A Boring berm of dirt

Sadira Rodrigues + M. Simon Levin, 2020

At TRIUMF, Canada’s famed particle accelerator centre, rests a berm of soil held back by a brick retaining wall. Located between the laboratories – ARIEL[i] and ISAC 1[ii], and the Main Accelerator Building, the berm is home to four Western White Pine trees, numerous sword-ferns, cedar bushes and junipers. Planted sometime in the early 1970s, the same time as the construction of the Main Accelerator Building, it is a non-descript landscape feature, one that you might pass without notice in order to enter the Accelerator Building. On a day we visited to look at it further, we were stopped by staff wondering what could be so interesting about a “boring berm of dirt” (to borrow from a passing comment).[iii]

My curiosity about the berm was the result of six months of conversations with my group of collaborators brought together through the Leaning Out Of Windows project. Three artists, a physicist, and myself as a scholar were asked to consider how the prompt of emergence might provoke ideas and possible new works. My collaborators and I spent time troubling the word, never landing on an agreement of what it might mean and slipping well past any clear connection of how it might be taken up in physics. Our physicist-collaborator’s skepticism of the term’s application to his field may have set the tone for our collective rejection of any stable meaning – instead we seemed to each land on the term from the habitus of our own thinking.

e·mer·gence (a process) of coming into view or becoming exposed after being concealed | of coming into being, or of becoming important or prominent | when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own

My own thinking and writing has recently been contaminated by the rich and complex metaphors emerging from considering the limits and effects of the Anthropocene.[iv] I have begun to explore how an ecology of practices can trouble systemic and institutional ways of thinking and being. In particular, if the Anthropocene lays bare the continuity between resource extraction and contemporary capital, as manifested in the land, then land of all forms should be critical texts in progress. Isabelle Stengers’ ideas have greatly helped me think more specifically about unsettling the (institutional) practice of physics: “Physics as a practice is in dire need of a new habitat, since from its birth as the first so-called ‘modern science’ its claims were entangled with its historical ‘habitat’.” For Stengers, there is no identity of practice that is independent of its environment.[v] What is at stake in this form of thinking is the desire to trouble the habits and habitus that inform the very forms of our thinking, and to situate the troubling from within its environment.

On my visits to TRIUMF to try and vector my own relationship to the LOOW project and its prompt of emergence, I found myself increasingly drawn to the one of the only natural environments in the facility. While the Meson Hall[vi], with its scale, palette and materials is undoubtedly stimulating, it is an entirely artificial one; its sounds, smells and atmosphere almost cruel, and inhumane. Although the tours of the facility were incredibly interesting and informative, the environment was so inhospitable to my body that I found myself wanting to return to the space between the two buildings, and to touch this berm and remind myself of the kinder materiality of soil and plants. I wondered what could come of focusing curiosity onto this berm, an unremarkable, oversized planting bed that is a feature commonly found throughout the landscaping of the University. How could this berm and the particular things held within it, present an emergent knowledge about this place and the practices held within?

Berms, Soil and Radiation Shielding

A berm is a landscape feature both naturally formed and man-made. I use the description of berm to describe this form, perhaps because it seems a little more elegant than an oversized planter (and because of the passing staff comment). A berm is a level space, shelf, or raised barrier (usually made of compacted soil) separating two areas and used for its defensive attributes. Its varied uses include:

At TRIUMF, this berm is as intentionally placed as each of the concrete barriers used in the mitigation of radiation inside the Meson Hall. An early photograph of the preparation of the site show the form of the berm as part of the overall design of the facility. The berm also hides the only escape hatch from the bowels of the accelerator. In the event of a catastrophe, escape is through a series of angled passageways – designed to bounce radiation particles to interrupt their advancement – ultimately leading to a completely non-descript hatch covered by a shed-like structure in odd contrast to the technologically advanced environment surrounding it. It is almost an after-thought, mundane in its design, its aesthetic drawn from rudimentary structures one might find in a survivalist guide. Moreover, in researching for this text, most of the information about soil and its uses in radiation mitigation was found in detailed descriptions of how to build a bunker in order to survive a nuclear fallout. The other curious repository of texts centred on ways that dirt on Mars and the Moon might provide a means of building shielding to support settlement development.[vii]

