Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations

It has been raining all day and into the warm winter night in downtown Toronto-Tkaronto in Mohawk. The water splashes off the office towers of Bay Street (Canada's Wall Street), is collected by a storm sewer system overtaking buried streams, and then washes out into the vastness of Lake Ontario. Office towers and other urban surfaces are covered in a thin, greasy film that attracts persistent organic pollutants like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs; These travel in global circulations of particulate clouds, encountering office towers whose oily films act like massive pollution-collection devices. The patter of droplets on urban glass rinses the PCBs into a chemically concentrated rainwash that returns them to the lake, a legacy dumping ground of PCBs from an era of midcentury industrial exuberance.