SoiferI VtP Annotation: Fukushima

The visualization and caption indicate how toxicity is often about choices that people make, and that toxicity can be layered and multidimensional (social, physical, geographical, environmental, etc.). The visualization gives off a sense of the multiple forms of labor taking place in the site, and the precarity of a space that is so vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis. Yet the toxicity of leaving the place is even more unbearable to the people who identify themselves with the blue spaces, and so they select to stay despite the dangers involved. Yet by building the structures deemed necessary to protect people from the effects of tsunamis (seawalls), this in turn blocks off the very people who depend on the sea for their well-being as well as hurts animal habitats. The message is one of precarity and choicemaking in a toxic place.