Toxic Chemical Legacies and Rhizomatic Ruderal Futures: Examining Spontaneous Plant Communities at a Former Agent Orange Factory as Oracles for Human-ecological Crisis Resilience

Rebecca Gross, Gallatin '25

Bachelor of Arts: Individualized Study, Biolaw and Policy

Advised by Dr. Karen Holmberg

“It is not the parks but railway sidings that are thick with flowers.” Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside, 1973.

Introduction: Context, Frameworks, and Methods

Context and Rationale

The Ironbound District in Newark, New Jersey, is one of America’s most polluted sites. United States Senator Cory Booker dubbed the area, home to around 50,000 residents, as “America’s biggest crime scene.” This seventeen-mile strip of land bordering the Lower Passaic River has a devastating ecological, industrial, and imperialist heritage — 80-120 Lister Avenue was home to the Diamond Alkali Company, America’s largest Agent Orange factory during the Vietnam War. The chemicals produced there were exported for use as weapons of war by the United States military in Vietnam. The devastating impact of Agent Orange on the people and ecology of Vietnam is well known. But Agent Orange, which was contaminated with the highly toxic chemical compound dioxin, also caused immense human health and environmental destruction in the places it was produced.

Despite this toxic ecological history, the industrial wasteland hosts a shockingly diverse mélange of life: weeds and mosses have grown within, despite, and perhaps because of the site’s perilous environmental contamination. The site exemplifies the intersection of environmental governance and justice, ecotoxicology, and climate vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience. In the face of ever-worsening global climate crises, I study these weeds as oracles and bioindicators to ask: what can weeds thriving in a toxic industrial landscape teach us about how to adapt to live resiliently on a dying and destroyed planet? I argue that the ruderal plant communities at the Diamond Alkali site reveal the ways multispecies lives persist in both politically and chemically disturbed zones, battling dominant narratives about utility, contamination, and ecological sterility.

Theoretical Framework

Our fraught relationship with weeds must be reevaluated, particularly in an era of compounding health and climate crises. The plants that we designate as nuisances, disturbances, or “weeds” are often the most resilient, climate- and disturbance-adapted, and able to thrive in a variety of strenuous or ruderal conditions in which many cultivated plants cannot survive. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that weeds offer important ecosystem services in toxic environments: They are able to absorb some of the toxins from the soil in which they grow

In this project, I observed the ruderal vegetation at a site of immense anthropogenic environmental and human health destruction—the Agent Orange production facility, Diamond Alkali Co.—to understand what we can learn from these underappreciated plant neighbors. They are mentors and oracles that epitomize modes of living amidst immense ecological harm and teach us how to cultivate future resilient human-ecological health frameworks.

The One Health Framework was foundational in my research. One Health offers an approach to ecotoxicology that approaches the effects of toxic legacies on entire ecosystems of plants, humans, animals, water and food systems, and fungi. This comprehensive approach is necessary to understand the broad-ranging effects of Agent Orange, and the simultaneous human and environmental health tragedies at play in this story. The integrated approach offered by this framework is critical as the effects of climate change continue to crystallize the fact that human, animal, and environmental health stewardship can no longer be addressed as isolated issues, but rather are deeply interconnected, particularly in governing environmental toxicity.

Current governance frameworks to address environmental toxicity often silo environmental and public health in remediation efforts. My concentration, biolaw and policy, refers to the areas of governance involving the life sciences, bringing together agricultural, food and drug, environmental, health, and biotechnology law and policy. Legal frameworks often fail to comprehensively address the interconnected nature of environmental toxicity that involves inseparable harm to humans, animals, soils, and entire living ecosystems. At toxic sites like Diamond Alkali, this approach to law and policy is necessary – contamination from Agent Orange has scarred both the ecosystems surrounding the site and the Ironbound community. The human and environmental struggles for health and safety are deeply intertwined and therefore require an approach to governance and remediation that recognizes these connections. My thesis argues for a necessary shattering of the boundaries within both legal and scientific frameworks.

Methodology & Scope

For this project, I employed a deeply interdisciplinary approach – weaving together studies in environmental toxicology, environmental justice, public health, history and philosophy of science, and political and ruderal ecology as lenses to understand the material and theoretical stories told by and about the human and weedy communities at 80-120 Lister Avenue. This study included fieldwork performed at the Diamond Alkali site, studying the ruderal vegetation growing there and the plants’ indicators of climate and ecotoxicological adaptation. My theoretical work utilized archival public health, environmental policy, corporate, and legal documents about the site in an attempt to craft a comprehensive history. By approaching these ecologies with metaphorical and material lenses, I examined how weeds make up a part of a larger community that is collectively rendered disposable.

Thesis Statement

In order to survive a future of global ecological crises, we must move away from the reductionist classification and valuing of plants through human-imposed metrics of importance, sustainability, and utility, and begin studying these plants and their survival for their own ecological purposes. As we imagine human-ecological futures in environmentally damaged and chemically contaminated terrains, this means moving to embrace ruderal and weedy lives as our vital companions. Through weeds’ intricate multispecies collaboration and networks of resilience, we can learn how to cultivate mechanisms for our own collective survival.

We cannot separate the survival of non-human living beings from that of humans, but rather we should live “tentacularly,” and "rhizomatically," bolstering our complex and often interdependent multispecies relationships.^[1][2] Accordingly, we cannot separate the urban, human, or cultural from the natural. The labeling and reputation of weeds and invasive species as the enemy must be questioned and reconceptualized. Instead of villainizing and waging chemical wars against them, we should appreciate the crucial purposes they serve in their own dynamic and adapting ecosystems, as demonstrated in the bioremediation of toxic and industrial zones, like Diamond Alkali.

Chemical Histories, Toxic Warfare, and Agent Orange

The story of Agent Orange in America is an unfinished chapter in history. The chemical continues to haunt generations of people and entire ecosystems. Diving into this history reveals a complex web of imperial and corporate violence and negligence, but also illuminates the resilient life that persists despite this ongoing damage.

Chemicals of Imperialism

From 1962 through 1971, under the code name Operation Ranch Hand, the United States military’s herbicidal warfare program, sprayed nearly 11 million gallons of a dioxin-contaminated defoliant – Agent Orange. This herbicidal campaign was implemented as a security measure during the Vietnam War, aiming to:

“1) defoliate jungle terrain to improve observation and prevent enemy ambush;

2) destroy food crops; and

3) clear Vegetation around military installations, landing zones, fire base camps, and trails.”^[3]

Even forty years after the site’s closure, the violent effects of Agent Orange continue to echo, perennially shaping ecologies and lives in Vietnam, Newark, and beyond.

Dioxin, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) flow through the Passaic River’s nearly eighty miles of contaminated waters between Morristown and Newark Bay, which act as a gallery for this chemical memory. Lining the watershed is a collection of several other Superfund Sites designated and monitored by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Through the 1940s, 80-120 Lister Avenue was home to Kolker Chemical Works, a major producer of Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT). In the 1950s, the facility was acquired^[4] and focused on producing agricultural chemicals including 2,4-D, which targets broad-leaf weeds and 2,4,5-T, which kills brush and hardwoods. These chemicals were each widely used in the U.S. to mitigate weedy growth along railroads and power lines, and in forests and industrial agricultural zones. This experience with herbicide production allowed for an easy transition to the company's production of the mixture of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T to create Agent Orange, for use as a weapon by the United States military during the Vietnam War, where it would annihilate entire ecosystems.

Manufacturing Agent Orange, which combined 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, led to the unintentional production of 2,3,7,8-TCDD, the most toxic chemical under the umbrella of the family of dioxins. Dioxins like TCDD are typically the byproducts of the production processes of herbicides (like Agent Orange), wood preservatives, and germicides, and can also occur naturally due to volcanic activity. Dioxins are widely understood to be some of the most toxic chemicals ever synthesized.^[5]

Diamond Alkali Company was one of nine U.S. manufacturers of Agent Orange. Famously, the toxic chemical medley was the most widely deployed of the “Rainbow Herbicides” weaponized by the United States military during its ecosystemic war on Vietnam. Originally, the Agent Orange produced contained only .05 parts per million of dioxin. However, in order to meet increasing military demands for the weapon, the production process was accelerated by increasing the heat 5°C during combustion, which dangerously spiked the dioxin levels in Agent Orange to nearly 60 parts per million. This change in production capacity, paired with an architectural expansion of the plant, allowed them to produce 15 million pounds of the dioxin-laced herbicide per year.

