Pauline Moskal
landscape architect
EXPO 2067:
Humans and This World
Pelly Island is experiencing the devastating effects of global warming at an accelerated rate. Compared to other coastlines in the arctic eroding at about one and half meters per year, Pelly Island’s coast is eroding at an estimated thirty to forty meters per year, with its disappearance predicted in the next fifty years.
The causes of this accelerated erosion reveals the complex and interrelated effects of climate change. Increasing global temperatures are thawing coastal permafrost while a decrease in sea ice is leaving the coastline vulnerable to waves and storm surges for longer periods of time. Eroding sediments are depositing pollutants into the sea changing surrounding water chemistry, while melting permafrost is releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. These effects are being felt all along the arctic coast, including the Inuvialuit hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk which is the closest community to Pelly, about 100 km away.
As a narrative device and starting point of imagining potential futures, this proposal adopts the World’s Fair as a means to explore new relationships between nature, culture and technology. Set a century after the renowned Montreal Expo of 1967, Expo 2067 explores the role of human agency in protecting or abandoning coastal environments in the face of uncertainty and accelerating change. In doing so, the proposal accepts Darran Anderson’s proposition:
“Perhaps it is time to host World’s Fairs, not with noble platitudes
in sparkling metropolises, but in the places facing impending catastrophes.”
In this context, Pelly Island becomes a theatre and experimental site for imagining the unfolding of a range of coastal adaptation attitudes and techniques. The Expo is set to open in 2020 and will run for forty-seven years until 2067, the year that corresponds to Pelly Island’s predicted disappearance. Following a choreographed experience, visitors are taken along four interventions, or “attractions,” on the island. Each of these attractions is an abstract representation of possible climate adaptation approaches—ranging from extreme preservation to accelerated erosion.
Attraction 01: Preservation Station
Departing from Tuktoyaktuk (Tuk), visitors are transported to the southwest point of Pelly Island by barge which is actively excavating sediments to be used for defense against wave action in Tuk. From the southern tip alone, one cubic kilometre of sediment is extracted and redistributed along the coast of Tuk.
Slowly, visitors make their way through the excavation field into The Great Dome. This dome is an arc of the last epoch and preserves a piece of what was once the Canadian Arctic tundra and the Richards Island Coastal Plain Ecoregion. This dome pays tribute to Buckminster Fuller’s speculative Manhattan project where he proposes a 3 kilometre dome structure as a method to control the city’s weather, air and ecosystems. Rather than comfort, Pelly’s dome artificially prolongs the existence of this landscape while simultaneously preventing methane and carbon release. When inside the dome, visitors can see the tension and similarity between extreme land preservation on the inside, and land exploitation on the outside. Both methods are effectively killing the landscape by removing them from natural processes.
This aggressive and unsustainable preservation method is reflective of geoengineering practices where full control is exerted on nature. This method is short-sighted and unaware of long-term unintended consequences.
Attraction 02: Venice of the North
Leaving Preservation Station, visitors enter the second attraction Venice of the North. Using the patented “terra-spade,” pieces of Pelly Island are preserved in capsules. As sea levels rise and sediments erode around them, these capsules break off from the mainland and float out into the sea. As the arctic warms, these capsules will host new forests in an area that was once above the tree line. The remnants of Pelly Island are free to roam the Arctic Ocean serving as a cautionary tale to other landscapes which are currently under threat of disappearance. This intervention, like The Great Dome, uses technology to preserve slices of land from destruction. Yet, rather than freezing the land in a single state, these open-air time capsules or “messages in a bottle” are allowed to evolve with warming temperatures and rising seas. Similar to strategies of resilience, this attraction looks to the long-term and adapts to change rather than fighting it.
Attraction 03: Phyto-Plank
The third attraction along the route is the Phyto-Plank. Here, visitors are able to witness an ecological process turned spectacle along a floating boardwalk. Iron posts serve as the main structure for the boardwalk and simultaneously act as markers against sea level rise. The iron stimulates phytoplankton growth, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That carbon is then sequestered at the bottom of the sea at the end of their life cycle. Visitors can engage with this process by looking though microbial periscopes placed along the boardwalk.
“For the low price of an admissions ticket, you can peer into one of the periscopes and look at the phytoplankton in action, which give us life-saving oxygen free of charge!”
As Pelly continues to erode and more carbon dioxide is released, this attraction will attempt to remediate and counter the effects of climate change. This intervention does not deny climate change, nor does it attempt to allow evolution to take its course, but instead, accepts the current conditions and attempts to provide a local remedy.
Attraction 04: Augmented Reality Experience
Lastly in the sequence is the Augmented Reality Experience where the visitor’s journey on Pelly Island is measured in kilobytes and not kilometres. This final attraction allows the visitor to experience fifty years of change all at once using AR headsets. Over the duration of the Expo, visitor’s themselves can document their experience of the island and upload to a collective data set. A flattening of time and space, this experience is the most hands-off or ‘business as usual.’ It allows the forces acting on the island to run their course and uses technology to give us a first-row seat on the geological time scale. Though a part of the island is being sacrificed, it is being immortalized digitally, turning its martyrdom into a message. Unlike The Great Dome which preserves one state, here you can experience ‘real-time’ climate change at an outrageous scale. This attraction is a call to action.
Process
Sketching became a very important tool during the design process. It allowed for quick iteration and easy communication of ‘big ideas.’ The following are a selection of initial sketches conducted during this phase, exploring big themes regarding the possible ‘future(s)’ of Pelly Island.
