Mathilde Braddock leads a “Hidden Wastes walkshop” for participants in the Wasting Time workshop 1.
A “walkshop” around campus
To kick off our Wasting Time project, we ran a “walkshop” called Hidden Wastes in the Anthropocene, co-designed by me, Mathilde Braddock, founder of Steps in Stone, and Claire Corkhill, Professor of Mineralogy and Radioactive Waste Management.
Researchers from across science and humanities disciplines, our museum partners, and interested parties from outside the university participated in a creative walk near campus on the topic of ‘hidden wastes’ – in particular hospital radioactive waste – as a rarely considered example of waste in the Anthropocene. In our walking exploration, we aimed to place the Anthropocene in its geological, historical and social contexts, and encourage innovative ways of making links between these different perspectives.
Claire Corkhill explains the different rates of nuclear waste decay to our interdisciplinary groups of participants.
Bringing my experience as a creative walking practitioner, my aim was to design a walk which contextualised the big themes of our project (time, waste, the Anthropocene, futures) and situated them outside of the classroom in our immediate local environment. As a project team, we wanted to explore if this contextualisation enabled new connections to be made, and new ideas to emerge.
During the walk, it was satisfying to overhear participants’ animated conversations. It seemed that the walk and subsequent discussions enabled participants to interact with familiar material – both the physical materiality of the city they pass through every day, and the intangible concepts of their academic research and work – in a reinvigorated way.
Participant notes from workshop discussion. Photo by Sam LeButt
Walking into the future
We chose the theme of radioactive waste for our walkshop because it provided a bridge between the multiple temporalities of the Anthropocene: linking our immediate human history with the long view of geological time (decay over thousands and millions of years). To bring these contrasting temporalities into greater focus, we ended the walk with a creative exercise where we “paced out” the decay of radioactive waste into the future.
We used the example of technitium-99, a radioactive isotope created in nuclear reactors which has a half-life of 200,000 years. This means that every 200,000 years, half of the technetium-99 decays into the more stable atom ruthenium-99, until eventually all the technetium-99 becomes ruthenium-99.
By assigning a spatial reference to the half-life of technitium-99 and pacing it out, we aimed to give participants an embodied sense of the timescales of this gradual decay. For the purpose of our exercise, we imagined that each pace walked represented 10,000 years. So by walking 20 paces, we travelled 200,000 years through time, or one time technitium-99’s half-life.
We started our exercise 200,000 years before the present day and walked 20 paces through Bristol’s most recent past – through two ice ages and interglacial periods, and the migration of human and more-than-human species to and from these lands. This gave participants a sense of how much a familiar environment can change over the course of 200,000 years.
Once we arrived “back in the present”, we asked the group to imagine they were a group of technetium-99 atoms created in a nuclear reactor. How long / far would it take for this technetium to decay? As the group walked on and paced out the future, they mimicked radioactive decay by reducing the group size by half each time the 200,000 years mark was reached (every 20 paces).
Sketch of the concept of our Technitium-99 Decay walk.
At each 200,000 years milestone, we invited participants to imagine what the world might look like. It was remarkable how quickly humans disappeared, and how soon our world evolved into “giant fungi” and “intelligent ocean civilisations, ruled by dolphin-people” (see pages 9-10 of our zine)… When looking 200,000 to 1 million years into the future – which happens to be how long we need to safely store the most hazardous radioactive waste from nuclear energy generation – fantasy and wild imagination kicks in pretty fast.
Participants pace out the decay of technitium-99 on campus, stopping each 20 paces to imagine future worlds.
Reflections
What purpose did this exercise serve? Did projecting ourselves 1 million years into the future help us engage differently with the realities we face today? Many of the responses from participant during the discussion part of the walkshop centred on the themes of perception and sight, demonstrating perhaps that the creative methods used helped make ideas that often feel detached or theoretical more visible and within reach:
Overall, it was felt that bringing examples of Anthropocene realities into focus in the everyday world around us, as well as projecting ourselves into our futures, helped us to get a sense of its shape and scale, even if only fleetingly. Might creative approaches such as these help us confront the scale and challenges of the Anthropocene in a deeper and more meaningful way?
Next steps
Having led this walk for interested researchers, practitioners and students, we are curious to see how the interdisciplinary elements of this approach could be explored further. For example, could a walk between History and Earth Sciences students enrich each other’s understanding of Anthropocene issues?
There are many other research areas we would like to involve in future collaborations, in particular futures studies and creative arts, to expand our exploration of the role of imagination and creativity in exploring the Anthropocene.
The walkshop was also a demonstration of how our immediate environment helps situate and connect our research. By involving our urban and anthropo-scenic world in our academic explorations, can we foster research which is more suited to addressing the complex and pressing questions of our time?
We would like to explore further the potential of such tools and methods as we used in our walkshop, and throughout the Wasting Time project, for engaging audiences with challenging and intangible concepts such as nuclear wastes and our uncertain futures.