Toxic Contamination and Land-Body Relations: Storytelling, Metaphor, and Topoi at the Former Badger Army Ammunition Plant

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe former Badger Army Ammunition Plant in rural southern Wisconsin has long been a landscape mired in settler colonial and industrial attempts to sever social and cultural relations between land and bodies. After the plant was decommissioned, the community decided it should be ecologically restored given the landscape’s legacy of harm. Through inter views with 17 local stakeholders and storytellers, this essay reveals how toxic containment as both metaphor and topoi, grounded in the materiality of toxins, brings visibility to the landscape’s history while at the same time providing a model of local resistance. For those in the Badger landscape, metaphor and topoi lead to personal and social actions that support culturally conscious relationship building with a direct impact on the scientific restoration process. Ultimately, this essay argues that how stories shape spatial experiences matters, especially given the way communities are guided by the metaphor-turned-topoi process.KEYWORDS: Environmental rhetoricmetaphorspatial rhetorictopoitoxic AcknowledgmentsI thank Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Morris Young, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback in developing this project.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Locals widely refer to the plant’s footprint as “Badger”; however, there is a developing effort to call it by its Ho-Chunk name, Mąą Wakącąk (Maa-wa-kun-chunk), which means “Sacred Earth.”2 “Re-story-ation” is a term theorized by ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan (p. 4) and Potawatomi and environmental biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer (p. 9) to represent the need for ecological restoration to better account for the relationships between landscapes and people. Stories play a central role in bridging scientific and cultural perspectives.3 The committee was biased in favor of US governmental officials while the remaining seats were distributed between cultural and advocacy groups. Although I hoped to include more Ho-Chunk participants than the original committee (one seat), I was only able to interview two storytellers given limitations related to funding, time, and COVID-19.4 Industrial solvents from a deterrent burning ground plume of toxins discharge to Weigand’s Bay, which connects to Lake Wisconsin and the Wisconsin River.5 Documented health complaints by workers at the plant included headaches and chest pains due to nitroglycerin exposure, as well as cancer deaths (Citizens for Safe Water; Gould).6 Community Conservation Coalition for the Sauk Prairie.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as well as the Department of English, The Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center, and the Center for Culture, History, and Environment, all of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.