This rush to manufacture Agent Orange came at a fatal cost. Veterans’ attorneys uncovered internal memos from 1955 between a U.S.-based Agent Orange producer and Boehringer, a chemical company in Germany. Boehringer detailed the serious health issues faced by their workers after exposure to an unidentified contaminant – including chloracne and liver damage. As a result, Boehringer immediately ceased production and eventually discovered how to eliminate the contaminant through adjusting the temperature and pressure settings, a change that slowed production.

Despite awareness of these hazards in 1955 and eventually how to prevent them in 1957, Diamond Alkali prioritized output and speed continued without stopping or changing their manufacturing process to implement safety measures due to the high military demand. These precautions could have protected the health and safety, not only of their plant workers and Ironbound residents, but also Vietnamese civilians, U.S. veterans, and the environment. Instead, economic concerns trumped protecting countless human and nonhuman lives.

This negligence prompted monumental class action lawsuits against the chemical companies filed by veterans and Vietnamese citizens alike. One of the earliest advocates was Paul Reutershan, a former helicopter crew member responsible for deploying Agent Orange. A few years after returning from Vietnam, he found himself severely ill with stomach cancer and chloracne. Facing financial hardships due to his inability to work, he attempted to sign up for disability benefits from the Veterans’ Association, which denied his request – refusing to recognize any relationship between the herbicide and his health conditions. As a previously healthy 27-year-old man, Reutershan grew suspicious of these claims – he knew that scientists had classified the chemical as a toxin.

Outraged, he pioneered Agent Orange Victims International from his bed in the cancer ward. The group reached thousands of Vietnam veterans and conducted vital research on the connections between the chemicals, the cancers, miscarriages, lesions, and birth defects that the veterans and their families had faced quietly for too long. With support from attorney Victor Yannacone, a trailblazer in the field of environmental law, they filed one of the earliest suits against the chemical manufacturers. Their case ultimately ended in a settlement for $180 million in 1984.^[6][7]

Tragically, Reutershan died from the cancer in 1978, before the lawsuit concluded. He reflected on his illness in his final days, saying, “I got killed in Vietnam and didn't know it.” He mourned not only for the suffering of other veterans and civilians caused by the chemical, but also for its long-term environmental damage: “We've got to stop. We're poisoning the earth,” he begged. ^[8]

Bioaccumulation and Biocide: Multigenerational and Multispecies Warfare

Between 2.6 and 3.8 million U.S. military personnel and approximately 4.8 million people in Vietnam were exposed to dioxin by the contaminated chemical weapon during the Vietnam War.^[9] The production and careless aerial spraying of these chemicals caused significant and lasting human, animal, and environmental harm that continues to reverberate across Newark and Vietnam.

Even at relatively low concentrations in blood (0.7 ppt), dioxins pose extreme threats to human health.^[10] The acceptable threshold of human dioxin exposure is 0.0064 picograms per kilogram of body weight,^[11] which can be quickly and dangerously exceeded in chemically-exposed zones. Long-term exposure causes significant and sometimes fatal systemic damage.

According to the CDC’s Epidemiological Studies on the Health of Vietnam Veterans, long-term exposure to Agent Orange resulted in health issues including impaired kidney and liver function, effects on the immune system, thyroid disorders, endometriosis, diabetes, diseases of the central and peripheral nervous systems, chloracne, immunological suppression, neurological and psychological effects, reproductive problems such as birth defects, carcinogenic effects such as soft tissue sarcomas, lymphomas and thyroid tumors, and various gastrointestinal disorders.^[12][13]

These debilitating effects have also manifested in the children and grandchildren of those directly exposed, many of whom are born with severe birth defects, in a vegetative state, with psychological impairments, or later in life develop cancer. Many of these illnesses are fatal. Around 400,000 Vietnamese people, 300,000 veterans, and an unknown number of chemical plant workers died due to fatal exposure.^[14][15] These numbers likely exclude many deaths that have gone unreported, unrecorded, or are unable to be precisely attributed to indirect exposure to Agent Orange.

Agent Orange represents a multigenerational and multispecies tragedy, causing immense and sometimes fatal consequences for all life forms exposed to it: no species of plant or animal was spared. As a persistent organic pollutant (POP), its toxic dioxin contamination remains incredibly stable. Due to its long half-life, it can linger in ecosystems, persisting in soils for up to eighty years, and in river and sea sediments for more than one hundred years. When dioxin is in the soil, it seeps into water and foodways.

Once lush major forests defoliated by Agent Orange, like the U Minh mangrove forests in the Ca Mau peninsula, still struggle to return to their pre-exposure state. TCDD is still present in southern Vietnamese soils, sediments, and wetland plants, and are not limited to the areas near Air Force bases where Agent Orange was stored before it was deployed:

“As a result of water and wind action, runoff, soil erosion, transport and deposition, these hotspots are spreading beyond airbase perimeter fences and into adjacent lakes, rivers and ponds. Local Vietnamese living in nearby cities breathe the contaminated dust, cultivate dioxin contaminated soil which can be adsorbed by their skin, and still eat bottom feeding fish and mollusk harvested from lakes adjacent to the hotspots. The Vietnamese Government retains, after 48 years, a fishing ban in lakes adjacent to the remaining airbase hotspots. However, the contaminant dioxin continues to be found in the local food supply.”^[16]

1300 soil samples procured 45 years after the final use of Agent Orange tested the levels of persisting dioxin contamination from 76 areas in and surrounding the Bien Hoa Air Base. Of the 1300 samples, 750 showed dioxin levels above the acceptable concentration standard.^[17] In 2019, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) began efforts to clean up the nearly 500,000 cubic meters of dioxin-contaminated soil at the base.^[18]

TCDD becomes twelve times more potent at ascension of trophic levels in a food web, as it accumulates in the fat cells of animals, including humans. Animals that drink or live in that water and eat plants sprayed with the contaminated herbicide in these areas are still at risk, due to dangerous bioaccumulation magnification in major interconnected food webs.^[19]

The use of Agent Orange as a weapon of war can be defined as a biocide. Coined by biologist and author Rachel Carson in her illustrious book, Silent Spring, she proposed the term as a more accurate alternative to the word “pesticide,” because the killing power of these chemicals was not isolated to pests, but rather affected all living beings together:

“Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done.”^[20]

Agent Orange’s harm caused to all life—in Vietnam and in Newark—particularly resonates with this term and with Carson’s clear warnings that a chemical war on nature is a war on the health and safety of all life.

The ecological and human health impacts of Agent Orange still haunt Vietnam as a continuous biological war that persists despite the war’s official end. Its ghost lingers within the landscape: it is visible in the bodies of people born with congenital disabilities, it is audible in the generational narratives of illness, and tangible in the poisoned soils, rice paddies, and waterways that remain contaminated. Approached through a One Health framework, which involves the interdependence of human, animal, and environmental health, the stories of Agent Orange must not be siloed into isolated fields of impact.

Toxic Governance and Grassroots Remediation:

Superfund Sites as battlefields of environmental justice and accountability.

The damage caused by Agent Orange isn’t limited to Vietnam – the chemical continues to wreak havoc in and around the Diamond Alkali Co. production site in Newark. Here, another history emerges, one that reveals intertwined issues of faulty environmental governance, corporate negligence, and imperialism. For this chapter, I focus on the history of governance and legal battles involving the Diamond Alkali site, in conversation with stories about experiences from Ironbound residents about the remediation process, through archival newspaper reports, documentaries, and an interview I conducted with activist Lillian Ribeiro, who was living in Newark at the time of the first cleanup efforts.

Figure 1: The Ribeiro familiy's fifty-year-old vineyard. Credit: Lillian Ribeiro.

Lillian Ribeiro is a 48-year-old drama therapist in Newark. She was born and raised in the Ironbound District, which she lovingly refers to as “Down Neck.” Growing up, she knew very well not to go anywhere near the Passaic’s riverbank. Friends and family would share “Newark fables” about the dangers of the water there, warning her that if she ever so much as touched the river, she would need to go to the hospital.

These tales weren’t merely cautionary; they reflected the disturbing reality of chemical contamination. According to court documents from a case filed against the Diamond Alkali Company by insurers, the company dumped waste containing dioxin byproducts into trenches that connected to the river on a weekly basis. ^[21] Over 23 years, the company is estimated to have poured over 700,000 gallons of dioxin-contaminated waste into the Passaic River. ^[22] Trucks leaving the site were also believed to have tracked dioxin into neighboring residential areas. Dioxin attaches itself to dust particles, which blow with the wind outside of the industrial confines and into “hot spots” – once bustling community areas that once hosted farmers’ markets, soccer fields, and public parks.

