Storming the Gates of Paradise (20 page)

Once again, it was the water that was the problem, only this time it wasn’t a shortage. Yucca Mountain, it turned out, was all wet, and a truly lunatic place to put seventy-seven thousand tons of high-level nuclear waste.

The government created the nuclear power industry with a promise to reactor operators that the essential crisis of the industry—the dangerous, exceedingly long-lived waste it produces—would be taken off their hands. In all the subsequent decades of nuclear power production, spent fuel rods have been piling up in “cooling ponds” onsite, while the operators waited for the government to make good on its promise to get rid of the stuff (mostly located in the population-heavy, resource-light East). Three New England reactors are already suing the government for failing to come up with a dump.

For more than two decades, the Department of Energy (DOE) has done everything it can to create one of the most scientifically dubious dump sites imaginable, at Yucca Mountain, about ninety miles north of Vegas, on the northern edges of the Nevada Test Site, where all those nuclear bombs were detonated (and will be again if Bush has his way).

The initial plan was to compare sites in three western states and choose the safest one, but two of the states—Texas and Washington—had the political clout to get out of the competition. So the “comparative study” never studied any place but Yucca Mountain, and yet the longer it was studied, the less suitable it seemed, even for the mandated ten thousand years it was supposed to keep us and the waste apart (forget the quarter million years the stuff would actually remain dangerous). Somehow, this never seemed to stop plans from proceeding. For a lot of geologists, the fact that Yucca Mountain had, in geological terms, recent volcanic
activity and has very contemporary seismic activity might have been grounds enough for doubt. But the DOE officials just kept lowering the standards, fudging the data, firing the dissenters, while spending nearly $100 billion to try to make it happen—the cost of a nice, short foreign war these days.

Nevada itself has fine activists who have stood up to some of the atrocities, and the state itself has vociferously fought the federal plan to make it into what might have been the world’s largest nuclear waste dump. And for now, this time, on this issue, they won, which is no mean feat. Early on, the Yucca Mountain plan was nicknamed the “Screw Nevada” bill, and the feckless plans to send the stuff across the country from the mostly eastern nuclear reactors is popularly known as “Mobile Chernobyl.”

Easterners imagine that the Wile E. Coyote landscape of Nevada means true inert dryness; the
New York Times
has seldom been able to resist deploying the adjectives
sterile, empty, barren
, and
useless
in any description of the place. But underneath it is a surprisingly high water table that could rise further in a changed climate, and flowing through the mountain’s billion fissures is rainfall that leaches out the chemicals in the rock, making a brew capable of eating through almost any metal, including pretty much every metal proposed for nuclear waste containment.

Originally, the rock itself was supposed to isolate the stuff. When it turned out that wet Yucca Mountain was uniquely unsuited for the task, the idea was that the metal containers would isolate the waste. When it turned out that the leaching would eat the containers away, the plan switched to little titanium umbrellas on top of each cask—so we’d gone from protection by the thick mantle of the earth to parasols in a couple of decades of study. And they call it science.

The state’s Nuclear Projects Office (which means anti-dump) geologist, Steve Frischman, told me long ago that they had picked ten thousand years as the period during which the waste must be isolated because you can at least pretend to estimate geological and climate changes over ten millennia; beyond that, it’s the utter unknown—Nevada could be a rainforest; its ancient lake beds could refill; and God knows who’s going to look after the stuff then. The Western Shoshone?
Among the more surreal aspects of the whole Yucca Project have been the many schemes to create warning labels for the waste that would make sense to unknown civilizations of the deep future.

But surprisingly, on July 9, 2004, two days after Bush signed the Western Shoshone Distribution Bill, a federal appeals court ruled that the standards for Yucca Mountain were wrong, that the Environmental Protection Agency should have accepted a ruling by the National Academy of Sciences setting the safety standard not at ten thousand years but at the point of peak radiation—which could be three hundred thousand years away, long after the metal containment casks have corroded into irrelevancy. As Joe Egan, an attorney for the state of Nevada, told the
Las Vegas Sun
, this means that “the department will have to apply a standard that all their own evidence says they can’t meet.”

