDIATIVE G

AQUATIC RE

BACTERIAL DISPERSAL

BACTERIAL GROWING

REGRADING // TILLING

AGRICULTURE

FOOD WASTE COMPOSTING REACTOR SCRUBBING // FILTER

BIOREACTOR //

FUEL CONVERSION

BIOMETHANE COLLECTION

HUMAN HABITATION

FA

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An overview of proposed phases.

PHASE 4

EARLY OCCUPIED HABITAT as regrading and bacterial deposition continues throughout the site, remediated water sources support aquatic + small terrestrial life. deposited seeds grow into larger vegetation, creating habitat corridors that link the two disconnected sides of the site. flora/fauna enters, traverses across,and occupies the remediated site.

GROWING

EMEDIATION

AUNA HABITATION

PHASE 5

CO-EVOLVING HABITAT overlapping habitat corridors form blurry boundaries that link the site’s edges & constituents. a patchwork of habitats fill the site’s voids & combine terrestrial and aquatic life. a co-evolving system of mutual interconnection establishes the remediated mine as a healthy, selfsustaining ecosystem for the human & nonhuman inhabitants.

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“Architects’ drawings show no roots, no growing, just green lollipops and buildings floating on a page, as if ground were flat and blank, the tree an object, not a life.

Planners’ maps show no buried rivers, no flowing, just streets, lines of ownership, and proposals for future use, as if past were not present, as if the city were merely a human construct not a living, changing landscape...” _Anne Whiston Spirn, The Yellowwood & the Forgotten Creek

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map key

2 mi

mined area human-occupied area habitat corridor re-countoured path existing river/stream recovered river/stream

PHASE 0 Hobet 21 mine as it stands when abandoned; leftover mining equipment is located on the site and converted into a series of deployable machines.

PHASE 1 The overburden placed into valley fills must be removed and the slopes recontoured to uncover streams and allow for water drainage. Collections of subsurface groundwater are located to inform the recontouring process.

During the regrading process, fungi and bacteria are mixed into the tilled soil to extract heavy metal contaminants.

PHASE 2 This, and a loosely graded topsoil, creates a suitable, non-compacted rooting medium for future plant growth. Early succession vegetation species are planted for wildlife habitat and soil stability.

site phasing PHASE 3 As regrading and bacterial deposition continues elsewhere on the site, cleaned water sources begin supporting aquatic life.

Deposited seeds grow into larger vegetation, creating terrestrial habitat corridors that link the two disconnected sides of the site.

PHASE 4 Overlapping habitat corridors form blurry boundaries which link the edges of and elements within the site. The distributed patchwork of planted habitats naturally fill Hobet 21’s voids, and combine terrestrial and aquatic life. The co-evolving system of mutual interconnection establishes the remediated mine as a healthy, self-sustaining ecosystem.

PHASE 5 The ecosystem has developed into a fully mature forest on the way towards becoming a climax community. A biodiversified habitat supports flora & fauna – both planted and self-introduced – and humans from nearby towns may also occupy the site with homes, research centers, substinence agriculture, and a newly protected national park.

A mutual co-evolution of all species ensues instead of humans exclusively acting parasitically and competitively.

remediative tree growth

regrading for water flow

remediative shrub growth

algae phytoremediation

toxic slurry pond

draining slurry pond

step pools

remediative wetland

clearing pond

draining slurry pond

previous railroad track

existing little coal river

existing road

SECTION_07

converted biorefinery

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25 20

1m

t2

30 20

be

20 20

begin

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regen

E2

PHAS E1

PHAS

site

wildl e d i w

ife

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se ouse mou field m fie ird ts mingb bam hu ingbirdl rrel hummsqui uirre ay sq gr ay gr

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40 20

35 20

0

tion clean tributary stream

aquatic populations establihed

merging vegetation corridors

terraced agricultural plots

cleaned recreational pond

existing road

human habitation hub

aquaponics production

cleaned pond

terrestrial wildlife population paths

road system addition

elevated boardwalk

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PHAS E5

PHAS E4

PHAS E3

tion

tions

esta

la popu e f i l ild ed w h s i l b

k k bear ac blel ats bobcat bc ss bo vulture ar s k be acre vublltu

l bass rn ow ba pie crap ss rkey ba wild tu n ow k rn el ba

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7.4_ when the beginning began.

