In early July 2022, amid a flurry of activity with visiting family and summer travel, I found myself with a few hours alone to get out and take photos. I drove west from Missoula toward Frenchtown where the Smurfit-Stone Mill site sits on the banks of the Clark Fork River just downstream from the confluence with the Bitterroot River at Kelly’s Island.
The drama in the skies was enchanting, so I parked my car and set up my 4x5 camera. I had just enough time to set up and meter the scene before large hailstones started landing in the field behind me. I quickly exposed two sheets of film and threw my entire camera — still on the tripod with the dark cloth over it — into the back seat of my car. I sped away in a shower of golfball-sized hailstones.
I have photographed this site numerous times, but on this particular day, I was lured to stop by the dark clouds which were quickly rolling in. The 3,200-acre site was built in 1957 to produce liner-board which is used in corrugated cardboard. It is one of several toxic sites along the Clark Fork River, and in 2016 it was recommended by the EPA to the Superfund Program’s National Priorities list.
Welcome to my local environmental dystopia. I am not telling you about it to challenge you to a game of ‘who lives in the most dystopian environment’. (Though I haven’t yet shown you photographs of the thick wildfire smoke which every autumn settles for extended periods in Montana’s river valleys and makes us all wheeze and cough.) I’m not telling you about Montana’s toxic legacy to elicit your pity. I’m talking about Montana simply because it is where I am. What I’m really getting at — if you are willing to replace the specifics of my geographic experience with a few points from your own — is simply that it doesn’t matter where you live these days, you are very likely living in your own localized environmental dystopia. Industrial pollutants, plastics, toxic spills, and the release of all manner of nasty air-borne particulates are common occurrences in our busy local economies. This is in addition to the now ubiquitous global climate crisis with its floods, heat waves, mega-droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires: these horrors are the new neighbors.
As a photographer living in this strange time, it is impossible to do what I do and not focus — intentionally or otherwise — on the environment. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I want many of the images I make to encourage action on environmental problems. But often this is accomplished indirectly, or after-the-fact. What attracted me to the scene above was not the derelict industrial complex, which I had photographed before, but the turbulent storm clouds which were encroaching on the landscape. It was only later, looking at the developed image, that the correlation between the storm and the environmental narrative was fixed. At the time I took the photograph, I was far too concerned with having my camera struck by hail to consider all the possible connotations of the image I was making.
If this is all you read of this piece (yes, free subscribers are about to get cut off, because this is a long post) please think about your local environment and consider how limited a view we often have of the places where we live. It is easy in Missoula to read Norman MacLean and go tromping off in baggy fishing waders in search of an afternoon’s fly-fishing fantasy. It is unfortunately much more difficult to embrace the 150-year history of our river being used as a toxic dump. The images we carry in our minds of our environment are very powerful, but — take it from someone who spends a lot of time trying to create those images — they rarely tell the full story.
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