Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations

Abstract

It has been raining all day and into the warm winter night in downtown Toronto-Tkaronto in Mohawk.The water splashes off the office towers of Bay Street (Canada's Wall Street), is collected by a storm sewer system overtaking buried streams, and then washes out into the vastness of Lake Ontario.Office towers and other urban surfaces are covered in a thin, greasy film that attracts persistent organic pollutants like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs; Simpson et al. 2006).These travel in global circulations of particulate clouds, encountering office towers whose oily films act like massive pollution-collection devices.The patter of droplets on urban glass rinses the PCBs into a chemically concentrated rainwash that returns them to the lake, a legacy dumping ground of PCBs from an era of midcentury industrial exuberance.Lake Ontario is the last lake in the eastward flow of Great Lakes water.Each lake becomes more and more industrialized along the way, passing by Canada's petrochemical refining corridor, the (de)industrialized zone of Detroit, and the steel mills of Hamilton.The Great Lakes form the largest basin of fresh surface