REMAINS

Abstract

In their books, Vibrant Matter and Waste, both Jane Bennett and Brian Thill start by listing things washed up on the shore. In the case of Bennett, the author’s collection included a worker’s glove. During the two years I have been living in Halifax, I have found plenty of discarded gloves: work gloves, winter gloves, rubber gloves. The one glove that triggered this introduction was a work glove found on a muddy trail by Otter Lake, Nova Scotia. I went there because I wanted to see how the lake was affected by the Halifax landfill, situated a mere 300 meters away. While completing the Master in Recycling and Composting Program offered by the city, I had heard that the landfill was conceived to protect the surrounding environment. I had to see that with my own eyes to believe it. I noticed when I went there that the water in the lake was clear, the rocky bottom was clean, and the trail, which was originally a road, had been reclaimed by the surrounding forest. However, on my walk, I stumbled upon discarded things like this glove, and also an abandoned rusty shopping cart, a broken fishing rod and an empty plastic vodka bottle. None of them had crawled out from the landfill by themselves. Rather, they were like waste from an overflowing trash can. As innovative as this landfill is in terms of preventing leakage into the soil and water, the preserved landscape around it is already a “wastescape”, as Brian Thill wrote, a land scarred by waste.