Industrial Sublimes
The drive up through the Oquirrh mountains is spectacular. Strangely, living in Salt Lake, those mountains aren’t usually much to talk about. You see them when you fly in — they are the smaller mountains to the West. They contain a giant hole (big enough to be seen from space) that has been dug out through a mountain top. I always wanted to hike in the Oquirrhs, or go backcountry skiing, but I just never did, with the Wasatch a more close and convenient option. On the way through this under-appreciated range, I was shocked by how big the Oquirrhs seem when you are in them. They look just as tall as the Wasatch, but far less rocky. On the day of the drive it was raining and cold. From my view on the east side of the valley I had thought the Oquirrhs were barren, perhaps even ugly, compared to the beautiful Wasatch that faced them, so it was striking to see the forest there. As we made our way up the rocky back road, we could see fog covered giant hills speckled with a few bright yellow aspen trees. When we pulled into the parking lot of our destination there was a giant cloud that appeared to be blocking our view.
We got out of the van and the group quickly began throwing warmer layers on, and we found that we were standing in a cloud. We walked together to the edge of the world and as we did the clouds parted. We stared down into the hole. Someone commented, “it looks like they are trying to dig to China.” We took a minute just to stare at it. When you see Kennecott Copper Mine from the sky it is hard to grasp its size, and when you see it from across the valley it’s even harder. When you stare at the mine from a lookout view somewhere in the Oquirrhs it’s actually no easier to understand the size of this giant hole, but it makes you feel small. From the lookout there are trucks that are dwarfed by the size of the mine. There is a school bus somewhere around the middle of the mine. It looked like a toy parked there, but for some reason it’s still impossible to understand the size of the hole.
As the group began to comment about what they saw, it was no surprise to hear the word “sublime” used. The word has traditionally been applied to “wild” spaces to explain the mysterious, dangerous, and beautiful feelings that come with vast landscapes untouched by western civilization. It is interesting then, to reimagine this word as it relates to the mine. The mine inspired mystery, danger, and beauty. The group was willing to admit that the mine gave us feelings of the sublime, perhaps because it was a class trip focused on industrial landscape. It is difficult to admit that something that huge, that destructive to a landscape, that man made, can inspire deep emotion. I think we were all surprised by that reaction. What was also striking was how untouched the areas around the mine appeared. From afar it is difficult to imagine that there is any natural ecosystem around the mine, but the forest seemed almost unaffected by the industry directly next to it. The mountains surrounding Kennecott look as if there were no mine at all. People were working in the mine, and we could see trucks moving. It sounded as if there were a large city below the overlook. The mine seemed gigantic, but there were many mountains around it. I was not alone in wondering why other mountains hadn’t been mined using mountain top removal. As an environmentalist it is difficult to admit that Kennecott could inspire the same sublime that the American frontier produced hundreds of years ago. I had always thought that with sublime came some respect. The awe and fear that sublime spaces inspire demands that we as humans treat a landscape a certain way. If a mine creates the feeling of sublime for us now, rather than or in addition to wild spaces, then does it command the same respect, awe, and fear? I think that this is an important question to ask ourselves and also an incredibly difficult reality to face for those of us who find themselves stuck between the beauty of the mine and the damage it does to the valley below.
A storm cloud was rolling in from the west and into the place a mountain used to be, and it looked like a fantasy movie. We got in the van and drove back down the steep road, continuing west out of the Oquirrhs and further into the west desert. We took a dirt road to our next destination on a route had been a pony express path in the past. When we pulled into our campsite we grabbed the binoculars and attempted to find any signs of the military we could. Our campsite looked out over the Dugway Proving Grounds, a military testing site that has been used to test everything from bombs to chemical weapons. It doesn’t look like much at first. There is a small town and airport to the East of the grounds. The land is unbelievably flat — it looks almost smooth. There are two visible mountain ranges on the grounds that come out of the flat ground in an unnatural way. Even with binoculars all we could see were these boxes that were scatted throughout the area. Some people had used Google maps before we arrived and noticed that there were some areas that looked charred, potentially from testing, and other areas with measurement devices. We couldn’t see any of that from where we stood; the grounds looked untouched.
When we gathered around the campfire that night to reflect on the day’s events we all cautiously began to admit that we had found the mine to be beautiful. It seemed to go against what was morally acceptable for environmental studies students to say out loud. I revealed to the group that although the mine was incomprehensibly large, I was surprised that much of the world’s copper could come just from that hole alone. There seemed to be some agreement. Then the conversation turned to the proving grounds, which had motivated some of the students to look up conspiracy theories. They were sharing stories they had found online, about abductions, aliens, and what was tested on the grounds. It seemed like a landscape that vast, and that militarized, created a lot of curiosity. Brent posed a great question: if we didn’t know that the land had been militarized, would we be so curious about an open, uninhabited space? I think a lot of the conspiracy comes from the military aspect of the landscape but some curiosity is created by the sublime of an open space like the grounds. Once again we were feeling a sense of sublimity but this time from a landscape that looked almost completely untouched. This landscape confused our feelings from earlier in the day. We had been coming to terms with the sublime that was created by the Kennecott mine, but now we were feeling sublime senses from a landscape we knew had been touched by industrialization, but did not physically appear that way. Brent pointed out that this land was in some ways being protected by the military and that ecosystems were able to thrive here because humans were only allowed in the space to test military techniques. While it looked like an untouched wild space, this is complicated by what you can argue is high impact, chemical and industrialized warfare on the landscape. If you didn’t know it was Dugway, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at it.
Kennecott Copper Mine and Dugway Proving Grounds provide an important juxtaposition of industrial landscape. The obvious human impact of Kennecott is striking and complicates the feeling of the sublime generally attributed to natural wild spaces. In contrast, Dugway appears untouched and gives a sense of the sublime in the traditional sense, but it is an industrial landscape as well. How can both of these spaces be industrial landscapes that create a sense of the sublime? In a sense these two spaces are on completely different ends of the industrialization spectrum: one creating a hole seen from space, the other, totally unrecognizable as an industrial space. However, it is clear that both of these spaces have felt the impact of human created industrialization in great ways. Experiencing both of these spaces in the same day provides us with a sense of the size and variety of human impact on the land. We begin to get a sense of how visible, and invisible the impact of industrialization is by seeing two incredible examples of this landscape.
Kailey Kornhauser is a Westminster Graduate (Class of 2015) and a current student in the Environmental Humanities Graduate program at the University of Utah. She joined Brent Olson and 11 Environmental Studies students on a tour of industrial sites in the West Desert. All photos by Brent Olson
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Originally published at ecsquared.org on November 25, 2015.