Ribeiro recalls when the local pool at Hayes Park was closed in 1983 after dangerous levels of dioxin were found in the drain. Some children who had swum there developed the severe skin rash commonly associated with dioxin exposure, called chloracne, which causes painful cysts and boils. A president of the area’s Parent Teacher Association described how the rash had disfigured one child’s face so severely that it resembled “raw meat.” ^[23]

Fourteen years after the factory’s closure, Ironbound community members rallied to have the area’s safety reassessed, demanding that samples be procured from the river and neighboring streets. Persistent advocacy resulted in Federal investigations that, in 1983, revealed dangerous levels of dioxin lurking in the streets. The area had the highest levels of dioxin contamination in the United States. Surface soil samples from the site had dioxin concentrations of as many as 51,000 parts per billion, and from the residential and commercial areas near the site, up to one thousand parts per billion.^[24] Out of seventeen groundwater samples taken, fifteen had dioxin concentrations of over ten parts per billion. Analyses of the sediment in the Passaic River held concentrations of 130 parts per billion.^[25] For context, in residential areas, the CDC considers just one part per billion to be hazardous.^[26]

Ribeiro says that because of the soils’ contamination, she still avoids planting vegetables in her garden almost forty years later. She lives in her family’s Ironbound home, which she grew up in. Like many other Portuguese families in the area, her backyard has a small vineyard which her relatives planted when they first immigrated to the city. One day, she hopes that she will be able to safely eat the grapes that continue to grow there, year after year.

In 1984, a year after dioxin was first discovered in testing done in the area, Diamond Alkali was designated as a federal Superfund Site. However, New Jersey state government officials had received a federal report warning about the likely dioxin contamination in Ironbound almost ten years prior to the initial cleanup efforts.^[27] In a secret meeting in 1965, Dow Chemical company brought together the major producers of Agent Orange – including Diamond Alkali – at the Dow Headquarters in Midland, Michigan. Scientists at the Dow meetings disclosed that they had detected toxic TCDD impurities in some samples of 2,4,5-T, and warned the companies to implement preventative precautions. Despite this warning, most of the companies continued producing the contaminated chemical weapon, now under pressure due to the increased demand for Agent Orange as the herbicide campaign accelerated in 1965.^[28][29]

In failing to address these toxic flaws in the chemicals’ production, Diamond Alkali put imperial and economic interests over the health and safety of people and the environment in Newark and Vietnam. Despite awareness of the dioxin contamination since March of 1965, "It was not until September of 1967 that a purification column was installed on the production floor [at Diamond Alkali] and put into use."^[30] Additionally, internal analyses performed by Diamond Alkali in March of 1968 revealed 3.8 parts per million in their herbicide mixture, which increased to 9 parts per million in October of that year due to the change in processing. Still, "production continued, and the product was sold to the government"^[31] to be deployed in the ecocide campaign in Vietnam.^[32]

According to court documents, reports of Diamond Alkali workers falling ill with symptoms related to dioxin exposure date back as far as 1956: “In 1956, approximately 29 workers in a Diamond Alkali (now Diamond Shamrock) plant were exposed to dioxin during the manufacture of 2,4,5-T and some of those exposed developed porphyria cutanea tarda, hyperpigmentation, and hirsutism."^[33] The health risks posed by the chemical’s production at the site were well-known, but fatally well-hidden.

When the severity of the contamination became public in 1984, then-Governor Thomas Kean declared a state of emergency. Administrative Order No. E0-40-1 launched immediate emergency measures to protect public health and safety, including immediate cleanup efforts, ceasing train traffic, shutting down an important nearby food distribution site, and a ban on fishing, selling, or consuming the highly contaminated seafood from the Passaic, which is still in effect today (See Figure 2). However, he claimed that the contamination had been contained within the property on Lister Avenue, despite tests detecting dioxin throughout the nearby neighborhoods.

Figure 2: Example of warning signage posted at the Lower Passaic riverbank. Credit: US EPA.

Stories of the 1984 cleanup illustrate how many community members were left in the dark about the toxic state of their neighborhood’s environment. Many families sat on their porches that hot summer, wearing just tank tops and shorts, watching as government workers roamed their neighborhood, donning protective gear that made them look “like they were walking on the moon.”^[34] (See Figures 3 and 4) At the same time, Ironbound residents were receiving false information about the toxic state of their neighborhood from the very governmental body tasked with protecting them from these toxic environmental harms: the EPA.

Figure 3: EPA worker examining waste-filled receptacles. Credit: The Newark Public Library and Ironbound Community Corporation.

Figure 4: EPA workers wearing heavy PPE, or “moon suits” while taking soil samples from train tracks used for Ironbound’s toxic industry. Credit: The Associated Press, pictured in The New York Times, 1983.

Rita M. Lavelle was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to hold positions as the assistant administrator and chief of the EPA’s toxic waste programs. Lavelle famously minimized the environmental and public health threats posed by dioxins during the early days of the cleanup, claiming that “Dioxin [was] not a national threat,” and that “[…] table salt [was] just as deadly.”^[35] These conflicting and confusing narratives about the true state of the site, and the lack of direct community involvement in decision making about its cleanup led to the Ironbound community’s understandable distrust in the government. Residents teamed together, founding the Ironbound Health Advisory Commission to advocate for their own health and safety.

In response to this blatant neglect and failure to communicate hazards, the group demanded increased transparency and the continuation of testing despite government officials’ hesitancy over its cost (around 450 dollars per sample). Supported by the Ironbound Community Corporation (ICC), they formed the Ironbound Committee Against Toxic Waste (ICATW), which met weekly after the 1984 announcement. When the government failed, Ironbound community members stepped up to inform their neighbors of the toxic hazards in their community: making home visits, putting up posters, and calling their neighbors to not only spread awareness, but to get themselves organized. The group brought together residents, seasoned activists, chemical experts, and physicians to inform the community about the hazard dioxin posed to people’s health. Residents and committee members took necessary political action, taking to the streets in protest, and planning frequent meetings with government officials to stay informed and relay their demands to ensure public health monitoring and dioxin testing. Their demands would later be passed as an official resolution in the City Council.

Figures 5, 6, and 7: ICATW protests in 1984. Credit: The Newark Public Library and Ironbound Community Corporation.

The ICC’s grassroots organizing and advocacy became, and still remains the driving force that protects the public and environmental health and human rights of Ironbound District residents. Their fight for their community’s health and safety didn’t end with Diamond Alkali. In 1990, a new battle arose when a dioxin producing waste-to-energy incinerator opened in the area, in the close vicinity of several public housing developments. The facility, owned and operated by Covanta, was set to burn nearly 2,800 tons of waste daily, collected from across Essex County and New York City. The ICATW opposed the new incinerator and organized protests, community hearings, and risk awareness campaigns. Despite their efforts, corporate power and profits prevailed, and the incinerator began its polluting operations, leading to increased concerns about the neighborhoods’ worsening air quality.

Today, Diamond Alkali remains one of the largest and most expensive Superfund Sites in the United States. In the past forty years, the US EPA and NJ DEP have undertaken massive remediation efforts at the Diamond Alkali Superfund Site. Beginning in the 1980s, this process included the attempted containment of the contaminated groundwater and soils at 80-120 Lister Avenue, and the vacuuming of contaminated streets in residential areas. By 2001, they had completed the containment plan: the EPA had demolished the Diamond Alkali plant’s building and incinerated the contaminated soil, transforming it into a barren parking lot.

The Passaic River’s contamination, however, remains largely unaddressed. Remediation attempts only began in 2012. It is still so highly polluted that even attempts to remediate the toxic site are considered to be too dangerous. At the bottom of the river, layers of toxic dioxin-contaminated sediment have lain dormant for years, creating a gooey black sludge that has been called “black mayonnaise.” Attempting to reach and remove this contaminated condiment would likely result in its further spread throughout the river. In 2024, the EPA proposed that the sediment be remediated through capping and dredging: covering up the toxic sediment with unpolluted materials to cap and prevent dangerous contact with flora and fauna, and removing the contaminated sediments without the diversion or draining of water. The contaminated sediment is treated and then disposed of in a landfill or a specialized facility.^[36] This process is expected to take another eight years to complete.

