The Multiscalar Worlds of Remediation: Sitting Halfway Down a Meandering Path

This hybrid environmental creative nonfiction invites the reader to consider a small, contaminated patch of land tucked inside an industrial neighborhood in Montréal (Tiohtià:ke). By exploring the multiscalar geographies and histories of this site—now a municipal phytoremediation testbed—I seek to reframe the notion of remediation against the extractive and colonial logics that underpin Western technoscientific imaginaries and practices of healing. Thus, I will address the “pluriverse” as a coalescing of multiple and incommensurable scales of living and non-living, political and affective, and social and economic processes that define a seemingly desolate urban wasteland (Povinelli 2016). Through photography and repeated visits, I consider ancient Carboniferous worlds and persistent toxicants (Hird 2013); Suncor refineries and a neighborhood; soil (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015), trees, bacteria (Hird and Yusoff 2019), and those who inhabit and continue to care for this place.