Armageddon, USA

WIRED magazine story Welcome to Armageddon, USA

In the latest issue of WIRED, the article Welcome to Armageddon, USA exposes the story of Picher, Oklahoma, a town shut down by industry and contamination. The mining of lead and zinc contaminated the land to a point where it was no longer suitable to live. It reminds me of the very public controversy of the love canal in the 1970's. In the situation of the love canal, chemical waste was buried beneath the grade to reveal itself decades later.

Love Canal in 1995 by MotionBlurStudios

Ben Paynter, writer for WIRED, points out that "for all the famed cities with thousands of years of continuity - Paris, London, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Istanbul - most cities just stop. Picher isn't simply another boomtown gone bust. It's emblematic of what happens when a modern city dies: A few people say behind, trying to hold on to what they can. They are the new homesteaders, trying to civilize a wasteland at the end of the world."

These towns and cities that have seen the end of one generation of industry and are struggling so hard while wounded to carry on to the next phase are displaced and detached from the connected socio and economic flows. These places are the remnants of what was once useful and now unbearable to many as they simply walk away. How can these sites be fostered and remediated for those radicals who find themselves in solitude? Is there a way to bring back a life to the city, expand the possibilities of what the space was from before while also being able to nurse back to health the land and place to a richer and more fruitful ecology?

While the Love Canal is now a barren neighborhood with sidewalks that lead to nothingness, and Picher, OK is a hostile town fallen apart with no one to pick up the pieces, there are terrains of flight or fight that situate the opportunities for interventions calling for a new generation and definition of a place, waiting to be put back together.

Mined

When I was eight years old I took an expedition with my family out west. One of the stops along the way was the Black Hills in South Dakota. With my small Olympus 35mm camera I took these pictures only knowing then that this was a "cool" place of mystery and possibilities. I collected some mica flakes, took some photos and crept just close enough to see the the dark interiors while being warned of the possibility of a collapse. I now really doubt that my eight year old frame might add enough stress to these structures for collapse. Many of them have been in an abandoned state for nearly a century. The Black Hills Mining Museum says, "Many mines were established during the early years of the boom (1870's) and many played out quickly. Most of them closed in the very early 1900's due to the lack of high grade ore and increasing costs" 

These structures are currently sitting dormant within the Black Hills and across numerous other landscapes in America. "As the American western landscape is being reclaimed, it continues to spawn ideas of exploration, expansion and discovery, technological domination, and transformation... The western United States currently holds over 200,000 abandoned and active mines covering millions of acres and tens of thousands of square miles. Funding for future federal and state reclamation will make this ongoing infrastructural project one of the largest- in terms of scale and spending- in the history of the United States". -Alan Berger Reclaiming the American West 
Each abandoned place like the one I discovered when I was eight rests within or outside a community parceled smaller than that of the great American West. Each of these smaller interventions leads to new possibilities with its contributions beyond a tourist hot spot. Can these small buildings set in the wilderness become excavation stations, surveillance outposts, or a water folly? As mining resources had diminished these places were walked away from but it may be possible to walk the site again with a fresh approach and new technology to elicit more from the site again finding richness in the reclaimed architecture of this landscape.