Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Natural Resources
First Advisor
Bindu Panikkar
Abstract
Contaminated landscapes undergoing redevelopment are sites where we can observe social and technical practices in action. These landscapes are often forgotten wastelands where capital accumulation obscures its externalities. In order to truly comprehend contamination and its complex entanglements within our bodies, systems, and structures, we must implement pluralistic methodologies to unworld our constrained epistemological practices. It is through these methodologies we gain clarity on how contaminated landscapes are co-created spaces of social, technical, and ecological creation. Through the case study of the Pine Street Barge Canal superfund and brownfield site in Burlington, Vermont (PSBC site), this thesis explores human-environment relations, as well as how dominant land-use, redevelopment, and remedial practices evolve on this post-industrial contaminated landscape. Utilizing ethnographic approaches, historical document and media reviews, key stakeholder interviews, and survey (n=87) results this thesis explores these two key themes.
Imploring interdisciplinary understandings of Marx’s social metabolism, the first chapter explores how economic metabolism takes place on contaminated landscapes and how the process of brownfield redevelopment co-creates systemic inequality. By examining restricting and enabling factors of metabolism at the brownfield parcel, as well as the surrounding superfund site, this chapter investigates how structures of brownfield redevelopment, political power, and techniques of wastelanding, restrict, and complicate the mobilities of different stakeholder groups. Through the lens of toxic worldings, the second chapter explores how different actors navigate a world entangled with toxic chemical contamination, toxic certainty and uncertainty, and explore four different socializations surrounding the reuse of the PSBC site including those driven by positivist technocratic views; economic centered re-use and growth; alternate scientific practices; and place-based community perspectives. Together these two chapters provide a greater understanding of the complex social-technical landscape of contaminated lands, offering pluralistic conceptualizations and metabolizations in order to shed light on how humans can cope and ‘live with the trouble’ of contaminated spaces.
Language
en
Number of Pages
112 p.
Recommended Citation
Golitz, Abigail Grace, "The Toxic Worldings and Metabolization of Contaminated Landscapes: A Case Study of the Pine Street Barge Canal in Burlington, Vermont" (2024). Graduate College Dissertations and Theses. 1910.
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/1910