ASLE 2015, Moscow, Idaho

Earth Writing, Geography, and Memory
Hilary Hawley

Hilary Hawley is an Instructor in the English Department at Seattle University. Her research and teaching focuses on the intersection between real-world rhetoric and literary responses to social and environmental injustice, and on the roles of service learning and sustainability in the classroom. She has recently contributed to revised editions of the writing textbooks Global Issues, Local Arguments and Writing Arguments. 
Shelley McEuen
Jonathan Frey
Laura Godfrey
Audrey Cameron

Hilary Hawley
What Lies Beneath: The Making and Remaking of an Urban Waterway


Crow flies around the reservation and collects empty beer bottles
But they are so heavy he can only carry one at a time.
So, one by one, he returns them but gets only five cents a bottle.
Damn, says Crow, redemption is not easy.
                                    ---Sherman Alexie, “Crow Testament”
 
It is a sunny summer day in 2011, and I am on a boat tour, a member of an environmental justice seminar. We have recently visited the lushly forested Cedar River, where Seattle gets its drinking water, and we are now gliding up the industrial canal that is the Duwamish River, where Seattle has, for the past hundred years, dumped or let run off the waste from its industry. The water is a sparkling blue, belying its Superfund status. A few water birds, a blue heron and some ducks, bask on the shore near Herring’s House Park, and our guide points to this as an early success story in efforts to clean up and restore the river, a process that has been underway since the 1990s. I listen as our guide, a member of the Duwamish tribe and an activist with the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition, explains the challenges. The Duwamish is a working river, and he wants it to stay that way. One reason is that the river remains a key shipping canal for boats bound for remote areas of Alaska that can only be reached in the summer months, so he stands in solidarity with the many native Alaskans who rely on this trade. It is also still true that the Duwamish is an economic powerhouse for Seattle, providing many blue-collar manufacturing, marine, and transportation jobs in a city where many of the big-name industries are decidedly white-collar (Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, etc.). Living only a mile or so from the river myself, a cement plant and a steel recycling plant are fixtures in my commute.  Now, from the middle of the river, I can see boatyards, industrial docks, and a metal recycler. Heaps of old cars, appliances, and scrap are piled within yards of the riverbank, waiting for a huge machine to chew them into metallic bits and spit them out into different enormous piles.  I have no doubt that these businesses provide good jobs for some of my neighbors. Yet because of these industries and others like them, a former Boeing plant included, it is also a place where members of the Duwamish, Muckleshoot, and Suquamish tribes as well as the diverse, low-income residents of the riverside-adjacent South Park and Georgetown neighborhoods have been warned not to fish for clams, crabs, perch, and other fish, loaded as their bodies are likely to be with the many contaminants that line the bottom of the river.  As we continue down the short navigable stretch of the river, he points to numerous small pipes cropping out of the rocky shoreline. In addition to the more than 200 storm drains, combined sewer outflows, and other outfalls identified by King County, there are hundreds more small drains like this, going back over decades, some unmapped and potentially still a source of toxins entering the river. Also, it rains, and whatever is on the buildings, streets, and lots of Seattle will eventually end up here.
 
Now in 2015, the EPA has released its final cleanup plan for this same stretch of river. The money promised, $342 million, is substantial, and more than advocates for the cleanup were expecting. EPA experts estimate that this plan will remove 90% of the existing pollution in the river through a mix of dredging nearly a million cubic yards of toxic sediment from the bottom, capping other areas with a layer of clean rock, sand, and carbon, and then allowing the natural processes of the river to sweep the rest out into Puget Sound. The primary contaminants include PCBs, phthalates, lead, mercury, arsenic, sewage, and other pollutants. In the EPA’s own words, the cleanup plan, along with all the previous work done by local coalitions including the Lower Duwamish Waterway Group (City of Seattle, King County, the Port of Seattle, Boeing and Earle M. Jorgensen), will make the waterway “less toxic to resident fish, shellfish, and other food chain organisms,” and that fish will be “safer to eat” (“EPA Releases Final Lower Duwamish…”).  “Less toxic” and “safer” do not mean clean and safe.  According to Dennis McLerran, regional administrator for the EPA, this is the plan that will leave us “with the cleanest possible river we can get” (qtd. in Welch). Again, not clean, but cleaner.
 
At the time of the plan’s release, the EPA acknowledges the “source area for this Superfund sediment site is approximately 32 square miles. There are all types of urban land use,” meaning there are all types of urban pollution sources in play (Lower Duwamish Site). The cleanup has been underway for over a decade already. Yet according to Daniel Person, each year “about 100,000 tons of new pollution-laden sediments enter the Duwamish,” while many incidents also cause untreated sewage and stormwater to enter the city’s waterways (Person). The question becomes, how can environmental restoration, let alone justice, be achieved when so many of the activities contributing to its degradation continue unabated, are indeed, necessary to our urban lives? Or, why does what should be a big win for environmental justice feel like just another layer of sediment being laid down in the Duwamish?
 
