Leanna Lalonde: Under cover of green

Impressions of Sudbury are intimately linked to landscape.  Like an archive, the ground is a repository of the events, both geologic and anthropogenic, that transform it. The most significant work operates at the surface in what can be discerned, most explicitly through sight.

Once a trackless wilderness of tall red and white pine, quick and successive waves of human activity stripped Sudbury of its vegetation revealing extensive rock surfaces, stained black by sulphurous smog.  Negative perceptions of these surficial qualities obscured the complexity and value of affected communities as ‘lived in’ places, reducing them to icons of dereliction and decay. These surficial qualities are also superficial, concerned with the immediately apparent, perceived without any depth. When, in 1971, two Apollo 16 astronauts visited Sudbury, the common view was that the landscape was a proxy for the lunar landscape to prepare the astronauts for stark environmental conditions. This misinterpretation solidified a narrative that cast the city as categorically ugly, hostile and unhealthy in the minds of visitor and resident alike.  

As the basis upon which people act and react, narrative and image are as consequential as material reality; environmental crisis is as much a problem of narrative and the imagination as it is technology or science. As a signifying system, landscape and the ground surface is a means of communicating narrative – a medium through which truth is revealed, seeing is believing, but which also is infinitely malleable and susceptible to manipulation. Any given ‘truth’ might be an endeavour in selectivity, narrow and restrictive.

As a beloved narrative, the Edenic garden generally falls into two categories that establish ‘right’ models of behaviour in our relationship with the natural world. The first exhorts people to transform the wilderness ‘back’ to garden by taming and controlling undeveloped unruly and rugged nature into a state of civility and order.  The second condemns humans for polluting and destroying nature. Contemporary environmentalism has grown out of this second interpretation; land reclamation finds its genesis in the admission of guilt for a scorched and endangered earth, and recompense for the loss of an intact and pristine natural environment. Sudbury’s specific recovery narrative begins in 1978, building compelling images of the compensatory value of nature against the harsh realities of the region. Regreening was a  prescription of lime, fertiliser and grass seed that produced a cover of green that relieves – even eliminates, the impression of a devastated landscape.

In 2003 after 25 years of Sudbury’s Land Restoration program, the city asked citizens to say what the regreening program meant to them. The theme and template, a ‘thin green line’, was provided as “a reflection of the ongoing work required to ensure that diverse self-sustaining ecosystems replace barren land” and “of the rather fragile relationship between the regreening hillsides and the physical state of the soil, the air and the water” in the city.1  The commonly used ‘thin red line’ figuratively denotes a point of no return, a line drawn in the sand – a limit beyond which safety is no longer guaranteed’; the thin blue line refers to law enforcement officers who stand between good and bad.  Thus, the thin green line is more than a statement on health, it is the new morality, negotiating the “uncomplicated choice between natural things, which are good, and unnatural things, which are bad.” 2 As a result, conventions of land reclamation have become a master narrative unquestioned by anyone except those who are necessarily aligned with destructive anthropocentric and other opportunistic forces. William Cronon explains that in this way, “Nature becomes our dogma, the wall we build around our own vision to protect it from competing views. And like all dogmas, it is the death of dialogue and self-criticism”.3

Eric Cazdyn has identified an intersection with medicine, relevant to Sudbury’s regenerative image, as a period called the ‘new chronic’. 4  Although regreening and restoration may be perceived as a cure, Cazdyn’s theory relegates it to a prescriptive meantime.  It begins with healing the city’s scars rather than deepening them, but progressively deals with the easier to manage symptoms of a complicated and ongoing relationship between industry, community and environment. Sudbury’s industrial sector remains active and new technology is rediscovering untapped potential at historic mine sites – the narrative of ‘healing’ detracts from these and other potentially meaningful agendas. Abandoned and hazardous mine sites are only just finding their way into current reclamation strategies, while urban brownfield sites, ageing infrastructure, disappearing heritage and below-average human health still negatively affect the city.  Although the community has no independent public accounting of the social costs of the mining industry,5 a declining ratio of barren to recovered land satisfies the city’s narrative that to make green equals health, although this is neither true, nor even representative of the whole truth.

David Leadbeater takes a particularly strong position towards these issues, stating that Sudbury is in a state of chronic crisis deeper and longer term than the usual boom-bust resource town formula. What is at risk by perpetuating the image of regreening is a future of more provocative and radical possibilities.  

Aesthetics are bound up in a battle over the image of society – what is permissible to show, to say and to do in the current social order. A critique of land reclamation methods and the pervasive nature ideologies that drive them would require establishing value in ‘damaged’ sites as a necessary part of an authentic context.  Neil Smith (In the Nature of Cities) states that however perversely, societies make the natural environment in which they live. ‘Nature is manifestly not dead but is incessantly reproduced—in ways we may detest or we may love’.6 What might a spatial strategy not fixated on definitions of health look like?

Constrained by the narrative of the Garden of Eden, society is discouraged from thinking outside or against the basic doctrines which govern its ideology.  For example, in barren and semi-barren areas significant metal content in the soil inhibits plant regrowth. Highly acidic soil contributes to the absorption of metal particulates by plant life, stunting root growth and ultimately killing all metal-intolerant plant species.  In Sudbury’s regreening program, crushed limestone neutralises soil acidity, rendering the metal content insoluble, allowing plants to grow “as if the soil was normal”.7 Where a lack of plant life was once a useful index of contamination, regreening renders this ongoing toxicity invisible. The ‘appearance’ of a convincingly healed landscape suspends criticism that may otherwise generate action.  

