Landscape as Infrastructure
1967 was a momentous year for the United States. General Motors’ 2 year long Futurama exhibit came to a close along with the Outer Space Treaty, which banned the use of nuclear weapons in space. What turned out to be most important in 1967 was that a small staff of five at the Milwaukee Journal, after successfully campaigning to stiffen the law against water pollution in Wisconsin and the Great Lakes, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. This was a step towards protecting natural resources from the contamination from the big industrial factories. The five great lakes were some of the biggest targets as each of them had a different reason as to why they could not be utilized. The issues of those lakes being: the declaration of Lake Erie as a dead zone, the overfertilization of Lake Ontario from sewage and detergent discharges, and the mercury contaminations that closed fisheries on Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, and Lake Huron. The Hudson river was also mentioned as a river that has been negatively affected by dumping. Although there has been healing done on rivers and lakes within the US, the Hudson is still a river that no one wants to willingly swim in and those that do take a risk. Those that live in New York City and New Jersey know that the Hudson is a beautiful sludge black that is so appealing to the eye.
Another major issue that was discovered in 1978 during construction of the LaSalle Expressway was that the construction that occurred on top of the Love Canal. This canal was built with the intention of being hydroelectric and transportation project between the upper and lower Niagara Rivers. Instead it was a dumping ground for weapons after World War I and was used as a chemical dump between 1942 and 1953 by the Hooker Electrochemical Company. This canal was sold and then used to build a school and homes and although the dumping stopped, the earth beneath all the newly built homes was contaminated with high level of dioxin which resulted in rashes, burns, miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer to name some of the illnesses. This is absolutely appalling and allowing the earth to heal itself from all this dumping would have seemed to be a better solution that to ruin the lives of those that lived there.
Today the view on dumping and how it drastically harms the environment is something that is so crucial. In the past, to further the economy meant to destroy the environment to do so but nowadays that is something so far from reality. Today the two work in tandem and the economy booms with a thriving environment. Food production is an example of a booming economy that relies on the environment. If water and soil are contaminated by dumping of factories than the food source can ultimately be rendered useless and the company drastically loses income. With how the technology of the world is advancing and new techniques and methods are being introduced, the preservation of the environment and our earth will hopefully flourish and revitalize the natural resources.