Perhaps it is because “restoration” is really not what’s going on, nor really can go on here.
 
When the first white settlers arrived in the area in the 1850s, the Duwamish was a winding, lazy river hosting at least 17 fishing villages belonging to the Duwamish people. Elliott Bay was largely salt marsh and tidal flats. Green and verdant, certainly, but not the world-class port city that some had in mind. Over the next 70 years, Seattle would undertake a wildly ambitious program of grading and leveling the city’s hills, and of straightening the course of the Duwamish so that 13 miles of winding river were reduced to a five-mile deep-water canal. The mud, sand, and dirt from these projects would be used to fill in the tidal flats and create not only the entire south industrial district of Seattle around the Duwamish, but would also be used to build the large, man-made, Harbor Island at its mouth. In other words, Seattle is Seattle today because of what the Duwamish River has become. And, as Coll Thrush has stated, “Environmental inequality was literally built into the city’s new watersheds, and its legacies resonate down to the present day” (Thrush 95-96). Clearly we have gone past the point of no return for restoring the Duwamish to anything approximating its original, pristine state.
 
So where does that leave us? The EPA’s page on Wetlands Restoration includes a definition of terms. While they acknowledge that “restoration” has multiple definitions, the first offered is “return of an ecosystem to a close approximation of its condition prior to disturbance.” Restoring the river to its original or near-original state is, however, not an option. In that case, the EPA relies on a study which says that “restoration may occur when a degraded wetland is returned to a previous condition of ecological functioning, although that previous condition may also have been altered by human activity.” Given that the river has likely not functioned ecologically for the last 75 years or more of industrial development, I argue that perhaps restoration sets up an unrealistic expectation of what can be achieved.
 
Perhaps a more accurate term, one that encompasses an action within our power, is redemption. One of its definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary is “the action or process of reclaiming land for cultivation or habitation.” No promises made about a pristine state, but it signals that the Duwamish might be reclaimed for the species that need to live there, might “work” for the surrounding ecosystem. This may sound like reclamation, but reclamation’s long history of altering the environment for human ends even while ignoring other human and environmental stakeholders makes that term unsuited to the current question (think of the Bureau of Reclamation, for example). Redemption, on the other hand, can also mean “discharging or paying off a debt, obligation, or charge,” or “expiation or atonement for a crime, sin, or offence.” Part of redemption’s appeal, then, is the idea that Seattle owes the Duwamish, both the river and its people, for its very existence and prosperity. To clean up the river is merely to fulfill the obligation against which we have been borrowing for more than 100 years. Another appeal is the idea that we must atone for our offenses against the river and its indigenous inhabitants. Justice, after all, can rarely be achieved through restoration. But repayment, atonement, redemption: these are not easy things, but these are the tasks of environmental justice.
   
Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. “Crow Testament.” One Stick Song. Brooklyn: Hanging Loose, 2000. Print.

Person, Daniel. “The Duwamish: River of No Return?” Crosscut. 7 Jul. 2014. Web. 20 Jun. 2015.

“Redemption.” Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd Ed. Sept. 2009. Web. 20 Jun. 2015.

Thrush, Coll. “City of the Changers: Indigenous People and the Transformation of Seattle’s Watersheds.” Pacific Historical Review 75.1 (Feb. 2006): 89-117. Print.

United States. Environmental Protection Agency. “EPA Releases Final Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund Cleanup Plan.” EPA.gov. 2 Dec. 2014. Web. 20 Jun. 2015.

United States. Environmental Protection Agency. “Water: Restoration: Wetlands Restoration: Definitions and Distinctions.” EPA.gov. 8 Nov. 2012. Web. 20 Jun. 2015.

United States. EPA Region 10. “Lower Duwamish Site.” EPA.gov.  Apr. 2010. Web. 20 Jun. 2015.

Welch, Craig. “Mammoth $342 Million Cleanup Ahead for Fouled Duwamish River.” Seattle Times. 4 Dec. 2014. Web. 20 Jun. 2015.
   

Earth Writing, Geography, and Memory, Continued.

Shelley McEuen
The Stories We Tell, The Landscapes We Deserve:
“Reading the Dynamics” of Rock Creek as Neglected Urban Wild Space
Audrey Cameron
​We Must Begin With These Stones
Jonathan Frey
Landscape with Strip Mall
Laura Godfrey
​“…where the shingle mill was…”:  Pleasure and Misery in Hemingway’s Remembered Geographies
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