Issues of remediation are compounded by the threat of worsening climate change, which has already exacerbated the ecological and human health tragedies caused by Agent Orange production in Newark. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused torrential rains across the American Northeast. These rains caused the Passaic to overflow, sending water flooding into people’s homes nearby. The water seeping into these homes wasn’t only structurally perilous but also a threat to public health and safety. It contained hundreds of thousands of gallons of dioxin contaminated waste that had been dumped into the Pasddsaic by Diamond Alkali Co. for years. The Ironbound District is no stranger to flooding like this. The strip of land dominated and defined by industry was once made up of meadowlands that lined the river, preventing the coastline from overflowing and erosion.

In the Ironbound, industrialization is not a relic of the past. Residents and ICC members continue to battle and resist the invasion of corporate and industrial polluters who continue to attempt to settle in Newark and use it as a dumping ground for profit. In 2020, residents watched in fear as, on multiple occasions, that same Covanta incinerator sent clouds of purple and pink billowing into the air. Environmental activists feared that these strange colored emissions were the result of iodine in the incinerator, presumably from medical waste, which would release especially harmful chemicals into the air that had already caused health issues like heart disease and asthma. According to the EPA, about one in four children in Newark has asthma, compared to the national average of one in fifteen. Through decades of grassroots advocacy, Ironbound residents have continued to unite on the frontlines in the battle for a safe future, where environmental and human rights and health are protected as one.

Figure 8: Striking pink smoke coming from the Covanta incinerator. Credit: Earthjustice, 2019.

In the Field: Weeds as Collaborators and Bioindicators

Figure 9: Plants growing within the rubble directly atop where the Diamond Alkali factory once stood. Credit: Author, 2025.

The rubble is alive. Walking beside the fence line before I reach the river, I am in awe at the sheer amount of plant and animal life I witness, miraculous considering the site’s toxic history. This life is rebellious, bursting through the fence that prevents one from walking atop the gravel under which the remains of Diamond Alkali Co. are now buried. Through these plants, I see spontaneous ecologies of life that not only persist in these hazardous chemical conditions, but insist on their own futures. This communal recalcitrance will be necessary in an era of compounding environmental crises.

In these interstitial and ruderal ecologies, my fieldwork finds its home alongside the weedy patches that thrive on the roadside, envelop the train tracks, and sprout from the cracks of the sidewalk. In these disturbed grounds, ruderals are pioneers, surviving and thriving despite anthropogenic changes to their environments in the form of construction, fire, toxic chemicals, war, and floods.

My work traced the historical, political, and ecological lineages of the plant life at Diamond Alkali. I studied their persistent survival on these grounds to understand what they can teach us about communal resilience and adaptive governance in the face of climate crisis. From the ballast flora that travelled on colonial slave ships four hundred years ago to the spontaneous plant growth in a hyper-industrial part of Newark, each of these plants defies the prevailing ecological narratives that permeate the false borders and boundaries of dichotomies like “wild” and “cultivated,” or “native” and “invasive.” In this disruption of and resistance to categorization, these plants help us reimagine what multispecies survival and resilience can look like on a burning, chemically-contaminated, flooded, and aching planet.

Fieldwork

Coming into the light after exiting the dark train tunnel that connects New York and New Jersey, the industrial landscape is immediately illuminated. This is my second visit here, after an initial exploration on a frigid day in February. Now, the sun washes over the tall grasses—perhaps Miscanthus sinensis, or Maiden grass— that line the railroad tracks, seemingly undisturbed by the sprawling theme park of human industrial ingenuity that envelopes them: train tracks, smoke stacks, and hundreds of shipping containers. We depart the train at Newark and board the bus. After around fifteen stops, my partner and I are the only passengers who remain on the bus. The fragrant aromas of Brazilian pastries gradually turn into odors of burning garbage and diesel, signaling our departure from the residential and commercial part of Newark, as townhouses bleed seamlessly into warehouses that make up the industrial metropolis lining the Lower Passaic.

Planes fly loudly overhead in what seems like a carefully orchestrated rhythm, whirring every two minutes. The bus conveniently leaves me directly in front of the site. Walking to the riverbank, past the seemingly endless rows of trucks filled with goods from Amazon packages to animal feed, the site’s imperial and chemical past is haunting. Perhaps the starkest part of the site is its emptiness. Today, an empty, gravel-filled parking lot memorializes the site’s toxic history as the former Diamond Alkali Co. production facility. It is now a Superfund Site, teeming with weeds. 80-120 Lister Avenue has become a museum of artifacts where industrial waste and unexpected plant life coexist: concrete fragments, patches of moss, and wild vegetation mix as the occasional empty bag of Doritos sails down the river.

I arrive at the riverbank. It is murky and brown, and rank with the thick stench of sewage. Two ducks, seemingly unaware of what lies beneath them, float happily along. I carefully eye the large gravel pieces that trace the river. Every so often, I see a peek of green and flip the rocks over with a nitrile-gloved hand.

Walking along the bank of the toxic river, what struck me most about the site wasn’t the rubble or dereliction, but rather the insistent vitality. Despite the industrial decay, the area appeared to be relatively greener and more abundant than many cultivated gardens I’ve encountered in New Jersey or New York. Here, though, the plants have found homes in this space without cultivation, without permission or pruning. Even during my first visit in the midst of an intense frost period in February, I identified several species of grasses thriving despite the bitter cold weather and the toxic landscape. I returned in April to try to understand rhythms of resilience in periods of growth and decay. Flowering plants emerged for the first time in the spring, while others had braved the winter, weaving themselves into this living concrete fabric.

Within this fabric, I documented around 25 different species of flora. I encountered these plants within a half-mile radius of where the original Diamond Alkali building once stood. What I found was that most of the greenery at the site consisted of plants that are dismissed and branded as weeds: an impressive assemblage of native, invasive, and exotic species. Insects, birds, mice, ducks, bees, and rats were frequent visitors to the plants I observed. While many of them were classified as weeds as I had expected, I was surprised by how many of the plants I observed—around one-third—were actually natives or non-invasive. What does it mean to define something as a weed in a place that has already been shaped by human disturbance, yet stripped of its governance and order? Are weeds here still outsiders, or are they residents? To whom are they a disturbance? What are they invading?

Erigeron canadensis or horseweed, and Taraxacum officinale, or dandelion, were a couple of the plants that were resilient enough to populate the rubble that marked the actual site where the Diamond Alkali factory once stood. Horseweed is considered to be native to North America, and was the first weed species to become glyphosate resistant.^[37] While the dandelion was in full bloom, the horseweed’s bright yellow flowers had just begun to bud (see Figure 9 and title page.) Their resilience and color stood out in the seemingly never-ending beige of the gravel that hosted them.

One patch between the parking lot and the river was especially blanketed in green. The leaves were jagged around the edges, and after flipping its leaves over, the plant was immediately identifiable by its coat of thick white hairs: Artemesia vulgaris l., or common mugwort. The plant totally covered the site, appearing at nearly every corner I investigated. Known in the Middle Ages as the “mother of herbs,” mugwort has been central to the history of medicine for its centuries-long medicinal use in treating gastrointestinal and gynecological diseases, and was likely brought to the United States for its medicinal properties in the 1600s. Recent research has reported the plant’s “antioxidant, hypolipidemic, hepatoprotective, antispasmolytic, analgesic, estrogenic, cytotoxic, antibacterial, antifungal, hypotensive, and broncholytic” properties.^[38]

Crucially to the site, mugwort is incredibly tolerant to polluted and nutrient-poor living conditions. The herb has been studied for its ability to extract toxins, including heavy metals, from contaminated soils in a process called phytoremediation. This process is made possible by the removal of the contaminants from the soil through phytoextraction and the reduction of contaminant bioavailability through phytostabilization. One study showed that the plant was able to accumulate up to 70% of the cadmium present in contaminated soils. Despite these invaluable properties, mugwort is still condemned as a nuisance (likely due to its pollen’s role in causing hay fever) and invasive – seen as a threat to biodiversity and therefore violently battled with herbicidal chemicals across North America.

Figure 10: Large mugwort patch on the site. Credit: author, 2025.

