Steve Rowell

Dead Zones

2020-23

A film, photographic, essay*, and mapping project about the aquatic dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico and the terrestrial dead zones of government subsidized corporate farming across the colonized and transformed prairies of the “American heartland” and the devastating impact on communities of color and fragile ecosystems downstream. Critically threatened and devastated landscapes are revealed from above and below the land of the vast Mississippi River Watershed. In collaboration with Priyanka Basu.

The Gulf dead zone is an exemplary instance of the normalization of environmental violence and death in the contemporary world. This dead zone, first recorded in 1972, is the massive hypoxic area in the Gulf of Mexico caused primarily by agricultural runoff along the Mississippi River. This overflow of excess nutrients, bacteria, and other waste materials causes the wild overgrowth of sunlight-absorbing algal blooms that blanket the Gulf for miles. The resulting waste and devastation spaces grow to enormous scales, and like other types of slow violence, are difficult to grasp and represent. These directly affect communities whose voices and stories are rarely heard, in this case, from rural communities along and at the end of the polluted waters, small-scale fishermen around the Gulf, to distinctive cultural communities, including communities of color, along the Mississippi River Delta.

* Text from “Dead Zones: Fertile Wastes at the Head and Tail of the Mississippi River” by Priyanka Basu and Steve Rowell in Decapitated Economies (Berlin, K. Verlag, 2023).

Made possible with support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the MacDowell Foundation, and the Art + Technology department at the University of Florida.

Film details:
DEAD ZONES, 2023, 17 minutes, single channel video, stereo sound
Steve Rowell: director, camera, writer, editor, sound
(text adapted from “Dead Zones: Fertile Wastes at the Head and Tail of the Mississippi River” by Priyanka Basu and Steve Rowell)
World art exhibition premiere, Insurgent Ecologies group show, Antenna, New Orleans, April-May 2023

Mosaic artwork at the Henry T. Odum Center for Wetlands at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Dr. Odum (pictured here bottom left) is credited as one of the founders of modern Ecology studies. He attempted to equate the intricacies and chaos of the natural world with the ordered, predictable world of computer systems and engineering. This mosaic shows various mesocosms, outdoor experimental systems that examines the natural environment under controlled conditions, in action.

A massive earthwork of potash mine tailings waste looms above a lake of wastewater in what was a forest in Northern Florida. Nutrien Limited White Springs Complex, White Springs, Florida. Potash is a raw resource for phosphate based fertilizers. Over 60 billion pounds of hazardous waste, along with billions of gallons of acidic wastewater, exists at sites like this across Florida and Louisiana.

After the digging is done and waste ponds seep into scrape pits, the land bears little resemblance to it former self. This landscape looks less like the woodland of northern Florida and more like the surface of Saturn's moon Titan with its clouds of nitrogen smog and rivers of liquid methane.

The Port Neal Nitrogen Complex run by CF Industries on the Missouri River south of Sioux City, Iowa. This facility produces Urea Ammonium Nitrate (UAN) fertilizer from urea and nitrogen gas, using an advanced version of the Haber Process developed in the early twentieth century by Fritz Haber, the so-called “father of chemical warfare,” who weaponized chlorine in WWI for the German military.

Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Cargill is one of the big agribusiness companies in the American Midwest. Like their corporate brethren, Monsanto (St. Louis, Missouri) and ADM (Chicago, Illinois), Cargill has holdings globally and is responsible for the spread of biotechnological side-effects and deforestation around the world as part of its process of constant growth.

Brilliant winter sunlight reflects saturated colors from the vibrant green waste ponds which deceptively shimmer with toxins and deadly plankton at the Mosaic Faustina Ammonia Plant in St. James Parish, Louisiana, along the Mississippi River. This stretch of the river is known as Cancer Alley – 7 of the 10 census tracts with the highest cancer risk in the nation are found here.

A pile of agricultural lime ready for field application somewhere in Minnesota. Lime helps soil absorb chemical fertilizers such as anhydrous ammonia, potassium sulfate, and phosphate. While early fertilization of fields was done using the ground bones of animals (including humans) and burnt lime, most of the dry phosphate fertilizer used in the USA comes from the Bone Valley of Florida where the geologic remains of sea life from the Paleocene (~10 millions years ago) are scraped from the ground. Trillions of ancient shark carcasses are transported through time and space and transmuted into corn syrup and soy protein.

Founding families of the American agribusiness story started small. This is the historic home of the Mayo and Cosgrove families. The Cosgrove family farm grew into the iconic American frozen and canned vegetable Green Giant Company, now owned by the Bloch & Guggenheimer Foods conglomerate.

An industrial dairy operation floats in a sea of homogenous, government-subsidized farms for genetically modified corn and soybeans, run by a handful of conglomerates and family businesses. This gridded and parceled landscape, like much of the American Midwest, was once the largest tall-grass prairie in the world. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, it has been leveled, scraped, irrigated, and manipulated to serve a single purpose: to grow as much product as possible using largely synthetic means of extracting nutrients from the earth for profit.

Companies like Big Gain owe their 'bigness' in the animal enlarging feed business to the fertilizer industry which boosts genetically modified corn and soy crop yields. Bigger yields, bigger animals, bigger profits, bigger people.

Along stretches of American farmland, which run parallel to the river, measures are taken to limit damage to critical infrastructure caused by catastrophic flooding, now common due to accelerated climate change. The Minnesota River, represented here as a mural, carries nitrogen and phosphate wastewater to the Mississippi River just beyond this flood wall in Mankato, Minnesota.

As the infant Mississippi River winds its way across northern Minnesota, it merges with countless prairie creeks and forest streams. It also crosses oil pipelines, such as this one, owned by the Koch Brothers, which carries crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta Canada. Clearcutting of forests, even on tribal lands, is common by pipeline companies and provides the unintentional benefit of the easy identification of an otherwise hidden and covert infrastructure.

The abandoned Mississippi River Basin Model Waterways Experiment Station near Jackson, Mississippi is the largest river model ever built, representing nearly half of the contiguous US in miniature. 24,000 kilometers of rivers that make up the Mississippi River Basin are rendered as thirteen kilometers of carefully carved channels across one square kilometer of poured concrete. This model was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers from 1943 to 1966, using German prisoners of war as labor until 1946. It has been gradually deteriorating for nearly half a century: its scaled landforms are being eroded by water and wind, its tiny waterways filled with dead leaves and debris, the strips of metal screens, once used to represent forests and swampland, now blow across this miniature landscape in drifts and piles.

An aerial view of the Birdfoot Delta as scale model along the Mississippi Riverwalk on Mud Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. This model represents 1,600 kilometers of the Great River from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico in 600 meters of molded concrete.

Algal blooms along the Louisiana and Texas coasts. The dead zone is most concentrated in the eddying currents near the deltas of the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers, clearly made visible by the larger bloom, which extends far out into the Gulf of Mexico. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Aqua MODIS.

Along the Mississippi River in Louisiana are numerous former plantations where ethno-anthropologists have recently discovered slave burial grounds. At this spot, buried beneath acres of sugarcane, is one of these - the Buena Vista Cemetery. Underground scanning has revealed that caskets and bodies from the 18th and 19th centuries are still intact. They are now under threat of exhumation and displacement by the development of the Formosa Chemical Company's plastics plant called the "Sunshine Project."

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Steve Rowell

Dead Zones

2020-23