we stood, more or less in a line, at the edge of the chain-link fence. my fingers were laced through the diamond voids, and a morning chill bit into my hands. my eyes traced past the dirt on my knuckles to the smoky flatness beyond the thin, steel links.

propelled our legs like mad. though not visible yet, we knew the beasts we sought lay just beyond the edge of the artificial plateau we raced across.

fog rose from the few untouched valleys beyond and shrouded our view. it was hard to make anything out in the mist. but we knew they were in there - we had been planning this for months now. we just had to go find them.

our band spread out over the barren field, eyes strained and searching through the fog. the coordinates we mapped onto the beasts weren’t perfect, but sufficient enough to provide their general location. still driven into a frenzy of elation for the task ahead, we eagerly searched on.

X was the first to move. the thud of her pack on the barren earth broke my distant stare and pulled my attention back to the task at hand. X ripped open her misshapen bag and produced a chain-cutter, smirking. “should we let the beasts outta their cage?” she directed more than asked.

X lifted the clippers into place on a thin strand of metal, still smiling. she liked to break things. but only with good reason. the complying snap of steel against steel told us this was as good of a reason as any. she worked through the wire mesh, the rest of us still stiffened from both the cold and the realization that we would finally begin. she swiftly completed her task and firmly yarded back a strip of link, holding it open expectantly. “well?” X ordered. her voice released us all from our inactive reverie, and we responded by blithely shoving past each other to squeeze through the torn barricade first. once inside, there was no pause. excitement

they pulled us, willingly, into the mine.

replete with both anger for the overconsumption that casued all of this, and optimism for our cause, we ran together. our disparate pasts brought us here for the same reason - we all had a job to do. alone, no one knew enough to convert the abandoned machines into anything useful. but tapping into all our skills - the chops of a mechanic, the knowledge of a local, the ingenuity of an engineer, the thumb of a botanist, and the expertise of an ex-miner - there was no way we could fail. if we couldn’t fix the problem that got us into this mess, we could at least prove what was possible from now on. after the seeming eternity of minutes, X issued a bright signal that sliced through the air - a crisp but somehow sad song reminiscent of the warblers that used to thrive here. the metal beasts had apparently been found, so I followed her call. I approached my friend’s small figure as the others caught up. through labored breath, I cracked a smile at the sight. a dozen or so mustard caterpillars lay strewn across the empty field. their bodies were

165

rusted, and it was obvious they hadn’t crawled for years. but that was a good sign - it meant no one would bother us. our mechanic removed a set of tools and divided them between us, one by one. we accepted them with a newfound pride - wielding these instruments was synonymous with taking this scoured land under our responsibility. but unlike those who came before us, our role was to give back to our community - the entire community . approaching the first beast, wrench in hand, it was impossible to predict what would come of the hopefully nomadic and self-sustained livelihoods we would create. we never considered ourselves environmentalists or preservationists. we weren’t god, attempting to decide where humans and nonhumans should or should not exist, and didn’t want to be. we were just human. but we would try righting what man did wrong, and make this place habitable again - recreating an empathy for the land that gave so much to us first. dismantling the destructive steel claws of the dozer underfoot, a notion became evident to us all. we were just human nothing but another living being on the planet. and so with wrench in hand, I began my journey to help all exist as such.

/

// the beginning.

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ////////

/////// ///////////////////

an empathetic ecology.

restoration & remediation.

intro to (re)assembly.

life of the (un)abandoned.

section _08

thesis.

“If we build a rich enough set of ecological concerns into the very epistemology of design, we may create a coherent response to the environmental crisis.� _Sim Van der Ryn & Stuart Cowan

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agriculture + habitat corridor

wetland

primary community + export station

171

agriculture + habitat corridor

wetland

primary community + export station

To investigate means of regenerating the site, three prototypical sections were selected from the larger mine. This included 1) a flattened area which could be used for agriculture after being cleaned, 2) the slurry pond to be healed into a wetland, and 3) the existing coal refinery to be converted into a biorefinery.

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woody vegetation slurry pond cleaned water retention wetland phytoremediative edge water filtration ditch existing paths phytoremediation patch human dwellings human paths

Site selection was further narrowed into a focus on the wetland, which allowed formal investigations including: _ a series of highly designed incisions _ overlaying circulation elements to represent housing distribution

173

174

SECTION_08

175

“The earth speaks in many languages, but only one voice.” _ Enrique Salmon

176

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177

8.1_ life of the (un)abandoned.

