Afterword: Improvement and Overburden

Jennifer Wenzel (bio)
Columbia University

“The mouth of this river forms the best harbour I have yet seen; being wide, deep and free from shoals, with a fine situation for a town and fortifications where ships may lie close along the shore, the land high, with a good air and fine streams of water”: so observed Christopher Columbus on November 12, 1492 (124–25). The report of this promising scene concludes Columbus’s inventory of the resources he found at the newly-named Rio de Mares: gold, spices, cotton, aloe, and mastic to be traded, as well as pliant souls to be converted. It’s a curious kind of inventory, not so much a list of current stock as a vivid projection of what could be. I take it as a seminal instance of what Mary Louise Pratt has aptly called an “improving eye,” in which a European explorer’s survey of the landscape offers a prospect both spatial and temporal: a vision of a “Euro-colonial future,” with “resources to be developed, surpluses to be traded, towns to be built” (61). What both Columbus’s inventory and Pratt’s analysis of eighteenth and nineteenth century travel writing tell us is that a resource logic is also a resource aesthetic. From the “beginning,” if you will, Columbus’s judgments—the best harbor, good air, fine streams and situation—are at once economic and aesthetic. You can just picture the scene, no? (Perhaps you’ve seen it in a vacation brochure.) The profitable and the beautiful are brought into alignment, envisioned as one and the same. This emphasis on aesthetic rather than merely economic value in the logic of improvement serves to “presuppose — naturalize — a transformative project embodied in the Europeans” (Pratt 59). Europeans might not have been the first to gaze upon these beckoning landscapes, but they were (so the logic goes) the first to discern in them what they were meant to become. The gap between the actual and the possible is bridged with a teleology. In this Afterword, I trace a kind of pre-history of (post)modernity, taking the improving impulse evident in Columbus’s prospect as a blueprint for capitalist modernity—a map of the future that, in its very immateriality, bears a complex yet instructive relation to the uneven territory of our present.

Anatomizing the forms of desire and coercion at work in the improving eye, Raymond Williams puts the link between economy and aesthetics more baldly than Pratt when he observes that, in reading conventional histories of English landscape,

you might almost believe—you are often enough told—that the eighteenth-century landlord, through the agency of his hired landscapers, and with poets and painters in support, invented natural beauty. And in a way, why not? In the same ideology he invented charity, land-improvement and politeness, just as when he and his kind went to other men’s countries, such countries were ‘discovered’. (120)

Elsewhere in The Country and the City, Williams links the agricultural and infrastructural aspects of “improvement” or “cultivation” more explicitly with their social, cultural, or moral aspects, “which were historically linked but in practice so often contradictory” (115). He identifies the false promise in the tautology: “improvement is or ought to be improvement” but seldom is (116). Thus the anger with which Aimé Césaire tallies the murders, stolen resources, and ruined lifeworlds attributable to the European “civilizing mission” in his Discourse on Colonialism: “They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks…. I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life (43). In the exchange from which this passage is excerpted, Césaire offers a counter-inventory of what Columbus and his successor-improvers have wrought.

Although he was concerned more with morality than with aesthetics (and, above all, with economic value), John Locke was another key theorist of “improvement” in its manifold senses. “In the beginning,” Locke writes in “Of Property,” “all the world was America” (V.49), by which he means that the entire earth was unimproved waste land gifted by the Creator to humankind for them to labor upon and make productive. “Waste” is a crucial word for Locke, in a quite different sense than it is for us today. For him, it primarily signifies land awaiting the infusion of labor—through which the gift of the earth to “men in common” becomes private property (V.34, V.25). The only possible limit to this divinely-ordained process of enclosing waste land that Locke recognizes is that agricultural produce might spoil before it can be used—i.e., go to waste. The crucial innovation that resolves this contradiction between “letting waste and making waste” (Ince 43) is money: “a little piece of yellow metal, which would keep without wasting or decay” (Locke V.37). Money helps to cheat the time of nature by enabling accumulation without spoilage, the industrious improvement of waste land without the sin of wasted produce. Locke’s optimism about the potentially limitless wealth to be made from waste is, as political theorist Onur Ulas Ince writes, a “progressive and acquisitive gaze that perceives the world as a reservoir of potential value to be extracted and accumulated” (46). Like Columbus, Locke is a prophet of accumulation: looking upon waste, he can see what will be. Not to extract and accumulate that value would be a sin—to contravene the intention for which the gift of the earth was given.

