![]() The swampy crypt both conceals and reveals decades of devastation by the petrochemical industry. The pipeline is an industrial hinge between the smooth foreground and the tangled devastation behind, but the cause of the chaos remains hidden. The red pipeline seems to float over the water. ![]() ![]() Nothing connects the smooth, viscid green in the foreground with the tangled ghost-swamp behind. But a visual disturbance, a phantom, mars the scene, troubling the eye. At first glance, the image is ethereal, almost beautiful: that silky water, that pale green. 9 In Richard Misrach’s photograph, where spectral trees tilt out of a pallid swamp, the water is an eerie green cut across by the blood-rust artery of an oil pipeline. Photo: Richard Misrach.Ĭonsider one ghostscape. MAD CARS FULL CRACK ARCHI SERIESSwamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana, from the series Cancer Alley, 1998, printed 2017. I call these ecological disturbances “ghostscapes”: damaged landscapes where traces of disavowed violence haunt the margins of the visible and can now be read to animate forgotten histories and envision alternative futures. The stricken trees create visual disturbances across the land, apparitions of shocked space and torn time that signal something is amiss: faraway melting ice caps, the invisible floods of rising saltwater hidden burial places on slave plantations half-remembered cemeteries of Native school children drowning Native lands and sacred mounds half-buried military munitions and abandoned petrochemical wastelands. Ghost forests mark disturbances in arrangements of property, thefts and troubled legacies, historical crimes and family secrets, great forgettings, eerie unburyings, and ruptures in time and space. The skeletal trees are visible emissaries of the planetary upheavals of the Anthropocene, but like other ghosts they also point to places of half-buried, concealed, or erased violence. Ghost forests mark the invisible flood-line of the salty tides. Ghost forests are chaotic stands of dead and dying trees, leafless and lifeless, bleached white by the stealthy rising of the seas. The tree is a monument to the forest’s disappearance, both a mourning and a warning. The ghost tree stretches its bony limbs upwards as if in skyward lament. The tree and I stand knee-deep in saltwater in the fragile, filigree marshlands. In the humid, haunted summer of 2019, I find myself standing next to a ghost tree in southern Louisiana, where once a forest of ancient live oaks grew. “These heat waves-I’ve never seen anything like this.” 7 Scientists now peer into the deep time of the watery Eemian to read portents of our future present. “It’s just crazy, crazy stuff,” says Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder Colorado. ![]() The Arctic undergoes its most extreme melt in human history. India and Europe reel under historic heatwaves. In Australia, the Black Summer wildfires torch the forests, emptying koalas out of the trees and birds out of the sky. 6 Seas this high would drown New Orleans, Venice, Kolkata, and many of the world’s other great cities. 5 The last time the planet was this hot was the Eemian, when the last ice age ended, when seas were twenty to thirty feet higher, and straight-tusked elephants and hippopotami splashed in a steamy England. 4 June is the hottest month ever recorded in human history. Were clouds of hot ash, blowing in the wind. 3 NASA’s project to investigate the damaged and drowning delta is called Delta X. But the Mississippi Delta is now the fastest disappearing delta in the world. The Mississippi is the fourth largest river in the world. The river birthed the land we call Louisiana. ![]() A new coastland arose from the water, creating one of the most verdant, vital eco-systems on earth. There in the warm, shallow waters of the continental shelf, the Mississippi slowed, swaying back and forth in long, easy loops called “avulsions.” Century after century, the river gathered immense loads of silty land from the interior and laid it down in the Gulf. Torrents carrying minerals and silt, meadow grass and buffalo dung, trees and topsoil churned towards an ancient basin at the center of the continent where the rivers converged and roiled south to the Gulf. 2 Each spring for millennia, snowmelt cascaded down the Rockies in the west and the Appalachians in the east. For eight thousand years, the Misha Sipokni/Mississippi river flowed down a latticed, tree-shaped fan of water draining two-thirds of the US and parts of Canada. There should be a special word for land created by water. What follows is a ghost story written in oil in an atlas of water and wood. Ghosts are open secrets through which hidden stories pass. The ground is all memoranda and signaturesĪnd many objects covered over with hints. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |