The Legacy of American Copper Smelting: Industrial Heritage versus Environmental Policy

Introduction

Introduction Essential for social identity and collective purpose, heritage enriches us through remembered precursors and prospective heirs. But these enduring benefits blind us to a mounting backlash. Age-old aversion toward husbanding the past today grows more virulent. Nature conservation arouses similar hostility, but animus against heritage is harder to counter. Environmentalists can threaten global extinction; heritage advocates warn merely of lower quality of life. To many that seems a lesser, even a negligible threat.1 —David Lowenthal, 2000 In its simplest form, this is a heritage study. It examines the debates about which things a community should save, how the final decisions are influenced and negotiated, and what, if anything, should ultimately be remembered about the past. These are not simple or uncontested questions because the significance of past events and historical materials are not universally appreciated. This book uses a specific genre, industrial heritage, and the complicated perceptions of value in an often disheveled and blighted landscape to explore these questions. Industrial heritage poses challenges that other types of heritage do not. In terms of merely conserving industrial structures, complications of process interpretation and structural deterioration exist in forms and scales that simply do not affect historic house museums or century farms. Further, industrial sites can encompass entire landscapes, which because of increasingly complex and historically significant operations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often include some contaminant or hazardous Introduction xvi waste threat to human health or the environment. All of these conditions tend to complicate the historic industrial setting, leaving a tangled legacy in need of both commemoration and remediation. This book will explore how heritage-minded groups living in historic industrial communities and wishing to commemorate their past and preserve their historic resources, articulate and negotiate that desire in the face of sometimes overwhelming opposition. In the cases studied here, protracted opposition will arise from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a well-funded outside federal organization whose mission is to protect human heath and the environment. The EPA, aiming squarely at remediating the waste streams emanating from the landscapes containing those very same historic resources, can at times view heritage preservation as an obstacle to the most efficient remediation—a viewpoint often endorsed by development-oriented community groups. Peter Howard defines heritage broadly, as anything—including material objects, ideas, customs, and practices—that anyone wants to save or remember for any reason.2 But not all heritage can or should ultimately be preserved especially with the limited funds available to preservationists. To ensure that funds are applied most appropriately, heritage standards and practices dictate that preservation decisions be initially qualified by the relative importance, or cultural significance, of the object, idea, custom, or practice to the community desiring to save it. The Burra Charter, drafted by Australia ICOMOS, defines cultural significance as the “aesthetic, scientific, social, or spiritual value for past or future generations . . . embodied in the place itself, its fabric, setting, use, associations, meanings, records, related places and related objects.”3 Although these definitions are necessarily broad, for the purpose of this study, heritage is simply reflected in the recognition that historical events represented by surviving material culture have helped shape the present, and that those material things and events that have the most significance, relevance, and integrity are worthy of remembrance and some sort of commemoration, documentation, or preservation irrespective of the environmental conditions in which they may reside. The ultimate decisions about what to commemorate, document, or preserve, however, are neither simple nor straightforward. Where historic evidence defines the age, function, and associations of historic resources, Introduction xvii and scientific evidence defines the existence of hazards within a landscape, opinions and values often affect and influence both preservation and remediation decisions. Historians and sociologists have demonstrated that the resolution of technical problems is not a linear process predetermined by its solution but rather a process negotiated and contested by divergent groups without predictable outcomes.4 This conclusion does not imply that sides are not drawn with some groups strongly favoring one solution over another, but that final work plans are—or can be—significantly influenced through a negotiated political process and that there is never only one course of action to solve a technical problem. Articulating a clear position, however, can have its challenges. The terms significance and relevance are subjective in a heritage context, often enumerated by associated values to specific groups at certain times. Contamination , too...