All of this might be dismissed as so much bourgeois political economy. And yet, notice how closely John Steinbeck’s defiant demur to the logic of improvement in The Grapes of Wrath echoes the moral economy of waste and the aesthetic of the improving eye, even as it lays bare their barrenness. Columbus’s prospect at the mouth of the Rio de Mares in Cuba finds its California counterpart in fallow land along the roadside, “lying there to be seen and coveted” by Okie migrants fleeing the merciless bankers and unforgiving winds scouring the Great Plains in the 1930s:

the good fields with water to be dug for, the good green fields, earth to crumble experimentally in the hand, grass to smell, oaten stalks to chew until the sharp sweetness was in the throat. A man might look at a fallow field and know, and see in his mind that his own bending back and his own straining arms would bring the cabbages into the light, and the golden eating corn, the turnips and the carrots. (234)

Out of mere “good green fields” the narrator brings forth a sensuous vision of bounty and beauty, the product of physical exertion and unalienated labor, a displaced small farmer’s embodied dream of what could be. A “homeless hungry man” driving this road “could know how a fallow field is a sin and the unused land a crime against the thin children” (234). As in Locke’s moral economy, waste land is a sin—affirmed both by a furtive squatter “steal[ing] a little richness from the earth” and by the sheriff’s deputy who finds his secret garden—and productive labor is the foundation of landed property: “A crop raised—why, that makes ownership” (235). But the private property regime dominated by the “great owners” whose aim is to produce profit rather than food is also shown to be a form of theft: the most rapacious one, with the force of law behind it. Who steals richness (in whatever form of value) from whom?—from deed-holders of thousands of acres lying waste, from hungry children, from Native Americans, from the earth itself. And theft is but one of the deadly sins that might be committed over the land lying fallow for the Okies to covet. Agricultural production is not only aestheticized but also sexualized, as hunger is re-figured as illicit erotic desire: the “good green fields” evoke “lust” and “temptation” for the farmer-fathers (234). To resist such temptation, however, is its own form of transgression against an alternative moral and legal code: a sin against the subsistence imperative, a crime against the children.

The spectacle of the 1930s Dust Bowl, with the native grasslands of the American prairie relentlessly ploughed under for cash crops until the topsoil simply blew away, rendered starkly visible the ecological limits to growth that Locke refused to see. It’s an iconic instance of how the castles in the air promised by the improving eye dissolve into catastrophe: massive swirling dust clouds of the very topsoil on which plant and herbivorous life depends. The dramatic sense of catastrophe is appropriate here, if we take the logic of improvement as a narrative arc and follow it to the bitter end with which we late moderns are all too familiar: not beckoning waste land awaiting improving labor, but wasted land—land (and lives) laid waste. And we know, too, that waste in this latter sense, as toxic or otherwise unwanted byproduct, can itself beckon as a new occasion for profit-making: as waste in Locke’s originary sense, as prospect. (This is to put the resource-to-waste-to-resource cycle that Amanda Boetzkes observes in her article in a broader context.)

Perhaps the narrative mode appropriate to our historical moment is not future projection (as in the glittering promises of improvement) but instead confession: an inventory of past sins, a record of resource exhaustion, a belated reckoning with externalities. Consider something like William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say,” a twelve-line poem that takes the implicit form of a pre-emptive Post-it^® note on the refrigerator: don’t go looking for the yummy plums in here because I ate them already. In “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto,” a meditation on Canadian indifference to the environmental costs of bitumen extraction in the Alberta oil sands, Warren Cariou adapts Williams’ non-apology apology as a “Letter for a time capsule to be opened in 2112”:

This is just to say
we’ve burned up all the oil
and poisoned the air
you were probably hoping to breathe.
Forgive us.
It was delicious
the way it burned
so bright and
so fast. (31)

In both poems, the consummation of intense sensuous pleasure is cited as an implicit justification for expropriation, yet the record of such pleasure would presumably only make the addressee’s loss of anticipated future enjoyment harder to bear. Give up your dream for that resource; I realized mine already and it was so totally worth it (to me). This dynamic reveals the hollowness of the social promise of Locke’s moral justification for accumulation, the “commonwealth” which he understood as increasing the “common stock of mankind.” Indeed, Locke begins with eating as a literal act of incorporation to explain how labor creates individual property in land: whatever I eat, you cannot.

