| Popis: |
What lexicon or neologisms might we use to speak of places removed by human force? Not by natural disaster, like the city of Pompeii or the Japanese fishing village of Minamisanriku, destroyed in the tsunami of 2011.1 Nor by the horrors of war or catastrophes of technology, as in Virilio’s obsession with the accident,2 like those at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, or the toxic morass at Love Canal in Niagara Falls.3 Instead, I consider here what I am calling landscapes of erasure: the large-scale, intentional removal of socio-cultural place through processes of engineering, often due—but not limited—to industries of extraction, power generation, and shipping and transport. That is, I am exploring the erasure of material and socio-cultural landscape by human forces operating at the geologic scale because such scale reveals and magnifies the consequences of human interaction with the land, both intentional and otherwise. |