Rather than continuing man’s domination and overconsumption of resources, this design implementation reconstructs the equipment used in destructive mining processes and converts it into habitat-building machines. These initially establish a shared habitat intended for all biotic systems that mutualistically affect the species therein. The resulting system efficiently performs by consuming waste produced at every level of the food web - and converts it into energy useful for man, machine, and whole community.

Three-dimensional form-finding experiments used bits of assorted mechanical and electrical equipment to create two reconfigured machines.

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DRAGLINES

8.2_ intro to (re)assembly.

excavation equipment used to remove large volumes of overburden. operate by casting a heavy cable-hung bucket outward from a crane-like boom and dragging the bucket toward itself

SCRAPERS earthmoving vehicles that selectively spread over- burden using a centrally mounted hopper with a sharp edge. can be hydraulically raised or lowered

CRANES lifting equipment used to place and move mined materials, equipment, and building materials over small distances.

BACKHOES/DOZERS track-mounted excavation vehicles equipped with wide, vertical pusher blades that can be raised and lowered during operation. used to clear land, scrape, dig, load, and move overburden small distances.

HAULERS tire-mounted machines with a wide and deep hydraulically operated bed used to move mined material from pit to stockpile.

FUEL TANKS on-site fuel tanks and pumps store large volumes of liquid fuel to power surface mining equipment. above-grade tanks contain 500 to many thousands of gallons of fuel.

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BIOTIC STORAGE

DIGGER DEPOSITOR

SEED BANK COMPOST

DETOX PLANTS VEGETABLES

leftov conve

BIOGAS CONVERTER SOLAR GENERATOR

CHICKEN BIRDS BEES

EAT EXCRETE SLEEP

HOUSING HUMAN DWELLING houses everyday human functions like room to rest, cook,and clean themselves.

MACHINE

NONHUMAN DWELLING contains chicken coops for human eating, & bird/bee houses to protect species during habitat restoration.

PROGRAM /

Reconfigured machines regrade the site, restoring elevation changes to the otherwise flattened area.

[ ] “otherness”

1. dig reg inn veg 2. ha coll nat am 3. bio cap com cre 4. ho hab mo wor

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SECTION_08

digger/depositor which will regrade the site and innoculate phytoremediative vegetation into the recontoured soil as it digs.

biomethane converter which captures methane from compost, stores it, and creates fuel for the machines

------------

------------

[

housing/agriculture safe for human habitation and nutrition. develops a self-sustaining machine where the workers can grow their food

[] ]

181

harvester/seed bank which collects seeds from nearby native plants & grows them in a mobile nursery

----------------

[ ]

------------------------

Reconfigured machines at work.

182

SECTION_08

183

A taxonomy of reconfigured machines.

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8.3_ restoration & remediation.

Leftover mining equipment is reassembled into housing // siteforming machines, and the components are used as a means of regeneration instead of destruction. These machines operate similarly to surgeries which intentionally cut or prod a part of the body to promote the need for scar tissue and healing to infill the affected area. Abandoned equipment originally designed to carve the earth and expose buried coal seams is converted into machines capable of regrading selected areas of the site and moving organic matter to the biorefinery. This renews and cleans the toxified water supply with a series of step pools and phytoremediative vegetation. As these reconstructed vehicles move through Hobet 21, the site is cleaned as the machines degrade.

Large-scale phytoremediation eventually re-establishes the soil and forest into a new ecosystem where both industrial man and natural wildlife may equitably cohabitate, repopulate, and coevolve among the degrading machines.