Both the improving eye à la Columbus and these confessional poems invoke a future, but they construe it differently: the improving eye implores the present with the promise of a better future, while the confessions address an impoverished future, one that is downstream, in the aftermath. Their trajectory is resource exhaustion rather than improvement, subtraction rather than addition. Yet in both the progress narrative of accumulation and the narrative of diminishment and decline, aesthetic judgment serves to legitimate and naturalize appropriation. I have argued that a resource logic is also a resource aesthetic by demonstrating how the logic of improvement joins its accounting of facts on the ground with prodigious imaginings of what will be. It’s a trick of the eye that allows Columbus to look upon a river mouth and imagine a bustling harbor town, or Steinbeck’s farmers to gaze longingly on empty fields and feel in their bones the satisfactions of labor and sustenance they might bring. One might conclude, then, that a resource aesthetic may be mere ideological cover for appropriation and exploitation—that “improvement” in its myriad senses is the friendly face of ruthless extractivism.

The question that gives me pause is whether extractivism might have its own aesthetic. The logic of improvement rests on an agricultural or organic premise of development, addition, bringing forth. But what of the logic of extraction, which seems, by contrast, a logic of emptying out or subtraction? How does a mining company see? What tricks of the eye enable its work? The extracting eye, I want to suggest, peers through space rather than time: to keep one’s eye on the prize in this context means to home in on what’s valuable, to espy the buried ore precious enough to make it worth the digging up. Paydirt. In mining parlance, the technical term for the layers of dirt and rock that must be excavated to get down to the valuable minerals below is overburden. Overburden is everything lying on top of the buried resource (or underground infrastructure, like pipelines or tunnels), as well as the pressure exerted by that everything on what’s beneath it. Overburden is topsoil, sand, and clay; sedimentary rock; surface water and groundwater. Everything in the way of paydirt. Overburden, I want to suggest, is an aesthetic judgment as well as an economic one: a way of seeing and a way of imagining what can’t be seen. Like that apocryphal line attributed to Michelangelo, that he simply carved away everything that didn’t look like David, mining is a subtractive mode of sculpture: everything that doesn’t look like money is cut away as overburden. Only through a trick of the eye could one look upon a landscape—whether forest or farmland, muskeg or mountain, prairie or permafrost—and see it all as overburden.

The implications of overburden in a broader, metaphorical sense are not difficult to grasp: overburden is the everything-else that stands in the way of resource extraction. In ecological terms, paydirt is the enemy of topsoil and groundwater; when the paydirt is fossil fuels, it’s the enemy of atmosphere and oceans too. But the implications are broader still. Mary Louise Pratt reminds us that even as the improving eye sketches a future prospect, it empties out an extant landscape and lifeworld that is already “lived as intensely humanized, saturated with local history and meaning, where plants, creatures, and geographical formations have names, uses, symbolic functions, histories, places in indigenous knowledge formations” (61). Pratt’s subject is the European colonial encounter, but her account of an intensely inhabited landscape placed under improving erasure can describe any place under threat of being under-mined.

This is, I think, what Warren Cariou has in mind with regard to Alberta oil sands (or tar sands) extraction in his allegorical tale of Tarhands, who “rose up out of a swamp with a nation on his back.” The people, who had wakened Tarhands and knew he was hungry, “shoveled all kinds of everything at him: trucks, roads, steam, pipes, trains, muskeg, lives, methamphetamines, rivers, pastahowin, laws, futures. He ate as fast as they could shovel, and sometimes he was almost satisfied” (18). In Cariou’s dark rendering of the upheavals underway in northern Alberta, overburden is both the “all kinds of everything” that goes into the insatiable maw of mining, and the pressure that this everything exerts: the burden of carrying on your back a whole nation whose dream of development has been staked (once again) on resource extraction.¹ In Alberta, recent technological innovations like steam injection are being used to extract bitumen from oil sands with a much smaller surface footprint than the usual (albeit, in oil industry terms, unconventional) practice of open pit mining, which Naomi Klein has described as a “terrestrial skinning” in which “vast, vivid landscapes are being gutted, left monochromatic gray.” In Klein’s metaphor, what the industry sees as overburden is the earth’s skin, which, when intact and healthy, is a vibrant shade of green. Steam-assisted gravity drainage, as the industry calls it, would seemingly reduce the scope of what is deemed overburden in the technical sense, thereby minimizing this flaying of the earth. In a broader sense, however, and given the links among fossil fuels, climate change, and the increased risk of massive wildfire, it’s hard not to see the fires of 2016 that ravaged northern Alberta and Fort McMurray—the epicenter of the oil sands industry—as a kind of aftermath, in the literal sense of a second harvest (or, following Klein’s skin metaphor, a debridement). Everything that extraction had spared (what boreal forests and muskeg that remained “untouched”) and everything it had built (boomtown neighborhoods and the promise of a better life) were revealed to have been overburden after all. The spectacle of monstrous flames in the rearview mirrors of fleeing Albertans and transient oil workers are perhaps a 21^st century counterpart to the monstrous dust clouds the Okies fled nearly a century earlier.