After attempting to ask more about the berm, I was fortuitously connected to Doug Preddy, the beamlines group leader at the facility, who is responsible for the overall management of the accelerator’s operations, and whose generosity in sharing helped shaped this text. Deep below the berm is the heart of the TRIUMF facility – the cyclotron[viii] – with its circular shape constrained by the rectangular boundaries of the building housing it. Inside the building, to protect from the radiation produced by the cyclotron, are 5 stories of layers of lead, steel and concrete. And where the shape of the cyclotron nears the boundaries of the building and the open environment, soil is used to build up an additional shield. Doug spends three months a year overseeing the placement and replacement of the concrete barriers inside the Meson Hall. (Figure 4). It is a task that requires the removal of all of the blocks, the recalculation of their shielding capacities, and a reconfiguration of them to maximise their use before the blocks are retired. For him, calculating the radiation shielding necessary for the experiments to run with minimal human and environmental harm means understanding the specific properties of materials. He explained the intricacies of materials deployed in radiation mitigation – lead and steel being the most useful in creating a barrier against the particles, while materials such as concrete and soil provide additional obstructive qualities[ix]. Doug, who has been at the facility since the 1980s, understands intimately why this berm exists – soil is one of the cheapest materials that can be used in radiation mitigation. Doug’s need to balance between a material’s shielding properties and its attendant cost became an interesting theme of our tour of the facility. From the visit into the new beam tunnels and their reused steel walls, to the patches of steel that were added to increase shielding thickness while adding minimal cost, Doug presented a complex approach to balancing safety with fiscal ingenuity.

Site Note: Much of the concrete used at TRIUMF originates from Texada Island – known for having higher iron content which is useful in providing additional barrier protection.

Not all radiation is bad. In fact, there are many forms of naturally occurring radiation. The sun and stars send a constant stream of cosmic radiation, the Earth itself is a source with radioactive materials (uranium, thorium and radium) naturally occurring in rock and soil, and we ourselves have internal radiation mainly from radioactive potassium-40 and carbon-14. But I wondered what happens to soil when it has been exposed to radioactive activities in the facility for such a long time. As it turns out, there are no measurements taken of the soil, for the simple fact that “most people/fauna don’t eat dirt”. An email from Max Kinakin, the Associate Health Physicist in the Radiation Protection Group[x] clarified this.

“TRIUMF doesn’t really do soil samples, we do vegetation samples as that’s more of interest from a radiation protection standpoint, given most people/fauna don’t eat dirt. We sample vegetation at all 8 cardinal points outside the site perimeter fence, in addition to 3 more samples taken NW, N, & NE of site ~150m away to see if anything’s blown north towards our neighbors. We typically see very low concentrations of Be-7, however we’re very confident that this is ‘naturally’ occurring based on interactions with cosmic rays that make their way down here, interact with carbon atoms in the plants to produce Be-7. Of interest is a very tiny, almost unmeasurable amount of Cs-137, which is of course not produced at TRIUMF, but rather is a relic of atmospheric weapons testing and the Chernobyl incident. Its kind of crazy that we can still see traces of anthropomorphic radionuclides that were produced 30-70 years ago. The levels of Cs-137 are on the order of 10^-5 Bq/kg – meaning that if you ate 100kg of grass from around site, you might ingest a single Bq of Cs-137 activity, which would lead to a ‘dose’ of roughly 0.1nSv – annual natural background is on the order of 1-2mSv/y, meaning if you were actually able to consume 100kg of grass, you’d be contributing < 1 part in a million to your normal background dose – really unmeasurable!”[xi]

At TRIUMF, soil becomes a potential marker of multiple radio-activities, both local and elsewhere. With the material relics of atmospheric weapons testing and the Chernobyl incident combined into the residues of thousands of local experiments, it has the potential to collapse how we think about time and space. The soil in the berm has also not been changed since it was first planted in the 1970s. It has been continuously present through fifty years of experiments, the size of the plants above it testament to how much time had passed. In this way, the soil in the berm is an assemblage – where past, present and to come collaborate and collide.

