Community environmental memory and emotion on social media: reading ecological grief,longing,and critique in the Birmingham,Alabama Subreddit

Abstract

In this piece, I attend to the entanglements of community environmental memory, emotion, and pop cultural referentiality as they take shape on Reddit, a discussion-based social media platform. I remix Reddit posts to develop a cultural-geographic practice of interpreting the hauntings of industrial contamination and environmental injustice in Tarrant, Alabama, a de/industrial community bordering Birmingham that hosts one of the largest foundry coke production facilities in the United States. I reflect on what these digital conversations illuminate about environmental memory and the complex range of emotions implicated in contending with ecological degradation. I situate my reflections within scholarship on memory and place and Seymour’s conception of ‘bad environmentalism’ and conclude that digital platforms such as Reddit host vibrant tapestries of community environmental memory and engender complex affective discussions surrounding place and socioecological degradation.

Introduction and background: physical and digital hauntings

Whenever I drive by the foundry coke production plant in Tarrant, Alabama, just next to Birmingham, on the way to my parents’ home, I see the landscape as it looks, layers of history etched across it, and the place as it might become. I dwell with the odor and the noxious fumes that emerge from the facility, as I watch the flares menacingly illuminate the night sky. I think of the long history of legal complaints and action coordinated by local grassroots and legal advocacy organizations, ¹ as well as the testimonies of local residents which have sought to draw attention to the pollution present in the air and soil of North Birmingham and adjacent Tarrant, Alabama. ² These are the hauntings, remains, and sordid afterlives of the interconnected industrial metal and mining economies of Birmingham, Alabama, a city in the Deep South that geographer Bobby Wilson has called ‘America’s Johannesburg’. ³

As a geographer who grew up in and around Birmingham with a longstanding interest in the digital lives of environment and climate, I recently found myself perusing threads about Birmingham and Tarrant on the social media site Reddit. I was surprised to encounter interesting expressions of memory, humor, and complex emotions. It is from this initial encounter that I reflect on the methodological potential of social media platforms like Reddit as archives of community environmental memory, repositories of ecological emotion, and ultimately, sites of cultural geographic expression and analysis.

I began to experiment with remixing Reddit posts to further explore what I am coming to think of as the interlinked physical and digital hauntings of industrial pollution and environmental injustice in a de/industrial community. In what follows, I attend to the multiplicities of place de/attachment and community environmental memory as they manifest on Reddit discussion boards. As repositories of everyday digital discourse, I content that Reddit forums offer insight into community environmental memory as a complex tapestry of stories shaded by multifaceted emotions including disgust, grief, mourning, ⁴ and a wistful longing amid what feel to be intractable structural conditions of environmental injustice. These emotions offer productive counterpoints to the dominant emotional palette of environmentalist discourse defined by ‘dour, self-righteous, sentimental, or apocalyptic tones’. ⁵ Through compositions stitched together from Reddit threads surrounding the Tarrant community adjacent to North Birmingham, Alabama, this piece aims to illuminate how affect and memory animate political, structural, and moral critique of socioecological power relations characterizing multi-scalar environmental injustice in the Anthropocene. This piece further demonstrates the methodological potential of creatively (re)interpreting social media data to investigate cultural geographies.

Community environmental memory and ecological emotions in the digital discussion of Tarrant, Alabama

Tarrant is a majority-minority community adjacent to North Birmingham that hosts one of the country’s largest foundry coke production facilities, ABC Coke, a subsidiary of Drummond company. The racialized industrial development of Birmingham, Alabama is well-documented in geographic scholarship ⁶ and the toxic afterlives of industry ⁷ are imprinted across the medical records and health conditions of generations of residents. The economic and infrastructural remnants of (de)industrialization continue to characterize the landscapes of Tarrant and Birmingham. ⁸

