Land of Opportunity, 2022. 83” x 83”. Mixed media drawing and collage on cyanotype print. Installation view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, CA). Documentation by Impart Photography and courtesy of the CJM.
Land of Opportunity is a map that documents forty-three of the most well-documented toxic sites in the Bay Area, alongside local environmental justice protests and both federal and community-based remediation efforts. The tar-like blobs dripping down the paper are places notable for the amount of toxic material that has leaked into the soil and groundwater primarily as a result of high-tech industry, military activities, mercury mining during the gold rush era, and nuclear testing in the South Pacific during World War II. Despite its reputation for being one of the ‘greenest’ places in the United States, the Bay Area also has one of the highest concentrations of Superfund sites in the country, particularly in Silicon Valley, the techno-utopian capital of the United States.
The map emphasizes community-based, grassroots organizing efforts, and shows both the kinds of poisons that have contaminated the land as well as the ways in which surrounding communities have protested the presence of these polluters and demanded their right to a clean, healthy environment. Land of Opportunity is a register of the ways in which the Bay Area has been shaped — both figuratively and literally — by dominant settler narratives of the landscape’s potential for wealth and resource extraction. But it is also more than the shadowland of settler, entrepreneurial greed, or the American imperial war machine: it’s also a place constituted and nourished by strong radical politics, care for community, and a trust in the power of local organizing. We live in a place of endless possibility — where the byproducts of greed and warmongering can be sublimated into other forms of power, and politics can be shaped in certain places by the will of the people.
The Education team at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (Emily Gerstner and Cara Buchalter) have thoughtfully created an educational resource for the map, which is designed to help K-12 students gain awareness of environmental justice in the Bay Area and make a map representing their personal connections to where they live. The resource includes a high-resolution image of the map, discussion prompts, and a mapmaking activity, with templates provided. You can download the resource here.
Land of Opportunity has been acquired for the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. A high-resolution scan is available here.
Detail images cropped from photography by Charlie Lederer, 2022.