Wayward Pines

There is no clear evidence that the massive Western White Pine trees that dominate the berm were intentionally planted. We speculated on whether an intrepid early researcher felt nostalgia for a certain landscape of their past, or perhaps there was a sale at the botanical gardens, or that someone brought them from home as a gift to the facility. While the possibilities seem endless as to why these trees were planted there, no one I spoke to seemed to know any specifics. But this not knowing is never a reason to stop being curious – after all, it was these trees that first drew my attention – their lush presence a stark contrast to the rest of the facility. It turns out that White Pines – whether intentionally planted or not – are a good choice for their ability to filter and purify toxic soil and water. The Western White Pine is a species of pine that occurs in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, the Cascade Range, the Coast Range, and the northern Rocky Mountains. They are a large species, growing upwards of 200 ft and living up-to 1000 years. One of the oldest living organisms is the Methuselah, a 4,851-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine in eastern California, recognised as the tree with the greatest confirmed age on earth.

The pine tree is intertwined with our daily existence, its ubiquity making it almost invisible.

Pines are magic to many cultures around the world. This was first brought to my attention by a dear friend, a gardener of Finnish heritage who joined me for one of my walks around TRIUMF. I invited her, as I often prefer to think with others whose knowledge expands my own, bringing forward questions and observances that wouldn’t otherwise emerge. For her the pine loomed large in family lore and cultural traditions – from the saunas they built to bathe in, to the pines planted outside to filter the water of the soaps used. For many indigenous cultures, pines are also symbolically and ceremonially important trees[xii]. Pine pitch and bark continue to be used as medicine, and pine nuts are an important food source, particularly in California and the Southwest – the dense nutrition of the nut meant it was as significant to the people of the Great Basin as the buffalo was to the plains people. Pine needles are also used in some traditional basketry, stripped and processed in a similar manner to cedar. And for the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), on whose territory the TRIUMF facility is located, the pine mushroom that grows adjacent to pine and other coniferous trees, was a part of their annual food collection, prized for its flavour. Curiously in the berm, perhaps the result of irrigation, mushrooms of any kind seemed scarce.

In this berm, the pines with their height, vigorous foliage, healthy cones and thick underbrush seem to exemplify the vitality of the species, towering well over the buildings in the facility with no sign of stopping. They seemed to flourish in the irradiated soil. They have created a canopy that has supported cedar trees to emerge, sword-ferns to be protected and squirrels to seek refuge. And while this berm will in no way ever be more than an industrial scale garden container – could it reveal the possible ways that we could protect future tree species through controlled radiation intervention? After all, atomic gardening – the practice of plant irradiation – had emerged in the 1950s as part of the movement to develop peaceful uses for fission energy. Typically, through the use of cobalt-60 as the radioactive source, atomic gardening led to the development of more than two thousand new plant varieties, many which are used in agricultural production today. The most famous example is the Rio Star Grapefruit, a mutant species that was bred with radioactive modification, and today accounts for more than 75% of all grapefruits grown in Texas. Japan’s Institute of Radiation Breeding continues to research modern-techniques for atomic gardening today, almost all dedicated to strengthening food and agricultural production.

Radiation Bred

Rice, wheat, barley, pears, peas, cotton, peppermint, sunflowers, peanuts, grapefruit, sesame, bananas, cassava and sorghum.[xiii]

Could there be accidental evidence of the potential uses of radiation intervention in forest restoration here at TRIUMF? As I write this, the Western Red Cedar dies off as drought conditions extend from the result of climate crises, and there are predictions that the pine and firs trees will begin to equally manifest the stress of a rapidly heating environment. It has the potential to transform our relationship with the tree, as eating irradiated pine nuts may not sound appealing; although we seem to have no problem with the peas, bananas and other produce whose existence is a result of interventions. For now, researching radiation and forests seems limited to information about the condition around Chernobyl following the 1986 nuclear disaster – trees grow slower as do the creatures that feed on them and their decay. Might TRIUMF’s irradiated soil give us a glimpse into future interventions as we begin to grasp at ways to save the trees and forests dying around us?