As communities increasingly contend with the emotional and affective dimensions of escalating climate and environmental losses, forms of ‘social memory’ are critical elements of socioecological resilience. ⁹ Social memory is often understood as being transmitted intergenerationally through practices including ‘rites, traditions, and social learning practices’. ¹⁰ Another approach to conceptualizing memory emerges in memory studies and geography in relation to contested social memory of social movements and political change, such as the U.S. civil rights movement. ¹¹ In this literature, memory is understood as political, performative, and spatial. For many communities, ‘rearticulating memory’ is a way of mapping occluded structural power relations, drawing attention to intergenerational injustices, and ultimately reformulating social and spatial connections to enliven the possibility of different futures. ¹² Scholars in geography and other disciplines have called for attention to cultural, educational, political, and spatial practices of ‘memory-work’ ¹³ as a way of opening up emotionally and politically challenging conversations on the memorialization of violent regimes and figures ¹⁴ and a way of more sensitively and ethically recreating ‘wounded cities’ that carry multivalent meanings to residents and community members but remain scarred by past injustices. ¹⁵ Moreover, scholars are increasingly wondering what types of ‘environmental commemoration’ practices may emerge to meet the growing losses of the Anthropocene. Environmental commemoration refers to a set of ritual and public practices that recognize the pervasiveness of extant environmental grief and open possibilities to more deeply engage with the affective entanglements of moribund ecologies. ¹⁶

However, the extent to which practices of everyday ecological re-membering take place on social media is comparatively under-explored. As scholars of social media have noted, one of the significant reorganizations of the digital age is that the interpersonal, pop-cultural, everyday and banal become entwined with the political, extraordinary, and outrageous. ¹⁷ This is locally evidenced by the current Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin’s recent hosting of an ‘Ask me Anything’ session on Reddit, that reputedly involved discussion of subjects as varied as ‘crime, cybersecurity, potholes’ and ‘wild dogs’. ¹⁸ Reddit threads and subreddits are saturated with humor, ¹⁹ irony, and the elements of what Seymour might conceptualize as a ‘low environmental culture’ ²⁰ in which pop cultural references are interwoven with affects like mourning, loss, and disgust in moving mosaics of community environmental memory. Often invoking place-based critiques of corruption and injustice, the community environmental memory I explore on Reddit encodes complex feelings, unlikely hopes, and grief about the socio-environmental-economic trajectories of Tarrant, the broader context of Birmingham and the U.S. South more generally. I turn now to compositions made from the Reddit posts.

‘What’s burning?’: ecological wondering and existential questioning

 “What’s burning” ²¹

 “Our will to live?”

 “Pretty sure that’s the fire from the large tower at the concrete (coal? Other rocks?) refinery on highway 79 in scenic Tarrant . . .”

 “My office hopefully”

 “The eye of Sauron burns bright in the hills of Tarrant almost every day and night, atop his tower at the ABC coke plant”

 “used to look @ it from my porch and wonder what it was then drove past it one day and was like holy shit THE FLAME.”

 “Not sure . . . it still looks really bad”

 “Lol if you lived near there I’d be pursuing a lawsuit. That’s a diiiiiirty company. . .”

 “I been . . . working in bham for 26 years and idk if I’ve ever seen that flame not flicking”

 “That’s terrible for us to breathe”

Here, I present the first of two remixed Reddit threads that distill digital conversations that took place from 2024 to 2025. In this thread, the anonymity of environmental injustice in Tarrant manifests in a complex wondering, expressed by one Reddit user asking ‘what’s burning?’ accompanied by a picture of Birmingham framed by fire and smoke emanating from a nearby industrial facility. This inquiry creates an opening for responders to tap into pop culture references, memories, lived experiences, and dark humor in offering context and commentary, whether likening Tarrant to the heavily industrial and polluted land of Mordor from the Lord of the Rings books and films, or inflecting the conversation with a decidedly existential bent suggesting that the visible flame represented ‘our will to live?’. This is not the variety of ecological wonder you might expect to encounter in a rapturous description of a scenic vista, but an eerie, open-ended ecological wondering coupled with an existential questioning that speaks to the occluded relations of power and production that juxtapose visible environmental harm and neglect with the high-carbon normalcy of carrying on the day to day amid industrial pollution (e.g. ‘my office hopefully . . .’).

‘Get smart, Tarrant!’: power, community memory, disgust, and sociopolitical critique

“What’s with people’s general disgust with Tarrant? Every time I post my event . . . all I get is ‘ew Tarrant’ or ‘Tarrant, really?’”

 “Basically, the big old companies in town have polluted it to fuck and back. I work in Tarrant and every single morning, I pass that ABC Coke plant billowing noxious smoke, that flame of Mordor constantly burning as a very real reminder that I’m driving into hell.”

