
Photo of the Berkeley Pit by Don Ankney
Some people have been asking me how I could call a lake so polluted it kills swans a romantic getaway. And am I serious about visiting these ecodisaster sites, or was the article a joke?
Yes and no. The story was a satire on the style of ecotourism destination roundups, but all of these places are totally worth visiting. Each one is like a historical monument that tells us how we came to be the country we are — the miners of Butte, for example, dug that big hole in the ground so we could make copper electrical wires and light our cities.
Each one is also a great place to go and ‘be with nature’. We tend to think of nature as some other place away from the cities and away from civilization, but, as Jenny Price pointed out in her great Believer piece about finding nature in LA, by doing that we ignore the natural world around us and, crucially, our role in shaping it.
So! My prescription for a romantic Superfund encounter: Stand at the edge of the Berkeley Pit, under the ridge of the continental divide and at the edge of the Deer Lodge National Forest, and look for yourself in its red waters. You might just have one of those ‘the world is so big and I’m so small’ moments that we usually associate with mountain peaks and Niagara Falls and that make us reach for our loved ones.
Speaking of Jenny Price, tours of environmentally damaged areas that are cropping up all over the place and she’s right in the thick of it with trips to the LA River and disputed Malibu beaches over at the LA Urban Rangers. Another travel idea is the Futurefarmers’ Silicon Valley Superfund tour, which you could take on your own with the help of their interactive map (follow the Superfund map link). There are also Global Exchange’s Reality Tours and there’s a Toxic Tourism book about using site visits as an environmental advocacy tool. For more self-guided experiences of our impact on the environment, the database at the Center for Land Use Interpretation is a great resource. In August, they’re doing a bus trip to the Puente Hills Landfill in LA, which was the nation’s largest landfill in 2005! Too bad it’s all booked.
There’s more, too. You can find some gathered at the Temporary Travel Office and advice on visiting Chernobyl, plus links to the dirtiest spots in the world at the pollution tourism blog.