Writing Wednesday: Concluding the Landfill Paper

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a paper that I’ll give in August as at conference on landfills.  Last week, I introduced some of the writing that I’ve been doing lately on that Atari Alamogordo Expedition in 2014 (!!). This is part of larger paper on the the archaeology of contemporary landfills. Much of this is based on the first few chapters of my book. Follow the links above to get some context for this.

What I managed to finish today was the conclusion. It’s still very rough and unsatisfactory, but the conclusion is titled “The Future of Trash.” Perhaps I should call it “The Potential of Trash.” In any event, here it is: 

The Alamogordo Atari excavation situated the archaeology of contemporary landfills at the ragged edge of archaeology of the contemporary world. At this edge, the archaeology of consumer culture, media archaeology, and the archaeology of global networks of production, distribution, and discard intersect. While it is impossible in a relatively short paper to trace fully the implications of the tangled discourses that my paper has introduced. There are three things, however, that might encourage us as archaeologists to consider spending more time in and around landfills.

First, landfills are parts of intricate and largely hidden systems of waste management. In this paper, I have called them “waste streams.” These systems not only support consumer practices centered on disposable goods, but also handle the byproducts of production and distribution. The presence of industrial waste such as malathion and commercial waste such as returned and remaindered games in a small town landfill demonstrates that these streams do intersect. More significantly, however, the decisions to dump “e-waste” in a small town landfill anticipated the growing reach of waste streams in the late-20th century where “e-waste” has become the subject of growing economic, environmental, and diplomatic attention. The Atari dump, contemporary with the farcical efforts to find a port for the Khian Sea and Mobro 4000 garbage ships demonstrate highly visible moments when the networks of global production reveal themselves as networks of discard.

Excavations at landfills make visible the materiality of waste streams, which in some ways represent a window into the inverse of our increasingly globalized consumer culture. The challenge is the size of this window. As Bill Rathje famously observed there is no “garbage crisis” and cautioned against a view of consumer trash that overstates its significance in 20th and 21st century waste streams. Archaeology, of course, has always had to face the challenges of scale and we often work to understand the whole from very small parts. In an age of global waste streams and global challenges, a small trench even in a large landfill appears to be radically out of proportion to the scale of the issues that they seek to address. John Schofield has recently acknowledged this mismatch in his book on Wicked Problems and urged us to focus on “small wins.” For Schofield, this means documenting plastics on the beach (and tragically in the belly of a deceased sea turtle) in the Galapagos islands offers a “small win” toward understanding the vast natural and human systems that produced the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Similar work done documenting wind-born trash around inland water courses and drift material along beaches in Iceland demonstrates the plurality of forces at play in the circulation of trash beyond the borders of the landfill. Our experiences in Alamogordo confronted the power of these non-human agents to demonstrate the relatively futility of our work at the landfill itself when a sandstorm driven by 50 mph winds tore through the excavation area on the second day. 

Encounters with the wind, ocean currents, and tidal drift reminds us that waste streams do not exclusively operate according to human agency alone. Landfills despite their deliberate invisibility contribute to the infrastructure of power in society as they seek to control the influence of both human and the non-human agents at work in our waste streams. By exposing and studying the content of landfills we lay bare the fuzzy boundary between social and natural processes. The safety precautions associated with the excavations at Alamogordo make clear the unease surrounding the opening of a landfill. Concern over toxic fumes, unstable scarps, and other environmental and physical dangers associated with our waste infrastructure required that New Mexico Environmental Department physically and temporally limit access to the landfill. The invisibility of landfills represents a key element in our efforts to exert control over our waste streams. The growing tendency for developed nations to export their trash beyond their borders represents the globalization of discard practices that parallels the globalized networks of production. Individuals associated with work in landfills, for example, often occupy the margins of society and are socially invisible. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have sought to make these individuals visible as a way of articulating the human costs of our current system of waste. 

The desire to make landfills, waste streams, and the individuals associated with them invisible extend to the afterlife of landfills. For example, a closed construction landfill at the San Francisco Bay Area site of Albany Bulb became home to numerous individuals who used salvaged material from the landfill to construct modest homes. When the city decided to turn the closed landfill into a public park, they removed the improvised homes and compensated the former residents with the understanding that they would not return. The residents’ improvised homes connected the landscape to its past as a landfill, and this required their removal to ensure the continued invisibility of our waste streams. Similarly, homeless residents of Pelham Bay Park on City Island in New York City’s Bronx borough scavenged at the nearby landfill. When the landfill closed, the borough evicted the homeless from the park as part of a larger environmental conservation scheme which rendered the landfill and those who interacted with it invisible. 

While our work at the Alamogordo landfill did not delve deeply into the social consequences of these places as part of our waste stream, it did open a window into the contemporary infrastructure of discard and consumption. This infrastructure shaped the re-discovery of the Atari games. The use of a small town landfill as a dump for commercial garbage revealed an early example of e-waste very close to the foundations of our digitally mediated world. At the same time, the conditions of the landfill exposed the fragility media as it rendered the Atari games unable to express the full significance of their message. The failure of the media to reveal their message paralleled the strategies of visibility and invisibility that masked the consequences of late 20th century consumer culture. Excavation partly made these strategies evident by exposing the participants to complex human and non-human agents at play in our waste streams. In this way, the excavation of landfills bridges the gap between the discipline’s seminal interest in trash manifest as early as the 18th and early 20th century and its growing interest in infrastructure, agency, and power manifest in 21st century scholarship. More than that, it demonstrates the potential of archaeology to adapt its tradition of focused study to contribute to understanding the global scale of contemporary society.