Researchers in South Africa have discovered the remains of a new species of human ancestor, Homo naledi, a curious new creature with hands like ours, and who likely walked upright like us, but with much smaller bodies and much smaller brains. Who were these early people? How did they live, and why were the bones of so many individuals found so deep in this particular cave?

It’s interesting, this vocation of digging and discovering, playing detective with the clues we find in the earth. It seems to me to encompass the best of both phases of our lives: child-like exploration and imagination coupled with the applied intellect of adult retrospection.

A few months ago, during my residency at PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon, I was invited along with the other artists-in-residence to visit an archeological dig. The theme of our residency was focused on the collaboration of art and science, and we creatives were invited to see a little science in action.

Our host was University of Oregon archeologist Dr. Dennis Jenkins, whose own work in the Paisley Caves of southern Oregon has challenged the once widely accepted story of how and when early humans populated North America. His discovery of human coprolites (fossilized human excrement) radiocarbon dated between 14,000 and 14,300 years old, pre-dates previously discovered artifacts from the “Clovis people,” who were once believed to be the first North Americans via an Ice Age migration from Siberia through the Bering Straight. In essence, scientists have returned to the drawing board to understand the full story of how we got where we are.

Here’s what struck me most about the visit: 1) our continued fascination with the origin of our species juxtaposed against the increasing threat of our demise, and 2) the role of what we discard in the telling of both of these stories.

“You can learn a lot about a species,” Dr. Jenkins said, “from the waste it leaves behind.” He went on to explain how scientists can extract the DNA from plant and animal species found in human coprolites to re-imagine the environments in which our ancestors lived, right down to the lice in their hair.

“You can learn a lot about a species,” Dr. Jenkins said, “from the waste it leaves behind.”

This lesson stays with me.

During my time at PLAYA, while reading about the plight of veterans seeking support from our government for their exposure to Mustard Gas and Agent Orange, I discovered, ironically, that just a few dozen miles (as the crow flies) from my environmental writing retreat, is the Alkali Lake Chemical Waste Disposal Site. An isolated, ten-acre site that contains the remnants of over 25,000 fifty-five-gallon drums of chemical waste, including dioxins and distillation residues from the production of Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides used during the Vietnam War.

In other words, a place not yet being studied as such, but one which meets all the basic criteria of an archeological site: any place where physical remains of past human activities exist. What might an archeologist learn about us upon discovering such a site? What does this waste say about our species? About our relationship to one another? About our relationship to the earth?

 I did not visit the Alkali Lake site — public access is restricted for obvious reasons — but I have walked along the Summer Lake playa of the Oregon desert outback. My feet have sunk into the cookie-crumble soils of sun-baked playa shores. I know how thirsty they are when the thunderstorm clouds tease from above.

Between 1969 and 1971, over 25,000 drums of herbicide waste were transported from Portland-based Chemical Waste Storage and Disposition, Inc. to the Alkali Lake CWDS under a permit granted by the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA). Waste deliveries ceased in 1971, after the ODA and Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) determined that the company was improperly handling and disposing of chemicals at the site, leaving barrels unattended and leaking.

After a three-year legal battle, the DEQ assumed administration of the site, and in 1976 took action to crush and bury the rusting drums into twelve, 400-foot-long, 2.5-foot-deep trenches. You can see it being done here:

Bulldozers Puncture Drums of Toxic Waste at Alkali Lake, Oregon – YouTube

I know how thirsty those soils were. Now, ground water at the site is so contaminated that samples collected for analysis are bright red in color.

Red is the color of anger.

The DEQ still monitors the site, but has abandoned administrative action to pursue remediation. Veterans continue to fight for compensation for the health effects from their exposure to Agent Orange.  So for now, this site is remains a relic, an artifact of the harm we are willing to inflict upon ourselves. For what, exactly?

For victory?

For profit?

I keep hoping for another Dennis Jenkins — a Dennis Jenkins of the environmental archeology subgenre to discover some postmodern archeological site that will challenge this story that we’ve left. To alter, in some critical way, the thinking about who we are and what we value. Imagine what a site like that might contain. Imagine what it might not. You can learn a lot about a species from the waste it leaves behind.

photo credits:

Mary Heather Noble

Oregonlive.com

CRAG Law Center (crag.org)

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About a month ago, right before my cross-country move, I participated in a themed residency at PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon.  The residency included several artists, writers, and scientists of varying genres —botanists, essayists, environmental scientists, poets, photographers, and other visual artists— whose work addresses, in some manner, important environmental issues. I spent a glorious two weeks on the beautiful grounds of PLAYA among other creative minds, other environmentally focused creative minds, which felt a little like meeting a wonderful family that you didn’t know you had (read about the other fabulous PLAYA residents here).

PLAYA’s art + ecology series is specifically designed to nurture the collaboration between science and the arts, in an effort to both inform artistic work with current scientific information, and to increase the accessibility of scientific discourse by using humanities to engage the senses and emotions. At the end of the residency, we residents were asked to share excerpts of our work at PLAYA’s “Beyond Creating: A Climate of Change” event, the second in their series of conversations “between artists, writers, and scientists about environmental issues affecting mankind and other species.”

When Deborah Ford, Executive Director of PLAYA, first invited PLAYA residents to participating in this discussion, the question we were asked to consider was: What is at the heart of my work? —Which is exactly what I am re-examining today.

I was first trained as a scientist. I have degrees in geology and environmental science, and spent many years working as a regulator in the technical environmental sector: permitting of industrial and municipal wastewater discharges to be protective of ground water resources, and overseeing the investigation and remediation of contaminated sites. So I bring this knowledge and experience to my work — the science. But as a writer, I not only want to translate the science of my subject matter and make the technical information accessible, I want to MOVE people. I want to engage my readers on an emotional level, so they might be motivated to change.

So I often write stories and essays about my former industrial sites, and feature people —including myself— who may have been impacted by what’s there.

What this means is that not only am I going to tell you, the reader, all the technical details about what happened at the site and what is present in soil and water, I’m going to take you with me when I sample a neighboring well. I’m going to bring you through someone’s living room and into their kitchen so I can collect a sample of what they drink. You will see the to-do lists by the phone, the children’s artwork on the fridge, the prescription bottles by the sink.  You also hear the little boy splashing in the bath while I’m talking to his mother. You, too, will hear his bath-time singsong the entire time we’re there.

Writer Julia Cameron says, “The act of making art exposes a society to itself. Art brings things to light. It illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, ‘See?’”

In science circles, you hear a lot about acceptable risk, whether something is clean enough, and “no evidence of harm.” But we often forget to ask the ethical question of whether it’s right or wrong to conduct nonconsensual experiments on current and future generations in the first place.

THIS is at the heart of my work: shining a light on the things we confine to the corner while we are arguing about the science. I want my work to show you how our society handles matters of science, and ask you to question whether we’re really, truly upholding the values we say that we hold dear.

Image credit: Marketingland.com

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