Digging into the soil around the plant, I observed firsthand how the mugwort has propagated efficiently and rapidly through a complex underground rhizomatic system – a network of horizontal stems that connect plants to one another, communicating about and adapting to their environmental conditions.^[39] The rhizome as a philosophical concept, as theorized by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, refers to these biological systems as models for intertwined, non-hierarchical, evolving, and multi-origin multiplicities and connections. They reject the idea that one subject can be separated from a collective, and argue for a decentralized view of the world as dynamic and interconnected relational networks rather than fragmented or fixed entities. The spread of a rhizomatic plant is dependent on the assemblage of connections and emerging relationships the rhizome forms, rather than following a linear pattern of reproduction: “The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, [and] offshoots.” ^[40] Even when broken, miniscule residual fragments of the rhizome are able to regenerate their expansive stem networks.^[41] Mugwort’s remarkable ability to spread in the contaminated soils isn’t dictated by one singular stem or point of growth, but happens in the connections formed by the dissemination of its horizontal stem networks, disrupting established borders and territories. Plants like mugwort remind us that persisting in and adapting to extreme chemical or climatic conditions is not only a tool for survival, but an embodiment of collective resistance.

Figure 11: Rhizome structure pulled from the mugwort patch. Credit: Author, 2025.

Making a Weed

“Wherever man settles, the face of nature is changed. His domesticated animals and plants follow him; the woods become sparse; and animals shy away; his plants and seeds spread themselves around his habitation; rats, mice and insects move in under his roof; many kinds of swallow, finch, lark and partridge seek his care and enjoy, as guests, the fruits of his labour. In his gardens and fields a number of plants grow as weeds among the crops he has planted. They mix freely with the crops and share their fate. And where he no longer claims the entire area, his tenants estrange themselves from him and even the wild, where he has not set foot, changes its form.”

―  Adelbert von Chamisso. “Overview of the most useful and the most harmful plants found wild or cultivated in Northern Germany." Along with views on botany and the plant kingdom, 1827.

As a dual natural-cultural invention, producing an overarching definition of weeds is a tedious task. In order to properly remediate toxic ecosystems, we should look beyond the good plant vs. bad plant, native vs. alien, and natural vs. unnatural dichotomies humans have created and imposed on the natural world. Weeds shatter these false dichotomies. We can turn to the perspective of the Anishinaabe, which insists that all plants are kin. Through a human-plant relationship-based model, we can question how a so-called invasive plant arrived in a particular unfamiliar zone, and actively address the conditions that led to this status. Many of these species arrived as a result of anthropogenic disturbances, but can we really claim this process to be wholly unnatural? Humans and animals have unintentionally triggered the mass migration of plants and their seeds as long as they have existed on Earth. Tao Orion describes how, if we examine deep time, the history of the arrival of plants on land is itself an invasive one. ^[42]

Weeds have acted as a companion species to humans from the beginning of human civilization. Researchers’ discovery of “proto-weeds” on a twenty-three-thousand-year-old archaeological site—Ohalo II, which was adjacent to the Sea of Galilee and inhabited by hunter-gatherers^[43]—transformed our understanding of weeds and their origins, understood prior as having emerged with Neolithic Era agriculture. The researchers define weeds as synanthropic species, meaning that they evolved to live with humans, and as “plants that disrupt or alter the functioning and composition of natural ecosystems and human-altered environments.” Proto-weeds are “the first wild plants that entered and thrived in early human-affected habitats, which subsequently led to the evolution of weeds.”^[44] Archaeobotanical evidence from Ohalo II suggests that these synanthropic precursors to the weeds we know today were considered local wildings during the Terminal Pleistocene that lived within these “human-affected environments,” only later evolving into and functioning as weeds with the advent of agricultural systems. Here, we can understand that weeds are not a natural or inherent biological category, but a product of human history and interaction.

The weeds I see here on Lister Avenue are not mere accidents of nature or of industry. Rather, many of the species I see here–mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), shepherd’s purse (Capsella bursa pastoris), common reed (Phragmites australis)–each have expansive and entangled histories of migration and relationships with humans. Some of them are ballast flora, and travelled across the ocean in the sediment used to balance slave ships during the transatlantic slave trade. After a ship’s voyage, the ballast was dumped in the sand and soil of seaports, and then was often repurposed for use at construction sites. Seeds from that ballast dumping can stay dormant for centuries and then germinate years later, in the right conditions. These migrations reflect stories of people enslaved and displaced by imperial and colonial expansions. In her work “Seeds of Change,” Maria Thereza Alves looks at these weeds as historical, social, and ecological actors and indicators, as well as involuntary migrants in these violent histories. She asks, when do species and seeds actually become native? When does a plant become an “invasive weed,” an unwanted migrant?

Mission Impossible: Defining a Weed

Richard Mabey offers a particularly compelling way to understand weeds in the opening line of his book, Weeds: “Plants become weeds when they obstruct our plans, or our tidy maps of the world.”^[45] Without these neat maps and plans, weeds would just be plants. But there is nothing tidy, neat, or controlled at Diamond Alkali. If weeds do share one universal characteristic, it is their incredible ability to thrive in human-disturbed environments.

In research at Diamond Alkali, the line between what is a wilding and what is a weed became increasingly indistinguishable. As I observed them in abundance and read varying descriptions of them and their classifications in different cultural and ecological contexts, I found it difficult to define what was and wasn’t invasive. Some of the plants I encountered were considered native and ecologically beneficial in one region of a state, and invasive in a nearby one.

Ultimately, I conclude that weeds do not exist as a universal truth of nature, biology, or botany. What makes a weed different from any other plant is not constant, nor is it necessarily “natural,” but is dependent largely upon cultural, agroeconomic, and geographic determinants in complicated and ongoing conversation with one another. “Weed” is an inherently mutable category: what is a weed in one agricultural context might be cultivated for food and medicine elsewhere. For instance, the mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) I saw covering the site has historically been used medicinally in European and East Asian cultures. But here, even in a zone where it is not causing economic or agricultural disturbance, it would be classified as invasive and worthless. Many plants that are now of high importance in native ecologies were also once condemned as weeds.

A weed is created by what people want to procure from the land they believe they control. It makes sense then that 2,4-d and 2,4,5-t, the chemicals that comprise Agent Orange, have a history of agricultural use. Spraying these chemicals over farmland kept these so-called weeds at bay. During the Green Revolution after World War II, pesticides and herbicides were used to quell fears of an impending Malthusian doomsday, in which an arithmetically increasing agricultural yield would no longer be able to sustain an exponentially increasing global population, leading to mass starvation and, according to U.S. foreign policy officials, the rise of global communism. This legacy persists today, as over a billion gallons of herbicides are deployed annually across the globe. Despite this warlike attack on weeds, they rebel and persist. They adapt and resist their chemical demise.

Weeds as Models of Resilience

Diamond Alkali is a case study for ecosystemic survival. Urban spontaneous vegetation, while often dismissed and overlooked, is part of larger interconnected urban ecosystems and is often found on fraught terrains like construction sites, mines, in the ruins of war zones, and industrial areas. Despite these sites not offering environmental conditions that are typically conducive to hosting plant life, ruderal plant strategies like quick growth, high reproduction rates, high stress tolerance, and short life cycles allow these plants to quickly populate and thrive in highly disturbed sites.^[46]

The plants I observed at Diamond Alkali exhibited many of these critical adaptive strategies. In the face of worsening climate chaos, where increasing temperatures, violent storms, and chemical catastrophes will likely become the norm, all living beings will be required to adapt to changing planetary conditions. Here, weeds are not intruders, but survivors. As resilience-adapted plants, weeds offer us invaluable clues and insights into the future of life on our planet. These oft-misunderstood plants are oracles, offering us suggestions and indications of how flexibility, adaptability, and multispecies interdependence will be the determinants of what can live on a damaged planet.

Studies have demonstrated that weedy species’ flexibility makes them better suited than cultivated ones in responding to and enduring the hallmarks of climate change: increased temperatures, water and soil salinity, and changing weather and irrigation patterns. This phenological and physiological flexibility allows for quick shifts in response to the stressors of climate change. Additionally, these species perform crucial ecosystem services as first responders, particularly in urban and industrial contexts: reducing temperatures, sequestering atmospheric carbon, mitigating runoff, nourishing and housing urban wildlife, and generally maintaining biodiversity in major urban ecosystems.^[47][48] Along the New Jersey coastline, weeds quite literally hold the ground together, preventing worsening erosion during intense and increasingly frequent storms due to their strong, web-like root structures.^[49] These adaptive efforts are dependent not only upon biological processes, but also on interspecies relationships: weeds are constantly interacting with pollinators, humans, decomposers, soil, mycorrhizal fungi, and microbial communities that together foster this ecosystemic resilience.^[50] Despite these invaluable functions, weeds are widely regarded not only as rejectamenta but as a botanical enemy, an ecological outcast that is marginalized by the same powers that have neglected and harmed the human communities that, like the weeds, live in a toxic nightmare.