“The emissions go wherever the wind blows. The soil in Tarrant proper is just as fucked as the site immediately across the railroad tracks, if not more.”

 “Tarrant is rough dood. Rich folks made it shitty on purpose, and working there breathing that air and drinking that water is probably taking time off my life . . .”

 “Tarrant is one big sad story that, in my opinion, summarizes Alabama’s dilemma. Alabama hates it’s working poor and we’re all too often left voiceless.”

“That’s the whole point–the EPA was going to expand the superfund site to include Tarrant (or make it its own site), and Drummond and other Really Bad People lobbied, bribed, Set up a greenwashing campaign called Get Smart Tarrant, etc to make sure that DIDN’T HAPPEN.”

 “You can see how the pollution has discolored some of the homes and the grass”

“From what I understand these big industrious chemical/coke/coal slag companies essentially bought the town. It’s working class inhabitants complain and petition the city for change in policy regarding the pollution but the folks from ABC Coke just pay the fines and keep producing.”

 “Good food out that way. Good people out that way. It has it’s problems but as far as crime and poverty, who doesn’t? Tarrant’s problem, however, is very multi faceted. Very complex. The owners of these companies essentially own the city . . .”

 “Tarrant’s pollution problems are BIRMINGHAM’S pollution problems.”

“It’s basically an industrial wasteland . . . a great location for a post apocalyptic movie”

 “These company owners will see a hell if there is one.”

 “My grandmother lives there. My parents were raised there and I spent a lot of time there as a kid in the eighties.”

 “It’s home to me and it sucks to see so many people talking bad about it because a lot of good folks live and grew up there”

The thread remixed above expresses interest in the ecological disgust that often surrounds local reactions to Tarrant. Thinking with this sense of disgust as an affective-ethical expression is a productive way to understand the Anthropocene as a sensory phenomenon that animates visceral reactions with political, ethical, and aesthetic layers. ²² The afterlives of industrial residue continue to weave their ways into the cells and airways of community members and the internet posts of Reddit users in the form of disgust that is both embodied and animating of ethical-political critique. The story of Tarrant that emerges across the Reddit threads is complicated, messy, tragic, and mournful. As many users mention, reporting suggests that when the North Birmingham Superfund site was under consideration for expansion into Tarrant, corporate executives and lawmakers conspired to ensure that this did not happen to prevent the company from being named a partially responsible party with financial responsibility. ²³ For Reddit users, fragments of community environmental memory recount the broad outlines of this story with disgust, a disgust that also forms a critique of the ecological degradation of the city, conceptualizes it as a function of consolidated political-economic power and carelessness, and attends to the embodied impacts of this neglect while also producing a sense of the impossibility of a Tarrant free of industrial pollution (e.g. ‘Tarrant is rough dood. Rich folks made it shitty on purpose, and working there breathing that air and drinking that water is probably taking time off my life . . .’). Still others engage lived experience to articulate a complex and plaintive longing amid a sense of place grounded in community environmental memory (e.g. ‘Good people out that way’, ‘It’s home to me and it sucks to see so many people talking bad about it’).

Conclusion

“Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.” Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Within geography, the methodological potential of working with Reddit discussions (and other social media sites) as expressions of collective spatial sensibilities, knowledges, and articulations is just beginning to be recognized. ²⁴ Informed by cultural geography, this piece models a creative practice of engaging with Reddit threads as sites of community environmental memory, emotion, and critique. Layered in pop cultural intertextuality and affective ambivalence, the spectral presences of environmental injustice haunt the pages of the Birmingham, Alabama subreddit as users collectively compose a sort of community environmental memory. Through the discussion forums on Reddit, people messily make sense of the contradictions, histories, complexities, and eeriness of contemporary socio-ecologies while piecing together theories of the industrial, economic, and ecological trajectories shaping this moment. In these digital archives, fragments of community environmental memory, affect, and sociopolitical critique merge to create textured forms of environmental analysis and can express subtle aspirations for more just, equitable, and meaningful modes of socioecological flourishing. In thinking of social media platforms as cultural geographic archives and source material, we would do well to attend to the affordances of these platforms in allowing users to curate and interweave memory, digital and popular culture elements, and multivalent emotions. It is in the banal interstices and articulations of online community environmental memory that the glimpses of potentially shared desires, disgusts, and everything in between begin to condense into possibilities.