(re)struction

185

SECTION_08

THE INNOCULATOR

186

COMPONENTS nutrient delivery A1 microbiota & compost storage A2 delivery piping to innoculate crushed earth soil anti-conglomerator B1 earth scooper // salvaged from bulldozer B2 earth crusher to innoculate microbiota B3 release hatch // twigs/grass mobility system C1 hydraulic legs // salvaged from bulldozer C2 mechanical arm // converted bulldozer arm

A1 A2

circulation system D1 ladder & walkway for human operator access C2

B3 C2

B2

B1

C1

D1

a mobile earth-crushing machine which de-densifies toxic soil & innoculates it with phytoremediative microflora

the innoculator

187

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COMPONENTS

FODDER PRODDER

A1

organic delivery system A1 nursery & organic matter cultivation A2 extensive growth stage & human access point A3 organic matter collection bin & distributor A4 organic matter distribution silos

A2

mobility system B1 mechanical arm // converted bulldozer arm B2 salvaged bulldozer tires & hydraulic legs

a mobile nursery-tilling hybrid which simultaneously divides firm and toxified clay soil & innoculates it with organic matter

A3

mechanical system C1 light tiller to loosen soil for organic matter

A4

B1 B2

B2

B1 C3

the fodder prodder

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THE PLANTER

a man-powered plant nursery which plants new growth as it roves along freshly fragmented soil, preparing ground for phytoremediative cultivation

A1

A2 C1

C2 A3

C2

B1

B2 D2 D1

COMPONENTS roof & water collection A1 water collector & shader // salvaged from metal silo A2 shader // salvaged corrugated metal A3 rainwater collector to supply nursery power system B1 human-powered mobility // salvaged bicycles B2 rubber tires // salvaged from abandoned truck structural system C1 wooden joists & columns // salvaged trees C2 wooden axle // salvaged from new tree growth nursery planting D1 rotator caps to plant new nursery growth D2 axle belt // salvaged cable from draglines D3 organic planter boxes // hollowed tree bark

the planter

191

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THE PROBOT a self-roving & probing robot to communicate and monitor site conditions as phytoremediation and regeneration occur

A1

COMPONENTS power system A1 solar panel for off-grid mobility

C1

sensing system B1 anemometer for wind monitoring B2 soil sample storage B3 ground topography scanner B4 probe // senses chemical level

B1

B2

structural core C1 holds sensor devices

B3

mobility system D1 hydraulic legs // salvaged bulldozer D2 rubber tires // abandoned truck tires

D1 B4

D2

D2

the probot

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COMPONENTS // sources bird house A1 bird shelter // packed earth A2 bed/floor // collected twigs roof structure B1 filtering shingles // chopped wood B2 waterproofing // salvaged tarps B3 secondary support // twigs/grass B4 primary structure // branches solar array C1 PV panels // found on site water collection system D1 gutter/collector // halved pipe on site D2 cistern // trash bucket on site D3 sink // trash bucket on site transportation system E1 hydraulic legs // converted bulldozer arm circulation system F1 ladders // found branches & rope wall system G1 metal structure // bulldozer chassis frame G2 operable window // dozer pulley & cable G3 interior wall // woven grasses G4 insulation // sheep wool shorn on site G5 weatherproofing // found sheet metal private spaces H1 floor framing // found twigs & brances waste storage I1 composting toilet // found twigs & brances heating system J1 furnace // metal trash bin + piping on site

ornithologist house

195

196

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nursery house

197

198

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hobet 21 national park

199

200

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hobet 21 national park

201

202

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8.4_ an empathetic ecology.

Let’s get back to the future. The year is currently 2020. The past decade of international climate summits has resulted in insufficient meaningful action to attain the global goal of climate-neutrality by 2050. And rather than moving forward by establishing more conservation and preservation habitats, improving the scale of renewable energy, and mutually benefitting our larger ecology, the current United States administration is leading the pandemic of environmental demise.

America in particular is not only blatantly allowing, but encouraging, ecocide in the name of profit - ignoring the cries of both its apparent ignoble human and non-human populus - as it continues to subsidize a failing coal industry.

The battle with our collective home has been defined by centuries of ecological commodification, the environmental atrophication of the industrial revolution, unstipulated capitalism, and mans’ abhorrant appetite for biopower. This battle has become a violent entwining of forces - and one must concede if a unified stasis is to be attained.

A stance of empathy for the other is necessary for a more equitable world as we design our future environments, lives, and choices.

Regenerative design and the alternative perspective of functions of a federally protected park offers an alternative to the American business as usual. Though this investigation is fictional, it depicts a very possible reality. Now is the time for change, and for placing what was once out of sight into mine.

Pollution.

Man’s solution?

Dilution: Environmental Revolution!

Mobilized against demise.

Opened Eyes Refertilize + Restore Ecology to Comprise All Lives.

back to the future

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/

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ////////

life, after.