Political Ecology: Weeds as Remedial Collaborators

The parallels between the plant and human lives involved in the story of Diamond Alkali and the Ironbound district are easy to observe. Like the plant community at Diamond Alkali, the human community in Ironbound is largely made up of immigrants – a “mosaic of peoples from countries around the world.”^[51] It is one of the most densely populated regions of Newark. Members of the Ironbound community are predominantly working-class and people of color, who, for four decades, have been forced to tolerate living in one of the most contaminated environments in the US. Like the weeds that miraculously line the sidewalks in the neighborhood, the community persists and resists under ecosystems and systems of governance that are not made to support or protect them: the air is thick with pollution, the soils are contaminated with toxic herbicides and their health has been continuously put in jeopardy due to governmental and corporate negligence and years of environmental racism. Still, the community remains. They adapt. They fight passionately for their home, for a clean environment, for safe air to breathe and toxin-free soil to plant gardens in – for interconnected human and environmental health and rights. Ecological and social resilience converge here.

Studying the plants growing here goes beyond an ecological inquiry – it is an exploration of the politics of survival. Here, weeds cannot be separated from the people of Newark, or separated from histories of chemical-fueled imperialism, the environmental racism and injustice, or the industrial violence that have together molded the site. What can be learned from the weeds here, when we move past branding them as detritus and begin recognizing them as collaborators and mutual stakeholders in our shared futures?

Effective collaboration with ruderal species requires that we reimagine the ways we have historically defined nature, culture, worth, and resilience. Boundaries between the natural and cultural, urban and wild, become permeable and porous in the cracks of the sidewalk and in the potential to create new relationships and care practices with our weedy neighbors, beyond regimes of herbicidal warfare. Nature is not some abstract elsewhere. It is here amidst industrial decay, rubble, and rust – it is in the weeds and the mosses that erupt through the concrete. Donna Haraway reminds us that you need not leave the city and go to a secluded wilderness to be in nature; we are continuously entangled with and encountering it every day and everywhere, even in a bustling brick metropolis or in toxic industrial ruins.^[52]

The ecologies in Diamond Alkali and similar unmanaged urban and industrial spaces illuminate ways of living that are not regulated, cultivated, or human-dominated, yet still, they are not entirely disorderly. Here, we can observe a new type of order, one that exists beyond prevailing paradigms of ecological purity: intertwining social-ecological systems mirror not only the chaos, but the intimate dynamism and collaboration of plant, human, animal, and fungal life that is necessary to survive amidst chemical contaminations and ecosystemic crises, like those present at Diamond Alkali.

Ruderal Ecology

Ruderal ecology refers to life that thrives in areas of intense human involvement, outside of utility for human purposes: management, cultivation, or extraction. The word has its origins in the Latin word, rudus, which means rubble. This ecological approach is helpful in understanding where these boundary-defying, classification-resisting, less romantic natures that include weeds fit into our conceptions of the natural world and in future disturbed ecologies.

Persistence, resiliency, and recalcitrance. These characteristics that guide my interests in weeds, and make them uniquely prolific in ruderal conditions like those at Diamond Alkali, are the same reasons that humans worldwide have waged chemical warfare in an attempt to decimate them. Despite chemical contamination and industrial decay, the concrete and gravel at Diamond Alkali is teeming with life. What can life at a toxic former chemical weapon production facility tell us about urban ecologies, and more generally about the roles of nature in a post-capitalist, post-industrial, ecologically-destroyed world?

The field of ruderal ecology emerged from botanists’ studies of Berlin’s ecology after World War II. As Bettina Stoetzer describes in her book, Ruderal City, botanists were shocked by the rapid resurgence of life that shot through Berlin’s rubble-laden necropolis,^[53] largely characterized by the lingering death and destruction after the war. Much of what blossomed in this dereliction would have been understood to be a weed in a cultivated or agricultural context. The weeds that emerged and thrived in these “blasted landscapes” came from all over the world, as German cities became sites of global human and plant contact during the war – some seeds migrated across borders on the soles of soldiers’ boots.

Figure 12: ruderal vegetation at an abandoned commercial site, Nordgüterbahnhof. Credit: Bernd Machatzi.

Sticky goosefoot, likely originally hailing from Istanbul, was one of these plants that came to thrive in the rubble, and eventually permanently wove itselfim into the urban botanical fabric of Berlin. These plant travelers, like goosefoot, chickweed, and dandelion, uprooted Nazi plans for “pure” human racial and spatial ordering and categorization that isolated Germany and its ecologies from the rest of the globe. Blooming in city centers, the travelling ruderal plants rebelled and “unsettled ideas about who or what belongs, and which communities are considered ‘out of place,’”^[54] and opposed the postwar cultural imagination of a city as a hub for culture and humanity but wholly separate from nature.

Facing starvation, Berliners began to forage, forging new relationships with these newcomers, finding sustenance in them as a food source. These “unlikely neighbors” showed how life can return to a war-torn space, but that life would transcend and reject the invented categories governing who and what belongs. Like Berlin, Newark’s ecology is ruderal. It is molded by global histories of migration, extraction, exploitation, othering, and resistance. In these landscapes, ruderal ecology isn’t just about plants, but about collaboration and coevolution during times of crisis.

Categorizing, Naming, and Othering: Political Taxonomies of Weeds

One question I have grappled with throughout my research was the political and often militaristic language used to describe weedy species. In reading about many of the plants I encountered, I came across botanical and ecological articles that regularly described the plants using language like: “invasive,” “alien,” “disruptive,” “non-native,” or just outright “bad” species. These labels are not neutral, rather, they mirror societal anxieties about migration as a disruption to longstanding political and social ordering. As Bruno Latour explains in the introductory description of his book, A Book of the Body Politic Connecting Biology, Politics and Social Theory, this is a textbook case of “political science […] borrowing from biology what biologists borrow from political theory.”^[55]

In “Like a Tumbleweed in Eden,” Banu Subramaniam notes that the xenophobic narratives that pervade discourse about migrating plants and people are strikingly similar: both groups are accused of “crowd[ing] out native plants and animals, spread[ing] disease, damag[ing] crops, […] taking over everything.”^[56] These labels do not merely work to classify plants and humans, but also to justify an overarching fear of an outsider, and their subsequent ostracization, removal, and punishment. Subramaniam further draws similarities between the war on terror and work within the fields of invasion biology and ecology, suggesting that

“Homeland Security and invasive species activists do very similar work in calling for the naming of the foreign as a threat. As human anti-immigration activists have increasingly called for identifying and “deporting” human immigrants, many environmentalist groups have also called for identifying and exterminating foreign and invasive species. Both sides agree that only a fraction of the “foreign” are harmful, and when they are, all agree they can be very destructive and need to be reined in. But can you tell the difference? The crux of the issue is: how do you tell which “alien” will become “invasive”? Nip it in the bud, some biologists say. Catch it before it becomes a problem. Similarly, how do you tell which “alien” will become the “terrorist”? Again, immigration activists suggest nipping it in the bud— proactively targeting particular nations and racially profiling individuals, whether they are citizens or not.”^[57]

In this context, in the absence of human-invented and patrolled borders, there is no illegal migrant, and in the absence of human-disturbed environments, there are no “alien” or “invasive” species or weeds.

This process of villainization is not new. J.C. Loudon, a 19^th century gardener and writer, explicitly encouraged his readers to marginalize weedy plants as they did humans. He urged them to: “compare plants with men, consider aboriginal species [weeds or wild plants] as mere savages, and botanical species [cultivated plants] as civilised beings.” Systems of naming and categorization do not exist in a linguistic vacuum – they are used to create and shape policies, governance, gardens, and scientific knowledge. Ideas of who and what belong in a particular environment span these scientific, biological, and political contexts. In the Ironbound, these paradigms are foundational in shaping the entangled lives of plants and people.

