From 14th to 17th May 2024, the waste in motion network held its 3rd workshop entitled ”Planning for Uncertain Waste Futures: Exploring Practices of Care, Control, and Disposal in ‘Hinterland’ Regions” at Seminarhof Drawehn (link: https://seminarhof-drawehn.de) in Wendland.
The effects of waste disposal and pollution are generally uncertain and unpredictable. Whether and what consequences environmental pollution might generate in the future is in a constant state of becoming, and the surrounding uncertainties are further distributed highly unequally in a postcolonial world. Diverse strategies how to ‘handle’ or ‘deal with’ waste – caring for living and abiotic ‘others’, controlling and managing risk, linear disposal as burying/burning – open pathways to multiple waste futures that are imagined and gradually formed with every interaction. The workshop aimed to contribute to chartering a course, from waste disposal to caring for waste differently and cooperatively, in the Anthropocene Age.
The meeting was situated in the Wendland, a sandy geest and heathland landscape in the Elbe’s primeval river basin. Until 1990, the Wendland was a so-called “Zonenrandgebiet” [zonal border area]. In the 1970s, this hinterland was chosen for the construction of an interim storage facility for nuclear fuel elements in Gorleben, whereupon decades of protests against nuclear power left their mark on this region. During a fieldtrip to the contested ‘waste space’ surrounding this area, Wolfgang Ehmke of the Citizens’ Initiative Lüchow-Dannenberg (link: https://www.bi-luechow-dannenberg.de) shared stories from this eventually successful protest movement (see pictures).
On a walking seminar led by affiliate member Tridibesh Dey, novel methodological ways of engaging with meshworks of waste in space were tried out and shared, and guest speaker Sandra Jasper offered some fresh insights from ongoing fieldwork about nitrogen pollution at Mar Menor in the South of Spain. Last but not least, a visit to DJ Laufi’s cassette disco at Kulturelle Landpartie (link: https://www.kulturelle-landpartie.de/) rounded up the program!