Socializing with contaminated wastelands: Pluralistic toxic worldings at the Pine Street Barge Canal Brownfield in Burlington, Vermont

Contaminated landscapes are incommensurable and have complex histories. If not visibly obscured by redevelopment, remediation, or even by ecological growth and rewilding, these landscapes often serve as a reminder of past industrial legacies that have since left the land. Beyond what is immediately visible, contaminated spaces can be places of refuge, recreation, and even care and kinship. The Pine Street Barge Canal (PSBC) site, a 38-acre superfund site with surrounding brownfield parcels in Burlington, Vermont holds many toxic worldings. While the site is unique, this case study dives deep into the toxic world through in-depth interviews, site observations and an online survey. The PSBC case study provides insight into dominant toxic worldings that demonstrate economic visions of redevelopment upheld by techno-scientific boundaries of legally defined definitions of remediation and brownfield redevelopment procedures. While these legal definitions and technical orderings are presumed in capitalist economies, is there room for care and healing? Is there room to rethink how to deal with the trouble of contaminated landscapes? This case study investigates techno-economic toxic worldings, and holds them up to light against alternate worldings based in care, scientifically proven, yet legally unsupported bio-remediation methods, and participating in cleaning, caring, living, and using land that has been deemed otherwise unused, unproductive, and unsafe. The PSBC site, despite being a superfund site with surrounding brownfield parcels serves as refuge for unhoused individuals, a research landscape for a scientific research group, and provides recreation with a more-than-human connection promoted by a non-profit. Yet these alternate methods lie submissive to legally established policies and procedures, unable to find support. As a truly incommensurable landscape, the PSBC site hints at what new futures of remediation and reuse can look like for contaminated spaces, while asking, how do we deal with the trouble of toxic contamination?