This ruling, which could mean the death of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, is startlingly good news for Nevada. Scientists have always said that Yucca Mountain was a disaster in the making, even leaving aside those 50 million Americans who live within half a mile of the shipment routes on which the Yucca-bound nuclear waste would travel for decades to come, or the estimated ninety to five hundred accidents of unknown scale that statistics suggest would take place en route over the years. (Who needs terrorist dirty bombs when our own tax dollars can supply them?)

When you consider the human rights abuses, the squandering of resources for the benefit of the few, and the lunatic decisions being made for the long-term future of the state, the war in Iraq looks a little like a decoy from troubles at home, or a parallel universe with all the same ingredients. Except that there’s almost no opposition to Nevada’s impending catastrophes—outside Nevada. But you can bring back other perspectives from Iraq too. One is that Goliath doesn’t always win: the David of local activists and the Nevada state government has been fighting Yucca for decades, and Goliath lost this round. Another is that if you’re tenacious enough, what looks like defeat can change—and the Western Shoshone have patience and commitment on their side.

Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky
, by Lori Pauli, with essays by Mark Haworth-Booth and Kenneth Baker and an interview by Michael Torosian (New Haven: National Gallery of Canada in association with Yale University Press, 2003), 160 pp., 64 full-page images.

Edward Burtynsky’s photographs are large, and colorful, and mostly ravishing, despite their subjects. They show seldom-seen industrial landscapes, the places from which resources come to us and to which they go when we’re done with them: mines, oil fields, refineries, quarries, dumps. These places look inhuman, for their scale and for their poisons and hazards, but they’re the landscapes on which most human beings now depend. It may be that industrial civilization is predicated on blindness and alienation, on not knowing that sweatshops or copper mines make your pleasant first world urban/suburban existence possible, for that knowledge would at the least make that existence less pleasant. Certainly most people nowadays would be hard-pressed to say where their water comes from or their garbage goes to, let alone their tungsten or their oil tankers. Burtynsky photographs those places with an eye to their aesthetic power.

“Although he understands that modern technologies can have devastating effects on the earth and its ecosystems, he believes that it would be hypocritical of him to use his photographs as a diatribe against industry,” writes Lori Pauli in one of the essays in
Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky
. But such a statement seems predicated on an old model, in which to be politically
engaged you had to foreground your own outrage, engagement, virtue (and certainly ostentatious display of appropriate emotion is part of many performances on all sides of the political spectrum). Facts themselves are political, since just to circulate the suppressed and obscured ones is a radical act. That, for example, an EPA official resigned because under Bush he wasn’t allowed to enforce air quality regulations that would save far more lives than were lost on September 11, and that depleted-uranium armaments pose a threat to the health of U.S. troops as well as Iraqis are stories that subvert the status quo and thus don’t get heard much. Environmental facts can be loaded, and Burtynsky’s certainly are: foremost among them that the industrial civilization we have created, from its marble façades to the contents of its gas tanks, depends for its existence on this inhuman scale of desolation and poison that remains out of sight. That he chooses to pay attention to these places is already an engagement, and the questions a photographer raises may be more profound than the answers the medium permits.

An earlier generation of environmentalist landscape photographers concentrated on ideal landscapes that in the end came to seem irrelevant, places that were fine because they had nothing to do with us, though these images were, and to a lesser extent still are, useful for conservation politics. In the past quarter century, most photographers have concentrated on some version of the social landscape, on inhabited wildernesses; dystopias; comic, disastrous, and mystic engagements with place, land, and nature. The three essays in
Manufactured Landscapes
do what essays in handsome books about artists usually try to do: establish the subject’s place in the grand narrative of the history of art.