/////// ///////////////////

life under quarantine, final show.

life, pre-quarantine. (bookshow)

section _09

finalĂŠ.

/

“Men are alive. Plato is a man. Plato is alive. Men are alive.

Grass is alive.

Men are grass.” _Gregory Bateson, in Design for an Empathetic World

////////////////////////////////////

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” .

_Paul Romer

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01

209

9.1_ life, prequarantine. (bookshow)

“(If you’re wondering if I want you to) I want you to” was a showcase of Studio 400’s research and published thesis books.

The installation was designed by my 19 peers over several weeks and constructed over 3 days. I focused on designing and fabricating the furniture to read upon with a group of 4 other architecture students.

We created stools and blankets made of sheep wool and throw pillows from balloons – all encased in clear vinyl. My other peers and I additionally blacked out the space using large cloth drapes, while another team focused on constructing a small room to contain the books using 2x4 lumber, sheet rock, white paint, and various props.

Our studio was able to host this exhibition just months before zoom became the norm.

-------------------------

01 Class installation poster; collectively designed by studio 400. (following pages) 02 “My, how relaxing these cushions are!”

03 Book display room: sited within a blacked-out, foggy space.

04 Enjoying the comfy lounge.

05 Balloon & vinyl pillows.

05 “What lovely seats these are for reading!”

06 Books on display.

07 - 08 Blacked-out reading space: serves as introduction to bookshow & requires navigation through seating and fog to retrieve books.

09 Playful balloon pillows in action.

10 Wool & vinyl “blanket.”

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02

03

04

211

05

212

05

SECTION_09 03

213

214

SECTION_09

06

07

08

215

09

10

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9.2_ life under quarantine, final show.

While Winter quarter began with my studio’s intentionally humid, dark, and intimate voluntary amassing of attendees, it concluded with news of Earthwide mass shutdowns due to the uncontrolled COVID-19 pandemic. As the world entered an ad infinitum bout of unprecedented endings, Studio 400, too, bid some of our final adieus as we scattered across the US and returned home.

On March 19, 2020, California officially began a government-issued Stay at Home Order. And so began a “new normal” – in education, for businesses, for at-risk populations, for parents, for students, for all.

Studio 400 quickly adopted Zoom, among other digital platforms, as a bereft but necessary means of maintaining connection and production of our 19 theses. Spring was defined by tentation, but generally constructive ventures.

And like most architectural universities across the globe, we were tasked with curating a virtual thesis exhibition in lieu of Cal Poly’s classic Chumash Show: no tispy professors spilling drinks on student’s shoes. No intricate models (emitting heaps of VOCs) to display the belabored efforts of frantic students lining the communal hall. And no opportunity to viscerally share in our colleagues’ exhaustion, pride, and bittersweet jubilation of graduating from our 5+ year degree commitment. However, our work was still collectively tackled and publicly displayed to a wider audience than was ever previously possible. Though the two dichotomous methods of display are impossible to compare, Studio 400 did create a unified website (www.400camgirls. cargo.site) which successfully portrayed

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the massively shared and individual efforts of each student, and the gratification which accompanies the epilogue of sustained struggles and achievements.

(prev.) The cover page of www.400camgirls.cargo.site, which nagivates to personal theses as well as other collective efforts. (right) Scrolling down through the site takes one to snapshots of individual theses, or selecting the zoom link takes one to a grainy, home-style video of a typical physical studio session recorded by Elijah Williams. There is also a link to a youtube video which details our studio trip in the American Southwest, wherein we traveled to the Biosphere, Flagstaff, Arcosanti, the Glen Canyon Dam, and were able to learn from Las Vegas. (right page) Studio 400 had to offer show snacks - it’s a tradition!

Sergio Gurrusquieta developed an interactive online platform to tour our studio, complete with each student, our advisor, a snipped of each of our projects and of course, cookies.

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400camgirls links to my personal thesis site, www.intomine.cargo.site. It is organized as a web-friendly version of the collected explorations within this book, and redirects to a digital copy of my thesis. It opens with an interactive embedded map containing current satellite imagery of the Hobet 21 mine.

(top right) The cover page of www.intomine.cargo.site, which nagivates to sections of research and proposals. (bottom right) The rightmost icons serve as a visual timeline, and lead one through each phase of my proposal according to which machinery has been constructed.