As Michel Foucault argues in The Order of Things, politics, power, and language are inseparable ^[58] from the creation of scientific knowledge and truthmaking. This is a crucial insight for understanding the categorizations and definitions of weeds, which are grounded in political taxonomies: labels, names, and categories are not neutral or natural. Describing a plant as a weed is not a straightforward scientific categorization, but a continuation of larger political and social discourse around controlling who and what belongs, and who and what are deemed threats. The origins of these politically charged labels for plants and people can be traced back to Enlightenment-era systems of classification through Carl Linnaeus’ 1735 “Systema Naturæ” and the creation of taxonomy, or the categorizing and systematizing of all life. At the time, scientific and botanical explorations were central tools for imperial expansion, in search of new lands with new natural resources to commercially exploit. Taxonomy was also used to categorize humans into four subsets of the human species, by color, geography, and noted character traits: Americanus rubescens, Europaeus albus, Asiaticus fuscus, and Africanus niger.^[59] Europeans were placed at the top of this racial taxonomy, which systematized and naturalized differentiation between races, and would be used to justify subsequent genocide, xenophobia, dehumanization, eugenics, and colonialism, all under the guise of scientific ordering. Naming and classifying weeds and people are not merely technical, botanical, or biological choices and processes, but deeply political ones.

Chapter Rhizomatic Futures: A Ruderal Survival Guide

“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”― Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

While the Diamond Alkali Superfund Site is an environmental bruise on New Jersey’s landscape, it is also a living, breathing, growing archive. In this archive, the toxic soils, sickened bodies, chemically-tainted waters, and regenerating weeds live to tell stories of brutal imperialism, environmental injustice and racism, and industrial greed and capitalism. Amidst devastation, contamination, and concrete, life emerges and persists. Mugwort quietly weaves itself into the soil through its underground rhizomes. Common reeds nurse the toxic and neglected Passaic. Yellow horseweeds burst through the gravel of the capped and dredged chemical weapons facility like flowers on a gravestone. Historically marginalized as nuisances and disturbances, these weedy plants are the first to return to this site, rebuilding and remediating it from below.

The communities enveloping this site – primarily working-class people, immigrants, and people of color – endured kindred legacies of othering, neglect, and resistance. Ironbound residents have spent decades inhaling toxic breaths, growing vegetables in the poisoned soils of backyard gardens, and rallying to have their voices heard. In a neighborhood deemed disposable, neighbors organize, protest, and insist upon their collective futures. Generations in Vietnam have been haunted by the toxic ghosts of Agent Orange and American imperialism – it lingers in rice paddies, human bodies, and serene mangroves.

Weeds growing at Diamond Alkali are inseparable from these human histories and futures. They are actors collaborating within the same ecological stories of violence and unrelenting resilience. As Anna Tsing notes, contamination is itself a form of collaboration:

“We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds – and new directions – may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option.”^[60]

Our collective future on a damaged and dangerous planet necessitates this messy collaboration, coevolution, and solidarity. It requires the acknowledgement of the shared stories and struggles across life forms – human and nonhuman. As we face worsening climate chaos, weeds show us how resilience cannot emerge from perceived purity or isolation but rather from a process of collaboration and adaptation. It requires entanglement with and inquiry of our environments and the living beings within them; together, finding new routes for our roots underneath the rubble. In doing this, epistemic divides between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, invasive and native, are shattered.

Weeds’ adaptive ingenuity, like their rhizome networks, which allow them to persist in chemically ruinous terrains, reflects the complicated and political survival strategies practiced by the Ironbound District community. They fight and resist polluting powers rhizomatically: not in an individual uprising but in perennial protests and strong, sprawling relationships. They survive through building horizontal, decentralized yet cohesive communities. They spread their roots while knocking on doors, preparing to join, and burst through the surface as strong stems, making themselves and the violence they face visible through protest. They forge powerful collaborations – between scientists and lawyers, children and elderly people, Spanish and English speakers, plants and poets – each node united by a shared rhizome that roots them in the soils of the Ironbound.

When weeds are torn from the soil or sprayed with herbicides, they almost always return.^[61] Through rhizomes and stolons, weeds can continue to reproduce despite fragmentation that severs and removes them from above. From the soil’s surface, they appear invisible, but networks continue to expand below ground, slowly regenerating after disturbance. This is many farmers’ quotidian nightmare. And for those who fight to maintain the status quo and preserve power rather than the planet, it is an existential threat. In both biological and political contexts, regeneration is a perpetual process of regrowth and endurance through kinship and multiplicity. Weeds and their rhizomes are not merely abstract allegories but living blueprints for collective survival.

Appendix A: Standard Operating Procedure – Hazardous Chemicals

The chemicals present in the Lower Passaic are highly hazardous to aquatic and land, plant and human life alike. Therefore, it was crucial to my study of the area that I took necessary safety precautions and training before engaging in any work on-site. I obtained certification through the SciShield NYU hazardous waste training that complies with EPA, NYU, FDNY, and NYSDEC regulations. Despite not working with large, highly-concentrated or isolated chemicals for extended periods of time, I meticulously read and abided by the SciShield Safety Data Sheet (SDS) guidelines and precautions for working with chemicals including: wearing adequate personal protective equipment (protective nitrile gloves, goggles, a face mask, long sleeves, and waterproofed close-toed shoes), only remaining on the site for the duration of less than one hour at a time to avert any risks of long term exposure, and thoroughly washing my hands, clothes, and body upon returning home from the site. I arrived at the site with all the necessary PPE as well as any first aid materials that could be necessary in case of emergency, such as a water bottle to flush my eyes or skin in case of accidental exposure. I never travelled to the site unaccompanied, and received additional precautionary guidance from an EPA employee who worked on this site as a monitoring body. I carefully monitored any potentially problematic symptoms, aware that I would immediately vacate the site if I ever began to feel skin or eye irritation, dizziness, nausea, shortness of breath, or drowsiness, which I thankfully did not experience.

Standard Operating Procedure                                       

 Field Observation and Ecological Survey of Ruderal Plant Communities at Former Agent Orange Site

This standard operating procedure (SOP) outlines required methods to be used by researchers during this outlined experiment or process. These practices and procedures are intended to provide a safe working environment, promote a culture of forward-thinking risk mitigation, and to promote compliance with federal, state, and local regulations.

APPLICABILITY

This SOP is for processes, experiments, or manipulations that pose moderate risks and that call for protective steps beyond those dictated by accepted laboratory standards. They are intended to limit the potential for injury, equipment damage, or environmental impact

RESPONSIBILITIES

Researchers/Undergraduate Students

• Implement and follow minimum working protection found in this document.
• Complete appropriate safety training.
• Wear appropriate personal protective equipment that includes but may not be limited to gloves and eye protection in the field.
• Report all near misses, incidents, and unsafe acts or conditions to supervisor.
• Follow minimum working protection found in this document.

Appendix B: SciShield Initial Hazardous Waste Training Certificate

Appendix C: Site Plant Documentation

Appendix D: Aerial View of Site and Plants Studied

Plants documented at and around 80-120 Lister Ave. The area highlighted in purple marks the original Dimond Alkali Co. factory building, now demolished and capped by the EPA. Screenshot from iNaturalist application.

Appendix E: Ironbound Demographic Data and Charts

GIS and statistical data sourced from the EPA’s now-deleted EJ Screen.

Appendix F: Additional Archival Images

Lois Gibbs, an activist at the forefront of the toxic cleanup of Love Canal, speaking at an ICATW meeting. Credit: Picturing Justice, the Ironbound Community Corporation Archives. Year unknown.

Children in Ironbound protesting the continued dioxin pollution in their neighborhood. Credit: Picturing Justice, the Ironbound Community Corporation Archives.

Notes:

Since the election of Donald Trump, many critical federal environmental datasets and archival materials that I relied on for my research have continued to disappear. Key documentation that once tracked toxic contamination in and outside of the Diamond Alkali – once sourced through FEMA (Newark Ironbound Resiliency Hub), USAID, and EPA websites – have now been removed or are otherwise inaccessible. One significant loss was the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screen (EJ Screen), which once hosted decades of ARCGIS maps detailing environmental data, toxic pollution levels, air quality, and included important demographic data. I replaced this source with the Public Environmental Data Partners’ copy of the site. Whenever possible, I used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to access these deleted documents. These alternatives are reflected in my citations.