Read most broadly, overburden offers another way of understanding the costs of a resource logic taken to its furthest conclusion. Overburden is distinct from mine tailings, the often toxic residue (i.e. waste product) that remains after the ore has been extracted. Overburden is perfectly good stuff that just happened to be in the way: Mary Douglas’s dirt in the way of paydirt. It is, in other words, closer to waste in Locke’s originary sense of the beckoning origin of accumulation. As critics including Teresa Brennan, Fernando Coronil, David Harvey, Leerom Medovoi, and Rob Nixon as well as the contributors to this special issue have shown, capitalist accumulation reduces both humans and nonhuman nature to “resources” whose value is calculated solely in economic (or latterly, biopolitical) terms. If neoliberalism is understood as having largely dispensed with the promise of improvement as a social good (rather than a strictly individual project with individual benefits), then we might say that the very things that the logic of improvement and enclosure once promised as ends—civilization, civil society, the state, the commonwealth as a social compact to protect citizens and their property—now appear as an intolerable commons, an unproductive waste (in Locke’s originary sense) in need of privatization, resource capture, and profit-stripping. It’s all overburden.²

Once upon a time, Marx told us of that “bewitched, distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things” (969). In the upside-down world of overburden, Monsieur le Capital is at the controls of a gargantuan earthmover, scooping up in its maw Madame la Terre and “all kinds of everything” and dumping it upside-down (Cariou 18). As with the tricks of vision at work in the commodity fetish, to see the earth as overburden requires a kind of X-ray vision whose image renders negative everything but profit.

The aesthetic of overburden is the inverse of improvement: improvement turned upside-down and inside-out.

Overburden is us.

Footnotes

1. Canada is perhaps the exception that proves the rule that James Ferguson observes about the contemporary divergence between the developmentalism of “‘seeing like a state’” (in James Scott’s formulation) and the extractivism of “seeing like an oil company”: oil extraction in twenty-first century Africa, Ferguson tells us, occurs largely in “secured enclaves, often with little or no benefit to the wider society.” Such enclaves separate the multinationals not least from “the follies of planned improvement by states” (377–78).

2. Indeed, note the language of excavation in Christophe Clapham’s account of the fate of African states under neoliberal globalization in Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival (1996): “Deprived of both capable staff and economic resources, states quickly became ‘hollowed out’” (qtd. in Ferguson 379).

Works Cited

• Cariou, Warren. “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto.” Imaginations 3.2 (2012): 17-34. Web. 25 Oct. 2016.
• Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Print.
• Columbus, Christopher. “Journal of the First Voyage to America, 1492-1493.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 117-123. Print.
• Ferguson, James. “Seeing like an Oil Company: Space, Security, and Global Capital in Neoliberal Africa.” American Anthropologist 107.3 (2005): 377-82. Web. 25 Oct. 2016.
• Ince, Onur Ulas. “Enclosing in God’s Name, Accumulating for Mankind: Money, Morality, and Accumulation in John Locke’s Theory of Property.” The Review of Politics 73 (Winter 2011): 29-54. Web. 25 Oct. 2016.
• Klein, Naomi. “Addicted to Risk.” 8 Dec. 2010. Talk.
• Locke, John. The Second Treatise on Civil Government. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1986. Print.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 3. Trans. David Fernbach. New York: Penguin, 1991. Print.
• Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.
• Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
• Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973. Print.