Anita Bakshi teaches in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University. She has worked on community commemoration projects internationally and with local partners in New Jersey. Her book, Topgraphies of Memories: A New Poetics of Commemoration (2017), explores new approaches for developing memorial and heritage sites.
I first visited Ringwood, New Jersey, in February of 2018 with a group of students enrolled in my “Marking Environmental Losses” design studio class at Rutgers University, Department of Landscape Architecture. Although we knew about the contaminants and toxins that lingered deep in the soil, everything looked so normal. We saw a beautiful wooded landscape, slightly subdued by the rainy weather, and a number of cute, tiny frogs. We were led behind the chain-link fence that marks the Ringwood Mines/Landfill Superfund site, where we began to see 55-gallon drums and orange fencing. Hikers who move from Ringwood State Park down the Hasenclever Iron Trail are also able to walk right through parts of the Superfund site without encountering any signs of what lies below their hiking boots.
But we had studied EPA reports that detailed the sludge removal locations and outlined facts and figures about the chemicals trapped in paint sludge that still remained buried in the woods. This was the residue of clandestine deposits made by Ford Motor Company contractors in their “midnight landfill” in the 1960s and 1970s. We knew that barrels and barrels of toxic material had been dumped down the shaft of the old iron mine that ran 1,800 feet below ground. Moving through the trails, we encountered running streams and ponds where the surface of the water sometimes shimmered like an oil slick. This is where, just a few decades ago, the Ramapough Lunaape Turtle Clan used to swim and ice skate, and drink from the clear running water.
Our work started that day, and has developed over the years into a more comprehensive project geared at conveying how the Ramapough are surviving this legacy of contamination. We want readers to understand that they are not accepting this passively, but have worked, and continue to work, to change the conditions they have inherited, and to protect the entire watershed. We share in this volume the Ramapoughs’ contributions, land stewardship, ongoing environmental advocacy, and intergenerational knowledge about the landscape
Today we are bombarded with many facts and figures about environmental losses and projections of how our climate will change. These abbreviations and numbers can be difficult to understand. The goal of our work is to explore how to represent and communicate the emotional aspects of environmental loss, to relate their impact, and to perhaps even inspire action around environmental issues. The first obstacle we faced in our initial investigations was the mind-numbing amount of documentation available through the EPA, NJDEP, NJDHSS, and ATSDR. Even these abbreviations
It is in an effort to communicate the emotional impacts of histories, ecological relationships, and scientific data that we have included personal narratives, traditional stories, and memorial design proposals in this project.
We hope that the drawings and renderings will help to provide a different kind of information about this landscape and its residents, and help to elucidate the histories of contamination and continuity that lie below the soil. You will notice that the stories and the representations are not just about loss and destruction. They are also about celebration, love of the particularities of home, joy in a unique landscape, courage, leadership, learning, and survival. They commemorate positive aspects of the past and generations of connection to this landscape. They celebrate the work that has been done and the seeds that have planted for future generations
I am a non-Native scholar who studies contested places and histories. My parents immigrated to the USA from India, carrying their own stories of the violence of Partition and the loss of home. I was pulled to this work because of the familiarity of the selective narratives and compilations of history and memory that have informed how this history has been told.
