Disaster tourism, with all of its moral ambiguity, is an established trend in national and international travel. Sites of massacres, genocide, torture, and imprisonment are regular destinations for many around the globe. Though the visitors to places like Auschwitz, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and the World Trade Center site are motivated for diverse reasons, the locations tend to share certain characteristics. They are sites of human tragedy, memorialized by monuments, museums, and plaques. Though at times representative of incomprehensible loss, the locations themselves can be visited in a day or afternoon, photographed, pointed to. Something terrible happened there, I saw where it happened, and I will not let it happen again.
But there are different sites of disaster. These sites are not memorialized; they are not capped by flags or graves or plaques or museums. Instead of marble, they are capped with clay, cement, or patchy grass. Instead of iron fences with gates and signs, they are surrounded by padlocked chain-link.
These are ecological disasters. Many take place over decades, if not hundreds of years, and will continue beyond all of our lifetimes. They occur beneath our feet, behind our backs, and under our noses. They are, in a perverse and poisonous way, forgotten graves. Ghosts of our industrial past that will not stay buried.
How do we acknowledge, how do we memorialize a tragedy that will last ten thousand years? How do we visit a site that demands burial in order to dig up the truth? Ecological disaster tours attempt to begin to explore these questions.