From Soil to Dirt

Soil (etymology): "to defile or pollute with sin," from Old French soillier "to splatter with mud, to foul or make dirty," originally "to wallow" (12c., Modern French souillier), from souil "tub, wild boar's wallow, pigsty," which is from either Latin solium "tub for bathing; seat" (from PIE *sodio-"seat," from root *sed- "to sit") or Latin suculus "little pig," from sus "pig." Literal meaning "to make dirty, begrime" is attested from c. 1300 in English.

It takes thousands of years to regenerate 3 centimeters of topsoil.

Throughout this text I have used the terms dirt and soil interchangeably. Yet I am compelled to ask what is at stake in naming something dirt not soil? What are the properties of dirt that deviate from those of soil? Soil is an organic, living, breathing life-force rich with worms, fungi, insects, bacteria, and other matter. Soil supports life. It is a complete, self-sustaining ecosystem. When displaced, according to the Soil Society of America, soil becomes dirt. Dirt is displaced soil – after a landslide, the earth that moves becomes transformed into dirt. Dirt is dead, it is seen as unable to sustain life. It is characterised by terms such as void and unbeneficial. By casting dirt as useless, does it allow us to treat it as an extractable and transformable resource without any consideration for the other-than-humans inhabiting it? Are we able to assign microbes and bacteria the same more-than-human attributes we seem increasingly attuned to? A recent conversation between Anna Tsing and Rosetta Elkin attends to this matter. Proposing the rhizosphere as a space of interspecies sociology, Tsing says: “[t]he nuances of these different interactions are exactly what is at stake in design fields that rely on industrial processes that objectify plants as units. They completely ignore that the rhizosphere is a busy social space and instead treat the soil as an inert medium or a physical support in which to insert the “tree object.”[xiv] While the story of subordinating plants to industrial production is well known, what happens when something ordinary – a boring berm or an unsightly weed – makes us look a little more closely to trouble our stable vectors of thinking?

I am grateful to this berm and the curiosities it has brought forward. This overlooked berm has become a means for me to “work the conjunctures [and] to raise unanswered research questions rather than to create boxes.”[xv] This berm transforms into a container of enquiries that open up the practices at TRIUMF in more human and tangible ways. It has revealed material connections between mineral, landforms, and the hyper-technologized experiments taking place deep underground. It makes me wonder what other natural materials are entangled with radiation, and what stories might emerge that point to the practices of physics and their new habitats? The IceCube Laboratory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in Antarctica, hosts computers that collect raw data from the sensors buried in the ice below. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is the first detector of its kind, designed to observe the cosmos from deep within the South Pole ice. Ice becomes a means to detect astrophysical events like exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars.[xvi] In November 2013 it was announced that IceCube had detected 28 neutrinos that likely originated outside the Solar System.[xvii] What kinds of stories might emerge from an encounter with this ice, its histories, its more than human inhabitants, and the practices of science that intersect with it? In the end, “[w]e need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.”[xviii] This boring berm of dirt is both small enough to wrap my curiosity around and through it, while opening up new troubles that I am planning to stay with.

This text was developed for the Leaning Out of Windows Project. More information can be found here: http://leaningoutofwindows.org. Thank you to the organisers for inviting us in.

[i] The Advanced Rare Isotope Laboratory (ARIEL) is TRIUMF's multidisciplinary research facility

[ii] The TRIUMF Isotope Separator and Accelerator (ISAC) facility uses the isotope separation on-line (ISOL) technique to produce rare-isotope beams (RIB).

