Tailings are the dirty secret of the mining industry. They are the back end, the bathroom, the stuff we don’t want to see. We hide our waste to forget it exists.

Notably, Sudbury has made little attempt to hide its slag hills. In fact, quite the opposite: Slag has become a symbol of the area, a source of local pride. There’s even a music festival named after it. A postcard from Sudbury will typically feature one of three images, all related to mining: the Superstack, the Big Nickel, or the slag hills. Molten ore is a sign of a robust economy. Slag is jobs; slag is Sudbury.

In the last two decades, the pours have slipped from sight — but they have not stopped. Mining executives have simply relocated them. They have disappeared, hidden from public view. Mining executives seem to appreciate that while the phosphorescent show delights the eye, it might also appall the conscience.

Appall

When we drape cloth over a dining table we call it a tablecloth; on a mattress, a sheet. Drape a cloth over a coffin, however, and it becomes a pall. It is a curious object, the pall, its purpose being to hide what we feel should not be seen. To make us forget what is beneath it.

Namely, death.

When we call something “appalling,” we say that something would be best covered up, tucked away where it is less likely to disturb our thoughts. (Notably, to call something appalling says less about the thing itself than it does about the person saying it.)

The word “pall” may have fallen out of popular use in the last few decades, but we have not stopped using palls themselves. Rather, the concept of a pall remains as ubiquitous and essential as ever. Palls grant peace of mind; they allow us to carry on with our lives. We depend on palls.

Yet, rarely are they pieces of cloth. Palls take all kinds of forms. They can look like a helpful euphemism, words carefully chosen to mask an abhorrent truth. A death becomes a “passing,” a funeral labeled a “celebration of life.”

In Western culture, hospice care is still often seen as a sort of acquiescing, an act of giving up.

The way we structure our lives — our waking hours filled with business and busyness — is another sort of pall. Our schedules allow us to defer any serious meditation on the certainty that we and everything we know will certainly perish.

How adept we are at this trickery, this tucking away of the unpalatable. We like our palls. Though we may recognize them as a full to-do list or a trip to Cancún, these palls are everywhere. We depend on them to help us carry on with a semblance of stability and purpose.

But, at what expense? At its most innocuous, the pall is the little white lie, the rug which hides dirt.

In the Anthropocene era, literally defined by humanity’s impact on Earth’s ecosystems, the pall is the hand that guides our gaze away from cold, black hills and glowing orange rivers. Away from a century’s worth of mining waste.

Concrete

When my mother-in-law was working as a nurse in the ‘80s, she treated a number of patients facing uncomfortable deaths. Too many doctors, she found, were giving these patients acute care. Regardless of a bleak prognosis, doctors treated these patients as if they could, and would, get better. These doctors were trained to remedy and to cure. Many of them made healing their perennial objective, even when the likelihood of recovery was slim. They feared patients and families would interpret any alternative approach as failure.

My mother-in-law had an idea to start a hospice, but her superiors shot it down. The healthcare system was not yet ready for what patients and families considered an unconventional approach to end-of-life care: acceptance. Hospice was a white flag in a field where most preferred to fight.

For some, the idea of resorting to palliative care remains, ironically, appalling. (“Appall” and “palliate” are linguistic cousins, but have evolved to take almost opposite meanings.)

In Western culture, hospice care is still often seen as an act of giving up. No one likes a quitter, and palliative care sure feels like quitting. (In the ‘80s, when my mother was a nurse, that popular “Hang In There, Baby” poster with the cat dangling from a clothesline was only a decade old.)

Though it is difficult to say what precisely we are quitting with a palliative approach. Not life, to be sure. Hospice Toronto advocates “adding life to days,” rather than days to life. This simple inversion captures a profound shift in end-of-life care, not to mention in how we might approach our own intervals of health.

Palliative care is not about quitting. It is about committing to improving the quality of this life, right now, in small, concrete ways.

A palliative approach just might serve as a hopeful new mantra for the weary, modern environmentalist.

I-4 Phosphor

So much of what environmentalists fight against falls within the category of “appalling”: the plastic island in the Pacific, the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, the melting of arctic glaciers. Mine tailings.

Photographer Edward Burtynsky captures images of a planet in need of palliative care. His photographs reveal hidden landscapes — the open scar of a quartz mine, the clear-cut rain forests of Brazil or British Columbia. We prefer to keep these scenes out of sight. We prefer to forget about them.

In Phosphor Tailings #5, a silver line protrudes into the frame, spewing a pewter blob onto a muddy surface. The image strikes the viewer as an abstraction: It could be a Petri dish under a microscope, or a distant planet’s lifeless surface.

But it belongs to this world. It is not far, in fact, from Disney World — just a short drive down the I-4 outside the town of Lakeland, Florida. There, thousands of liters of phosphor spill out into freshwater. All of this goes unseen, a 45-minute drive from The Most Magical Place on Earth™.