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1. Donna J. Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” e-flux 75 (September 2016) ↑

2. Deleuze & Guattari, “A thousand plateaus.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 21, 1987. ↑

3. Department of Veterans Affairs, REPORT TO SECRETARY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS ON THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN ADVERSE HEALTH EFFECTS AND EXPOSURE TO AGENT ORANGE, 1990. ↑

4. Diamond Alkali Company was later renamed “Diamond Shamrock Corporation” after a merger with Shamrock Oil and Gas, and has been called “Occidental Chemical Corporation” since 1987. This paper may use these names interchangeably or depending on the temporal context. ↑

5. Department of Veterans Affairs, “ASSOCIATION BETWEEN ADVERSE HEALTH EFFECTS AND EXPOSURE TO AGENT ORANGE,” 1990. ↑

6. To this day, disability payments to ill veterans cost the federal government billions of dollars annually. ↑

7. In 1992, former workers at the Diamond Alkali plant in the Ironbound District who faced health issues because of the contamination sued the company for damage, ending in a one-million-dollar settlement for the 72 plaintiffs. ↑

8. Richard Severo, "Vietnam Veteran's Family Vows to Continue His Fight," The New York Times, December 19, 1978, https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/19/archives/vietnam-veterans-family-vows-to-continue-his-fight-friends-pledge.html. ↑

9. Stellman et al. “The Extent and Patterns of Usage of Agent Orange and Other Herbicides in Vietnam.” ↑

10. Jessica Greene et al, "Basis for a proposed reference dose (RfD) for dioxin of 1-10 pg/kg-day: a weight of evidence evaluation of the human and animal studies." Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health Part B: Critical Reviews 6, no. 2 (2003): 115-159. ↑

11. Nhung, Nguyen Thi Hong et al. “A Review of Soil Contaminated with Dioxins and Biodegradation Technologies: Current Status and Future Prospects.” ↑

12. Ibid. ↑

13. Centers for Disease Control (US). Protocol for epidemiologic studies of the health of Vietnam veterans. The Centers, 1983. ↑

14. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, "Vietnam War Exposures” https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/wars-operations/vietnam-war.asp↑

15. Arnold Schecter et al. "Agent Orange and the Vietnamese: the persistence of elevated dioxin levels in human tissues." American journal of public health 85, no. 4 (1995): 516-522. ↑

16. Olson and Wright. “Long-Term Fate of Agent Orange and Dioxin TCDD Contaminated Soils and Sediments in Vietnam Hotspots.” Open Journal of Soil Science, 1-34, 2019. ↑

17. United States Agency for International Development. “Environmental

    Assessment of Dioxin Contamination at Bien Hoa Airbase. Environmental Assessment

    in Compliance with 22 CFR 216-Final,” 870. 2016. ↑

18. These remediation efforts were abruptly stopped in February, 2025, due to the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to USAID, putting thousands of people’s health and safety in jeopardy. ↑

19. Olson and Wright. “Long-Term Fate of Agent Orange and Dioxin TCDD Contaminated Soils and Sediments in Vietnam Hotspots.” ↑

20. Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring,” 7-9, 1962. ↑

21. Diamond Shamrock Chemicals Co. v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co., 258 N.J. Super. 167 (App. Div. 1992). ↑

22. PBS, America’s Biggest Crime Scene. Peril & Promise, Episode 2. Aired May 3, 2022. ↑

23. “People Organize Protection from Deadly Dioxin,” Ironbound Voices (Newark, NJ), August, 1983. ↑

24. Ironbound Health Rights Advisory Commission v. Diamond Shamrock Chemical Co., 216 N.J. Super. 166, 523 A.2d 250 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 1987). ↑

25. Christopher Dagget, “Record of Decision Remedial Alternative Selection” (US Environmental Protection Agency, 1987) ↑

26. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Perspectives in Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Health- Risk Estimates for 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin in Soil." Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 1984.

    ↑

27. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. EPA Research Accomplishments: Annual Report of the Environmental Research Centers and Laboratories, Fiscal Year 1974. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975, II-9. https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/tiff2png.cgi/2000EQEP.PNG. ↑

28. Clark, Gagliardi & Miller. Memorandum referencing U.S. Public Health Service, 1963. ↑

29. National Lawyers Guild International Committee, Agent Orange and the Vietnam War: Magnitude and Consequences (New York: National Lawyers Guild, 2014), https://www.nlginternational.org/report/Agent_Orange_Flyer.pdf. ↑

30. Plaintiffs' Brief on Governmental Knowledge, In re "Agent Orange" Product Liability Litigation, MDL No. 381, 1983. ↑

31. Ibid.↑

32. The government was also aware of the weapon’s toxic contamination. Dr. James Clary, the former senior scientist for the military in the Chemical Weapons Branch acknowledged their awareness, writing: “When we initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the military formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the civilian version due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture. However, because the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned.” ↑

33. Clark, Memorandum referencing U.S. Public Health Service, National Clearinghouse for Poison Control Centers Bulletin 1963. ↑

34. Julie Winkour, “The Sacrifice Zone,” Talking Eyes Media, 2020. 32 minutes. ↑

35. Philip Shabecoff, “Threat Posed by Dioxin Subject of Growing Fear,” New York Times, February 12, 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/12/us/threat-posed-by-dioxin-subject-of-growing-fear.html. ↑

36. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “How Superfund Cleans Up Sediment Sites,” last modified October 19, 2023 ↑

37. Bob Hartzler, “Status and Concerns of Glyphosate Resistance,” Integrated Crop Management News, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, 2005. ↑

38. Halina Ekiert, et al. 2020. "Significance of Artemisia Vulgaris L. (Common Mugwort) in the History of Medicine and Its Possible Contemporary Applications Substantiated by Phytochemical and Pharmacological Studies" Molecules 25, no. 19: 4415. https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules25194415 ↑

39. Hongfei Li et al, "How Roots and Shoots Communicate through Stressful Times." 2021 ↑

40. Deleuze & Guattari, “A thousand plateaus.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 21, 1987. ↑

41. William E. Klingeman, Darren K. Robinson, Gary L. McDaniel; Regeneration of Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) from Rhizome Sections in Sand, Pine Bark, and Soil Substrates. Journal of Environmental Horticulture 1 September 2004; 22 (3): 139–143. ↑

42. Tao Orion, Beyond the war on invasive species: A permaculture approach to ecosystem restoration, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015. ↑

43. Snir et al. “The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming.” PloS one vol. 10,7 e0131422. 22 Jul. 2015. ↑

44. Ibid.↑

45. Richard Mabey, Weeds: How vagabond plants gatecrashed civilisation and changed the way we think about nature. Profile Books, 2010. ↑

46. J. Phillip Grime, “Plant Strategies, Vegetation Processes, and Ecosystem Properties,” 2001. ↑

47. Guo et al. "Response of ruderal species diversity to an urban environment: implications for conservation and management." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. ↑

48. Robinson and Lundholm, “Ecosystem services provided by urban spontaneous vegetation.” Urban Ecosystems. 2012, 15, 545–557 ↑

49. Squatriti, Paolo. “Introduction.” Chapter. In Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750–900, 1–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. ↑

50. Jens Kattge et al. “TRY – a global database of plant traits, Global Change Biology.” 2011. ↑

51. Ironbound Community Corporation, “Our Community,” Ironbound Community Corporation, https://ironboundcc.org/our-community/↑

52. P.K. Jamison, "No Eden Under Glass: A Discussion with Donna Haraway," Feminist Teacher Vol. 6 No. 2, 13, 1992. ↑

53. Bettina Stoetzer, Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin, 2022, 177. ↑

54. Bettina Stoetzer, Ruderal City, 2022. ↑

55. Bruno Latour, A Book of the Body Politic: Connecting Biology, Politics, and Social Theory: San Giorgio Dialogue 2017. Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 2020. ↑

56. Nancy Tomes, “The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now,” American Journal of Public Health 90, no. 2 (2000): 191–199, quoted in Subramaniam, Banu. 2019. "Like a Tumbleweed in Eden: The Diasporic Lives of Concepts." Contributions to the History of Concepts, 12. ↑

57. Banu Subramaniam, 2019. "Like a Tumbleweed in Eden,” 13. ↑

58. Michel Foucault, “Classifying” in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1994. ↑

59. Carl Linnaeus, “Systema Naturæ,” 1735. ↑

60. ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING, “Contamination as Collaboration.” In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 27–35. Princeton University Press, 2015 ↑

61. Solèmne Skorupinski et al., "Rhizome Fragment Weight and Density of Competing Shoots Determine Belowground Regrowth of Elymus repens," Weed Research, 2024. ↑