[iii] On this day, the walk included a friend and landscaper Randi-Lee Taylor, artist M. Simon Levin, and my physicist-collaborator Ewan Hill.

[iv] And the hauntings of the Plantationocene, the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene. Donna Haraway “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” in Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015, pp. 159-165 www.environmentalhumanities.org

[v]Isabelle Stengers “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices” p183/84

[vi] The Meson Hall is the area where experiments are conducted primarily concerned with studying advanced materials and chemistry under extreme conditions using, as one example, muon beams

[vii] At the Microgravity Materials Science Conference held July 14-16, 1998 at the Von Braun Center in Huntsville, AL a small group of scientists discussed how to use materials in space to make space exploration safer.

[viii] The bulk of the research at TRIUMF relies on the use of its primary accelerator, a cyclotron measuring 18 metres across, the largest of its kind in the world. It is from the shape of this accelerator that the center gets its lollipop-like logo, since the six sectors of its enormous magnet have a distinct swirly shape.

[ix] To create the same level of radiation mitigation, the following materials would be used in their indicated thickness: 0.8” lead = 1.2” steel = 3.9” concrete = 5.5” soil = 11.8” wood. “There are many different variables that must be accounted for when designing a shielding system for a particular experiment, but, according to Doug Preddy, two of the most important are the specific kind of radiation and the energy levels involved. For example, you can effectively shield against alpha radiation — which has a relatively low energy level — with only a few inches of air. To protect against x-rays, the few millimeters of lead in the aprons most of us are familiar with is sufficient. When you start dealing with gamma and neutron radiation (which have higher associated energies), however, effective shielding quickly becomes a much more involved process. For shielding against gamma radiation, simple concrete is TRIUMF’s source of protection. When the main cyclotron is running, well over 2,000 tons of yellow concrete blocks stacked nine layers deep encase the beam lines as well as the experimental targets where radiation is generated during the collisions between particles.” https://www.ubyssey.ca/science/triumf-concrete-against-gamma-radiation/

[x] Radiation Protection Group - The RPG has a broad range of responsibilities related to radiation safety, emissions and environmental monitoring, and radioactive materials handling. These responsibilities include: monitoring radiological conditions and maintaining practices to ensure a safe workplace for personnel; providing training in radiation safety to TRIUMF workers; monitoring and characterizing emissions to assess the environmental impact of TRIUMF Operations; and managing radioactive materials including radioactive sources, activated accelerator components and radioactive waste.

[xi] Max Kinakin email to Ewan Hill, (note that underlines and italics and paragraph spacings are my intervention into the email)

[xii] A symbol of longevity to the Algonquian, the Anishinaabe and the Potawatomi, pine trees also represent wisdom and harmony with nature. The Iroquois saw the pine tree as a symbol of peace, and burned pine wood as an incense to pacify ghosts and banish nightmares. Among tribes of the Great Basin and Plateau, pine trees were often associated with rain, and pine cones or wood were burned in hopes of changing the weather to be more favorable. In the Southwest, the pinion pine is considered sacred by some; its sweet-smelling wood is burned as incense, and its pine gum is used as protection against witchcraft. http://www.pinenut.com/pinon-pinyon-history/value-nevada-forests.shtml

[xiii] “Useful Mutants, Bred With Radiation” https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/science/28crop.html

[xiv] Anna Tsing and Rosetta S. Elkin “The Politics of the Rhizosphere” http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/45/the-politics-of-the-rhizosphere

[xv] Anna Tsing “The Life of the Forest” The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press, 2015; p163

[xvi] “Encompassing a cubic kilometer of ice, IceCube searches for nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos. These high-energy astronomical messengers provide information to probe the most violent astrophysical sources: events like exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars.” https://icecube.wisc.edu/about/overview

[xvii] IceCube Collaboration (2013). "Evidence for High-Energy Extraterrestrial Neutrinos at the IceCube Detector". Science Journal

[xviii] Donna Haraway “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” in Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015, pp. 160 retrieved from:www.environmentalhumanities.org

Click an image to expand: