Resurveying the West
Every year the New York-based photographer Victoria Sambunaris takes extended road trips across America with a large-format 5×7 view camera. Although by now she has photographed nearly every part of the country, she devotes special attention to the West, focusing not only on the easy natural splendors but also on resource extraction and the vast infrastructure and transit networks that have enabled restless national expansion. In the portfolios that result, an image of an enormous strip mine might be followed by a spectacular view of a light-filled canyon and then a panorama of a truck yard filled with multi-colored shipping containers. The photographs evoke a sense of wonder at the scale of the landscape and an ambivalent awe at the scope of our presence in it.
Victoria Sambunaris is one of the few photographers that seems to share my love of the American West.
Not the capital-B Beautiful parts of it — the Yosemites, the Yellowstones, the Redwoods — but the "flyover" West. Interstitial Wyoming, middling Montana, eastern Oregon. The scale and scope of the American West is unlike anything else, if only for our species' ability to imprint itself onto land at sheer scale. Strip mines, earthen dams, river diversions, nuclear testing facilities, irrigation canals.
Leave behind the cities and you begin to see another side of human nature laid bare. It's deeply unsettling, but it's honest.
Indiana Nature Notes
Farther down beach, sand gave way to thick slabs of gray clay, slippery. Whole veins of it where waves took away sand covering. Geologists say last glacier pushed in clay (and gravel and dirt), creating Valparaiso Moraine: kind of ridge here at southern edge of lake. Glacier = bulldozer, bulldozing moraine, which then acts as dam or divide. North, the great lake; south, water drains into Kankakee floodplain. M. and I stand at ancient, slippery edge.
6.6 DOE Test Area North, INEEL, Idaho – Remediation Management of Complex Sites
From 1950 to 1972, all liquid waste streams generated at TAN were introduced directly into the basalt aquifer (Snake River Plain Aquifer), approximately 200–300 feet below ground surface, through injection wells. Waste streams included low-level radioactive wastewater, industrial wastewater (including organic liquids), and sanitary sewage. Historical records provide little information on the types and volumes of organic wastes injected into the groundwater; estimates of total TCE injection range from 350 to 35,000 gallons. The direct result of these injection activities was a two-mile trichloroethene (TCE, C2HCl3) plume at concentrations >20,000 µg/L.
Whoa.
America Is Draining Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow
Oklahoma is working to determine how much water remains in its aquifers, information that state lawmakers could use to set limits on pumping. But Christopher Neel, the head of water rights for the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, said people might not necessarily welcome the government telling them that their land is running out of groundwater.
“If we start showing that kind of data, that kind of goes into your property values,” Mr. Neel said. “If we show an area may be depleted in, let’s say, two years, well, if someone tries to sell that property, they’re not going to be able to.”
Rare to find human nature this blatantly on display.
Isn’t this the problem with humans? We are so concerned with our immediate present that we lose all sight of a not-so-long-term future. We feel entitled to what we have right now and we will do anything to justify keeping it, even when reality shows it to be impossible.