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\begin{document}

\title{Entangling bodies and socio-economic structures: histories of
environmental pollution in Newtown~Creek}



\author[1]{Veronica Olivotto}%
\affil[1]{Milano School of Policy, Management and the Environment, The New School}%


\vspace{-1em}



  
  \date{May 04, 2024}


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\href{http://www.thechimneynyc.com/atsunobukohira}{Atsunobu Kohira's
``Seek Hope, Who Enter Here''} is a statue for the ``dark side of
Newtown Creek'' in the words of the artist. With dark side Kohira refers
to the materiality, the blackness of coal and of its by-products, tar,
petroleum and plastics out of which Kohira crafted a 12ft monolith, on
view at~\href{http://www.thechimneynyc.com/}{the Chimney}. The plastic
waste was collected in the gallery's surronding in Newton Creek, a river
part of the Hudson Estuary, flowing west for 3.5 miles between Queens
and Brooklyn and emptying into the East River. The monolith is a piece
of garbage archeology, exploring the waste habits of the people living
and passing through this part of Greenpoint in Brooklyn. In the manner
in which it addresses discarded commodities the piece enters the
meshwork~\cite{Ingold_2002}, or the combination of life threads tying
the lines of embodied experience of the New Yorker of the present with
the (dark*) ecological and material histories that made and re-make
Newtown Creek.

\par\null

Maspet Kills, English Kills, Dutch Kills. The early human history of the
creek is carried in the names of its branches. Indians fished the creek
and named its overflowing tidal streams, before it was used by both the
English and the Dutch for agriculture and industrial commerce in the
Seventeenth Century. Later it hosted the first kerosene refinery of the
country and the first modern oil refinery. In the 20s and 30s Newtown
Creek was a major shipping hub, becoming the home of sugar refineries,
tanning plants, canneries and copper wire plants. Thanks to little or no
regulation of these industries until the 20th Century, the slowly
accumulating impacts of industrial pollution on both citizens' health
and the environment were largely ignored.~ The polluting history of
Newton Creek peaked with a 13 -17 million gallons underground oil spill
(\href{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpoint_oil_spill}{known as the
Greenpoint oil spill}) caused by Standard Oil's companies, the largest
oil spill in the country's history. The health and environmental impacts
have been the subject
of~\href{http://www.newtowncreekalliance.org/greenpoint-oil-spill/}{court
litigations} between Standard Oil successor companies, such as Chevron
and ExxonMobil, and Greenpoints' inhabitants.~Still
today~\href{https://viewing.nyc/this-disgusting-video-shows-why-newtown-creek-between-brooklyn-and-queens-is-an-epa-superfund-site-nsfw/}{millions
of gallons of sewage water are dumped at various Combined Sewage
Outflows~}(or CSOs) along the creek. The remediation work to clean up
the
site,~\href{https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/science/earth/28newtown.html}{declared
a Superfund site in 2010}, are expected to take at least another
decade.~\href{https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.schedule\&id=0206282}{The
kind of remediation has yet to be selected~}but it is likely to involve
techniques such as dredging the toxic sludge accumulated in the river
bed to dump it in other ``safer'' underground facility.~ This begs the
question: isn't there a need for other kinds of reparations and what may
these look like?

\par\null

Kohira's monolith evokes the extractive landscape of Newtown Creek in
the newly found materiality of once decomposing organic matter turned
into plastic forks, spoons, bottles and containers held together by
shiny tar .~ In this way the monolith enters into a relational dialogue
with the cultural, politico-economic structures that made Newton Creek.
Indeed we are reminded of, and become concerned with, the past as a
history of resource extraction, energy and commodities production of the
nascent U.S. capitalist economy, together with those of the chemistry of
the climate and the life of non-human entities. The audience is asked to
reflect on the ``multiple spatialities that co-exist'' in and of
themselves and which are brought to the surface within the gallery
space, and how these are ``bound to be differentiated across the many
subject positions''~\cite{Green_2012} of citizens, oil corporations and
wildlife inhabiting this stretch of land. At its best the monolith
collapses time and space revealing the unstable layers of place asking
the audience to care for these histories in the present, as politics. At
its worse, it may lull us into a toxic sublime \cite{Peeples_2011}. After
all, who recognizes toxicity and in what ways? I took part in the
symposium organized to discuss Kohira's work in light of the
Anthropocene with an audience of predominantly artists and academics.
The symposium highlighted this long history of the creek brilliantly
exposed by Willis, an organizer at the Newtown Creek Alliance (NCA).
However, this was just an instance. How will other viewers engage with
the legacies that this piece conjures upon us? Will they go beyond its
aesthetic qualities?

~

*dark ecology refers to what author Tim Morton calls the state of
affairs of the Anthropocene, where ecological awareness implicates us
all beyond just capitalism, fossil fuels and modernity, rethinking the
system of agrilogistics into a system of coexistence.

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