In Praise of Ambivalence: Reflections on Experiences of Pollution and Remediation

Since the 1950s, the chemical company Cheminova has disposed of more than 100,000 tons of toxic waste around its premises on Harboøre Tange, a peninsula in western Denmark. An immediate concern was a submerged chemical waste depository called Høfde 42-depotet, located just a few meters away from the coastline in an area known for its rampant storms and flooding. In 2019, the Danish government allocated funds to remediate the depot, with engineering companies proclaiming they had the technology. Local environmentalists, however, are reluctant to—or perhaps, more fittingly, ambivalent about—tackling the project.

Zooming in on the activists’ lack of enthusiasm for the remediation, this chapter introduces ambivalence as a tool for analyzing human experiences of environmental transformations. Through an environmental justice approach, it explores complexity and complicity in contexts of being-with a contaminated place as a generative framework. Significantly, it contends that ambivalence is a crucial yet understudied aspect of experiencing ecological transformations. Moreover, it signifies neither undivided optimism nor pessimism, or even indifference toward a given process, albeit it holds both positions by expressing reluctance toward certainty and facts while still acknowledging them. As this chapter will show, articulations of ambivalence challenge myopic tech-optimistic solutions as dominant epistemic regimes. As such, ambivalence can reveal otherwise hidden power structures and specific historical trajectories.