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9.3_ life, after.

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Days after a successful studio exhibition, the class of 2020 was bound for a clumsy online graduation: a congratulations for the feat of trudging through undergraduate studies, and a series of well-wishes as we entered post-academic life. But we stepped into the world just as it began to fall apart.

We all fell prey to a bleak, jobless market – foe to prospects of pursuing a path in architecture and any work not offered by tech giants. Many of us wondered if we had wasted tuition money and five years of our lives, or what we had done wrong, as many returned to their parents’ nests and reverted back to their high-school routines. Being lucky enough to receive a letter of rejection was better than the unbearable silence most applicants were met with when seeking a position, which has scattered many of us further from our original stomping grounds – but towards forced pauses of self-evaluation (and breadbaking) in attempts to understand our wistful positions instead as opportunities.

So while the class of 2020 has been denied a sense of the final transition from adolescence into adulthood and the allowance of a tabula rasa, we have been gifted an unprecedented ability to adapt to unpredictability. These formative years have hardened us from the rawness of impending climate crises, extreme political insufficiency, and abundant disillusionment from the difficulty of uncertainty looming over our foreseeable futures.

We are partaking in a defining moment for all global societies, one where skepticism and massive access to knowledge incites hope, fear, and a drive for urgent action.

‘Disaster resiliency’ no longer applies solely to climate-generated disaster zones – it applies to the cirsumstances and members of our entire generation. What we do, and what is left undone, will have massive ramifications for our unfolding fates. We know this worldwide disruption will affect our lives – it already has. But rather than blindly accepting our future with the que sera sera attitudes of generations before, we deny their stoic irresponsibility. In our generation, what will be, we design. (prev) 2020 Thesis Studio via Zoom, advisor Karen Lange. (right) Emeritus Professor Michael Lucas, a trusty Cal Poly guide, sending Studio 400 off to battle in middle earth.

Photo credit Dana Cameron.

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“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” _Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

image index.

04 Miwok people shown off...

Blue Frontier. “Home.” Adam Matthew Digital, Sage Publishing, 3 Jan. 2014.

05 A crowd waits to ascend...

Jim Robbins, et al. “How A Surge in Visitors Is Overwhelming America’s National Parks.”

Yale E360, Yale, 31 July 2017.

06 “Pave it and Paint it Green.”

Partridge, Rondal, photographer. Pave it and paint it green / Rondal Partridge. [196-, Printed Later] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

SECTION 01 01 Central Park.

Map of Central Park, Cartography Associates. Fineartamerica.com, 3 Mar. 2016.

02 Valley of the Yosemite.

Valley of the Yosemite, Bierstadt, Albert.

Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2003.

03 Old Faithful in Yellowstone.

Old Faithful I, Bierstadt, Albert.

Albertbierstadt.org, 2018. Painting.

04 American Progress.

American Progress, Crofutt, George A. Painting. Library of Congress.

05 The Oxbow.

The Oxbow, Thomas Cole. Painting.

Retrieved from MOMA. 06 The Course of Empire...

The Course of Empire: The Savage State, Thomas Cole. Thomas Cole National Historic Site.

SECTION 02 01 A pile of American Bison skulls.

A pile of American Bison skulls in the mid-1870s,Photograph. Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. 1870.

Map of Central Park, Cartography Associates. Fineartamerica.com, 3 Mar. 2016.

02 Map of the Yosemite Valley.

“Yosemite Valley Pictorial Map by Jo Mora (1931).” Yosemite Valley Pictorial Map by Jo Mora (1931), Dan Anderson, 4 Apr. 2004.

03 A poster advertising Yosemite’s...

“McCarthy Album 10, Photograph 326,” California State Archives Exhibits, accessed March 19, 2020.

07 Hetch Hetchy valley before...

San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

Photograph.

08 Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.

Hetch Hetchy reservoir. 1933. Hetch Hetchy Water Service. Photograph.

09 - 11 Aerial images of the Carlin Trend...

David Maisel. David Maisel Photography.

Photograph.

12 Retention ponds at the Gold King Mine.

The Associated Press. Colorado Public Radio, Colorado Public Radio, 6 Dec. 2018.

SECTION 03 01 Herds of wild horses occupy...

