Remediating a sense of place: Memory and environmental justice in anniston, Alabama

Abstract

Anniston, Alabama is home to an ongoing struggle for Environmental Justice (EJ) as residents remain embroiled in a remediation process to clean up PCB pollution left by The Monsanto Company. This paper engages with literature in Black Geographies, public memory, and environmental justice to argue that remedial processes neglect senses of place that are valued by impacted communities. In West Anniston, the predominantly black neighborhood that bore the brunt of the pollution, the remediation’s failure to restore a sense of place contributes to an ongoing erasure of black life from the landscape. As a result, the remediation transforms from a relatively benign project to one that facilitates a violence of forgetting. This paper examines how black life is remembered, commemorated, and valued by residents who participate in the remedial process.