As a counter-result, covering up signs of damage can lead to distrust of scientifically-determined ‘acceptable’ risk.  The 2001 Sudbury Soils Study, the largest risk-assessment study ever conducted in Canada, estimated whether people working, living or visiting Sudbury were exposed to concentrations of chemicals with the potential for adverse health effects.8 Although the results released in 2008 concluded that elevated heavy metal content in the soil was within an acceptable range, an informal poll showed that 68 percent of respondents in the community were not assured by the study.9  Risk isn’t always an objective phenomenon; there is almost always an aspect of risk that cannot be reduced to formal identification. A denuded landscape has value as an index of toxicity: where risk is visibly manifest people may be granted a degree of control and responsibility over the risk and their fear of it. Hide this risk, and control is abrogated. For now, synonymous with popular perceptions of health, green is morally upheld while rock, stone and slag heap become morally ambiguous, if not inadmissible.

As a whole other issue, in mourning for the loss of dense pine forests, regreening quickly covers vast areas of bare rock; however while this is going on, a defining characteristic of the northern landscape, its geologic structure, is also being replaced by prescriptive ecological stereotypes.  With blasting technology no longer just confined to mining, hills and channels are flattened and filled to make way for the rigid and hierarchical urban planning strictures of conventional subdivisions. New Sudbury, a neighbourhood northeast of the historic core, is organised into four perfect quadrants, demonstrating by counter-example the difficulty of redeveloping the old bifurcated downtown where houses follow the contours, finding the easiest places to build tucked up against the base of the hills. New hilltop developments blast enormous amounts of rock to make way for new houses with great views. Although the preservation of hilltops has recently become a focus of the city’s Greenspace advisory panel, so far there is no official stance against this erasure of original topography. Instead of encouraging development of abandoned or derelict land, avoiding development on hilltops altogether, the city advocates hilltop condominium development that reduces footprint and preserves views.

Against a background of newly established ‘green’, support for an authentic regional identity could mean establishing connections to contested landforms. Blasted landscapes hold value as authentic places amidst generic (and green) public space. A new ecological paradigm could stimulate dialogue between ecologists, scientists and designers to fully realise a complex human geography that addresses both good and bad processes in a renewed appreciation of historic value.
Reclaimed landscapes are only partial truths, imposing a ‘natural’ heritage on a complex cultural one. Sudbury is often embroiled in contested preservation of its heritage.  With little funding available to maintain its built heritage, there has been no concerted effort to develop a heritage plan for the otherwise ‘invaluable’ abandoned mines and town sites that punctuate the landscape. The preservation of barren sites have been considered – one idea was to declare the O’Donnell roast yard, one of only a few roast yards still visible in North America, a UNESCO world heritage site – but it is currently inaccessible on private company property and tours are increasingly rare. Without any effort to physically draw attention to the site it will soon be completely lost to public awareness.

Happy Valley may have the least well-known history. A fringe development, occupied by farmers and miners who wanted to live outside the planned Falconbridge Mine townsite, it found itself in the path of gas spewed from the smelter – hazardous to both vegetation and residents. To mitigate the effects on the community, compromises were made to reduce days of operation, but when that became unsustainable, the company purchased Happy Valley land, paid for relocation costs, emptied Happy Valley and carried on operations unhindered. Completely abandoned, the site is closed to the public by a large steel fence.

To bring this all full circle, Barbara Misztal (Theories of Social Remembering) states “…without memory…we will have no warnings about potential dangers to democratic structures and no opportunity to gain a richer awareness of the repertoire of possible remedies”.10  The ability to perceive the past is intimately connected to an ability to conceive of the future, only on this basis can a community come to terms with itself, acknowledging both the welcome and the undesirable, the offensive and the satisfying.

Landscape can be reframed to dismantle the exclusionary spatial practices of an either/or attitude – either land reclamation or industrial planning – and to liberate the potential of abandoned or derelict landscapes. The serious integration of nature and culture makes landscape an ‘arena of speculation’ without limitations on what it is possible to say, to hear or to do.11  Changing what can be seen – exposing rather than covering – thus becomes a radical act. 

1  Stephen Monet. ‘City Launches ‘Thin Green Line’ Contest Celebrating 25 years of Land Reclamation’.  Greater Sudbury, Sep. 15, 2003.
2  William Cronon. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: WW Norton, 1995  p52
3  Ibid p25
4  Eric Cazdyn.  The Already Dead, the new time of politics, culture and illness.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2012
5  David Leadbeater. Mining Town Crisis: Globalization, Labour and Resistance in Sudbury. Halifax: Fernwood, 2008. p 21
6  Neil Smith. ‘Foreword’ in Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw, eds. In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London: Routledge, 2006
7  Aaron Pickard. ‘Regreening efforts taking root’ Northern Life, Jan 21, 2012.  
8  Christopher Wren. Risk Assessment and Environmental Management: A Case Study in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Leiden, Netherlands: Maralte, 2012. p16
9  Bill Bradley. ‘Digging through the Sudbury Soils Study’ Northern Life, June 13, 2008
10  Barbara A. Misztal. Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open UP, 2003.
11  An arena of speculation is a term from the literature of the transformation of Israeli structures of domination. In the study of the potential application of physical interventions to open up a horizon for ongoing processes of transformation, an arena of speculation is an architectural tool that incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives through the participation of a multiplicity of individuals and organizations. Eyal Weizman, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti have an architectural studio in Bethlehem that employs a range of techniques, using architecture as an arena of speculation to deal with how Israeli settlements and military bases could be reused, recycled and re-inhabited by Palestinians.  See: Hilal, Petti and Weizman, ‘The Future Archaeology of Israel’s Colonization’  Roulotte, Aprill 2011

Leanna Lalonde is a graduate from the University of Waterloo where she completed the thesis Curation: Representation in the Reclamation of Sudbury, Ontario Landscapes, and is currently an intern architect at Adamson Associates.  leannalalonde.wix.com/designportfolio