Anton Petrus, Getty Images. Photograph. 2019.

02 A fox finds refuge...

Adrian Bliss. Photograph. 2018.

03 Ok funeral.

Gisli Palsson. Photograph. 2019.

04 / 05 Two identical views of Mt. Trumbull...

Colorado State/Improve. Photographs. 2016.

06 Haze at Joshua Tree...

National Parks Service. Photograph. 2019.

07 / 08 Yosemite Valley before major fire suppression tactics... / Yosemite Valley with doubled tree coverage...

“Comparative Yosemite Valley Tree Cover.”

NPS.gov - Yosemite, National Park Service U.S. Department of Interior.

09 / 10 Smoke from western wildfires... / California Wildfire smoke...

“Smoke across the United States.” Visible Earth, EOS Project Science Office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 4 Sept. 2017.

11 The SCU Lightning Complex wildfires...

“SCU Lightning Complex Wildfire.” Planet Labs, Planet Labs Inc. , 2020.

SECTION 04 01 Interconnective ecology diagram.

Prominski, Martin. Andscapes: Concepts of nature and culture for landscape architecture in the ‘Anthropocene.’ Journal of Landscape Architecture, 9(1), pp. 6-19, 2014.

02 Capped landfill in the west section...

Megan Moriarty. Photograph.

03 Freshkills dump in the 1960s.

DSNY. Photograph.

04 People may safely enjoy sections...

Tobias Hutzler. Photograph.

06 Map of flattened mine site.

Photograph. Ross, Matthew R V, et al. “Deep Impact: Effects of Mountaintop Mining on Surface Topography, Bedrock Structure, and Downstream Waters.” Environmental Science & Technology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 16 Feb. 2016.

07 Acid mine drainage dyes...

Mark Olade. Center for Public Integrity.

Photograph. 2017.

08 Inside a deserted dragline...

Michael Davis Photography. 2019.

Photograph.

05 The landfill site in 1943.

NYC Parks. Photograph.

09 Abandoned and decaying coal sorting equipment.

Michael Davis Photography. 2019.

Photograph.

06 Growing a new parkland over time.

Field Operations, NYC Department of City Planning. Digital Image.

SECTION 07

07 Proposed project as designed by...

Field Operations, NYC Department of City Planning. Digital Image.

08 / 09 Reef building and attenuation. / Oyster filtration mechanics SCAPE Architects. Digital Image.

10 / 11 Rendering of regenerative habitat... / Diagram of coastal area affected by regeneration...

SCAPE Architects. Digital Image.

SECTION 06 01 Coal Fields of Appalachia.

Chris DellaMea. Map. 2001-2007.

02 Coal River Mountain Mine.

Andrew Lichtenstein. Al Jazeera America.

Photograph. 2015.

03 The Hobet 21 mine leveled peaks...

Mark Olade. Center for Public Integrity.

Photograph. 2017.

04 Biodiversity Hotspots in the US. “Biodiversity Hotspots in the United States,” The Nature Conservancy. 2000.

05 Collection of satellite imagery...

Jesse Allen, NASA image. 2015.

06 Map of flattened mine site.

Ross, Matthew. “Deep Impact: Effects of Mountaintop Mining on Surface Topography, Bedrock Structure, and Downstream Waters.” Environmental Science & Technology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 16 Feb. 2016.

01 “What’s happened to our park...”

CNN. “Downed Joshua Trees at National Park.” Scripps Local Media, Scripps Media, Inc, 18 Jan. 2019.

02 A map of the Coal Rivers trip guide.

“Map of the Water Trail.” Coal River Group, Coal River Group.

03 2018 “Tour de Coal” on the WV...

Hudson, Craig. “Kayakers Begin Their Journey on the Tour De Coal.” West Virginia Gazette-Mail, Charleston Gazette-Mail.

04 An understory of cultivated American Ginseng...

Burkhart, Eric. “Forest farms could create market for ginseng, other herbs.” Penn State News, The Pennsylvania State University, 25 Nov. 2019.

05 Ramps (a leek-like vegetable) are grown...

Burkhart, Eric. “Researchers to Study Ramps’ Market, Flavor Profile, Vulnerability to Pest.” Penn State News, The Pennsylvania State University, 7 Mar. 2018. uncited images copyright Jennifer Mahan.