But the Canadian Burtynsky is more interesting for his divergences than his heritage. He tells of the incident that launched his current work, a wrong turn that took him to the mining wasteland of Frackville, Pennsylvania, where “in that entire horizon there was nothing virgin. It totally destabilized me. I thought, is this earth? I had never seen anything transformed on this scale. The pictures I took in Frackville sat as contacts for almost a year. I kept looking at them and then I realized, this is what I have to do. All the things we inhabit, and all the things we possess, the material world that we surround ourselves with, all comes from nature.” And this is what nature looks like when we wring our material world out
of it: luridly red-orange rivers of water saturated with oxidized iron at a nickel quarry, a tire dump whose millions of black donuts become canyons and crevasses and mountains.

Among Burtynsky’s most interesting subjects are marble and granite quarries, the voids in the unseen landscape from which buildings, particularly civic and corporate ones, are extracted (the critic Lucy Lippard often refers to these as the holes left in rural places to create urban erections). These are vertiginous, precarious terrains in which human beings and even their stoneworking machines are tiny. The geometry of architecture is already present in the horizontal and vertical lines and ledges carved into the walls and amphitheaters of stone. The stone is almost monochromatic, but the red and orange equipment in Carrara or a jade-green lake at the bottom of a Vermont quarry and a few yellow aspens on a ledge midway up give scale and relief to the monotony. They also magnify the Piranesi-like terror of these cliffs and abysses.

The photographer whom Burtynsky most resembles is Californian Richard Misrach, who also makes breathtaking large color images of overlooked and sequestered places. Military sites in the desert Southwest have been Misrach’s definitive subject, from the abandoned Enola Gay bunker and sheds in Utah to the ammunition-storage berms, bombing ranges, and radioactive landscapes of Nevada. A dozen or more years ago, this work was greeted with outrage for “aestheticizing evil”; viewers seemed to blame Misrach for the challenges that sublime and fascinating evils pose. Misrach was always more interested in testing this kind of tension, and his work differs from Burtynsky’s in its interest in conceptual and philosophical questions—notably the photographic representation of what can’t be seen—and in its tendency to end up more often with images that have the skies and spaciousness of traditional landscape. The culture seems to have become more sophisticated about the beauty/virtue schisms since Misrach’s bombscapes, but Burtynsky isn’t interested in pushing the contradictions and the politics of representation in the same way. He’s a more straightforward documentarian, though his work is hardly in the documentary mode, at least not in the mode in which a certain aesthetic and emotional remove—including a remove from the sensuality of the world—is part of the equipment. For Burtynsky’s
images are beautiful, or rather, like Misrach’s, sublime, of the same visually compelling order as forest fires, wartime ruins, floods, and other spectacles.

Nowhere are they more so than in his shipbreaking images. These, mostly made in Chittagong, Bangladesh, show the half-dismantled hulks of cargo ships and oil tankers on beaches, huge fragments over which men scramble like ants (apparently, though this is nowhere evident in the images, dismantling them with little more than blowtorches). Often taken in raking light or fog, these photographs depict colossal shards standing up at intervals from dramatic foreground to deep background, the most conventionally landscapelike of Burtynsky’s images (though some also show a façade that fills the image area and approaches abstraction). They are reports back from an unseen world—who in the first world ever thought much about oil tanker recycling?—in which our daily lives are embedded. But they seem almost allegorical, antlike men fragmenting the colossi that are the only relief to that vast, flat expanse.

And, like Misrach, Burtynsky cares about his subject matter, even though he’s no advocate. This concern sets him apart from the other photographer he resembles, the much lionized Andreas Gursky (like Burtynsky, born in 1955). Gursky specializes in huge prints in which antlike human beings seem to inhabit a world—of arena concerts, ski areas, the tiered balconies of hotel lobbies—that we mostly do know (though he too photographed a landfill), and whose alienating and inhuman scale and overabundance we know better through his images. But Gursky is, comparatively, a formalist, interested in digital manipulation and questions of scale and representation. His commitment is not to the subject.