Waste, Landfills, and an Environmental Ethic of Vulnerability

Western landfills are sites of forgetting made possible through legislative decision, regulative decree, risk models, community accession, and engineering practice. Despite this forgetting, waste doesn’t really go away—it flows over time and through space. This paper considers landfills as living natural flows where multitudes of bacteria collaborate with human debris and geological forces in creating assemblages of known, unknown, and unknowable entities. Through an exploration of leachate— putrescible and organic landfill material transported by water—I suggest geo-bacterial processes across strata necessitates an environmental ethic of vulnerability, sensitive to human and nonhuman asymmetrical vulnerability to an unknowable future, and focused on remembering and bearing witness to the waste we want to forget.