Smoke space: material and imagined nature in the smelter city of Anaconda, Montana Jeremy Bryson Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Northwest Missouri State University, 800 University Dr., Maryville, MO 64468, United States Abstract This paper argues that both the physical material of the environment as well as the social imagination of the environment are important actors in the production of urban space. Using a case study of the smelter city of Anaconda, Montana in the twentieth century, this paper shows how toxic smelter smoke and the complex social imagination of that smoke shape the contours of urban space. The production of smelter smoke for nearly a century in Anaconda persists today and presents a complex set of opportunities and challenges for the continuing development of the urban landscape. By taking a smoke-specific approach to the relationship between cities and industrial air pollution, this paper contends that material nature matters in the everyday urban experiences of life in this postindustrial city. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Mining communities; Smoke; Nature; Pollution; American West Smoke has always defined Anaconda, Montana. In 1886, only a year after the city’s founding, a visiting reporter from the Minneapolis Tribune observed that ‘for a distance of 30 miles the great clouds of smoke that rise from among the mountains indicate the location of Anaconda and the greatest copper smelter in the world.’ 1 For nearly 100 years, the Anaconda Company operated copper smelters in the industrial city while community residents adjusted to the pains and pleasures that accompanied their smoke-filled urban environment. While Anaconda’s airshed cleared after the smelter shutdown in 1980, smelter smoke continued to figure critically in the production of space in the postindustrial city. For decades, as environmental historian Matt Klingle argues, students of the urban past have ‘tracked effluents and chased fumes through their stories’ in order to untangle the complex relationship between pollution and cities. 2 Legal battles, environmental injus- tice, health hazards, and technological mitigation solutions have helped scholars illustrate how differing urban interests have used industrial pollution as an instrument of social power. 3 This research, though, often treated the material environment as powerful only when mediated through social processes. Otherwise it was a passive stage to be controlled by lawyers, technocrats and civic groups. New work is beginning to address this oversight by revealing how the physical material of the environment, or nature, matters in the production of urban space. 4 Klingle puts it this way: ‘Nature is an integral part of the messy planet on which human action unfolds. It may not be an actor in the strictest sense, yet its actions force people to make moral choices.’ 5 Indeed, as historical research of urban environments shows, both material and socially imagined nature have a significant impact on the production of urban space. Nature’s power is particularly vivid in the relationship between pollution and cities, and no type of industrial pollution has been the E-mail address: jbryson@nwmissouri.edu 1 H. Shoebotham, Anaconda: Life of Marcus Daly, The Copper King, Harrisburg, 1956, 77. 2 M. Klingle, Changing spaces: nature, property, and power in Seattle, 1880e1945, Journal of Urban History 32 (2006) 198. 3 The literature on urban environmental history is rich, but important texts include: M. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present, Baltimore, 1999; J. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective, Akron, 1996; W. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York, 1991; A. Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, New York, 2001; A. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945e1980, Chapel Hill, 1995. 4 For examples of how environmental researchers have argued that nature is an actor, see C. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature, Baton Rouge, 2005; A. Kelman, A River and its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, Berkeley, 2003; Klingle, Changing space (note 2) 197e230; M. Kaika, City of Flow: Modernity, Nature, and the City, New York, 2005; S. Prudham, Knock on Wood: Nature as Commodity in Douglas-Fir Country, New York, 2005; E. Stroud, Does nature always matter? Following dirt through history, History and Theory 42 (2003) 75e81. 5 M. Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle, New Haven, 2007, 9. Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg 0305-7488/$ e see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.12.002 Journal of Historical Geography 40 (2013) 16e23