2019 Issue No. 33 – Mineral Transformation and Resource Extraction: Pasts, Presents and Futures

Mineral transformation and resource extraction generate some of the most complex environmental, social and economic problems facing humankind and the planet today.

In one way or another, resource extraction and mineral transformation are central to human existence. Like all biological organisms, we are mineral and matter transformers, on very small and very large scales. Mammals breathe oxygen and emit carbon dioxide, and build mass through minerals ingested in food; as Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky noted, we are walking, talking minerals. Plants build mass by extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which releases oxygen. The carbon, nitrogen and water cycles surround and condition these processes, forming the principles which govern all life on earth.

Humans are increasingly recognised as powerful actors in these cycles, with some humans more implicated than others. Fossil fuel extraction for energy and manufacturing releases carbon dioxide and methane, heating up the planet. The use of nitrogen fertilizers has dramatically increased the amount of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere. Our built environment is grounded in resource extraction; silica for glass, sand for concrete, iron ore for steel. The shifting, expanding or degrading lives of extracted materials may also affect us in ways we do not immediately recognise.

Extractive processes and industries are celebrated as engines of some national economies and have a host of negative consequences; environmental degradation, groundwater contamination, market speculation and manipulation, conflict with Indigenous peoples and farming communities over social and territorial impacts – to name but a few. Given the triumphalism of what humanity has achieved with resources and the litany of problems associated with their extraction, the subject generates profound ambivalence. And alongside the practicalities of transitioning to renewable and sustainable forms of energy and resource use, questions arise about what it takes for governments and corporations to support and encourage such a transition.

This issue of Transformations explores how scholars in creative arts, the humanities, and social sciences are contributing to the debates and politics of resource transformation and extraction. The complex socio-cultural and environmental legacies of nitrate, lithium, coal and uranium mining are examined across a range of sites in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia. Across these different sites and modes of engagement, what emerges is a very tangible sense of the forces exerted by the activities of resource extraction upon environments and human populations.

EDITORS: Grayson Cooke (SCU) and Sally Babidge (UQ)

Trafficking the Earth documents the extraction of copper and nitrate from the Atacama Desert, Chile, and the accumulation of their values in metropolitan sites, the City of London and the houses of the British merchants in particular. Presented here as a photo-essay, it juxtaposes words and images to create constellations of meaning intended to disrupt a linear narrative of a past running smoothly into the present. The essay draws upon and tries to demonstrate a documentary practice that captures the collisions of time and the connected spaces of copper and nitrate mining as exemplary of an extractivist economy. The subject of the photography is the surplus of mining, its ruins, rubble and waste, which is offered not as a straightforward set of pictures but rather as perspectives through which the effects of global capitalism can be understood.

Keywords
extractivism, photography, copper, nitrate, mining, Chile, Atacama

In this paper I explore what we can do with minerals as scholars of the human. To stay with their ambivalence, between ecological destruction and technological development, it might be worth thinking again about how humans are entangled with minerals. Here, I build on the observation that minerals make both our environment and our very selves; and I engage with debates around materiality to explore what this feature can do for us in one particular case: lithium. Through lithium I explore how minerals confront us with complex epistemological issues in interdisciplinary conversations. Based on science studies and work on scale I seek ways between social constructivism and scientific universalism, suggesting matters of scale as a way forward. Drawing on diverse histories of science, technology and medicine I perform matters of scale by telling a pragmatic story about lithium as specific material situated in scientific practice.

Keywords
lithium, materiality, scale, science studies, stories

Mineral extraction landscapes are infamous for their histories of spectacular ecological destruction and corporate-Indigenous community conflict. In contrast, until recently mining company activity and Indigenous community responses in the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile, have been marked by a somewhat mundane political and environmental dynamic characterised by invisible, shifting and short-term benefits for locals and unspectacular contests. However, the effects of extractive industries are cumulative and complex. In this paper, I examine the operation of relatively new Chilean regulation relating to environmental and social impact of mining that includes obligatory consultation between proponents and Indigenous peoples. Relying on new regulation, Indigenous people have expanded their repertoire of response to mining, refusing extractive development’s proffered benefits and entering negotiation with powerful outsiders on better terms, but there are also social costs. Using the critical terms of community leaders who protested about the “overburden” of new projects mounting up in consultation with proponents, I examine the structural and temporal problems generated by new regulatory process. Through ethnographic material derived from engaged anthropology, I show how community administrative and political labour to respond to the technical processes of consultation is at once mundane and exhausting. I argue that community work to consider and respond to proposed extractivist projects “exceeds” the progressive politics of recognition and new Chilean regulatory frameworks of consultation and left unaddressed, generates additional negative effects. I suggest that regulatory processes regarding the social impact of extractive industry should take seriously the implications of overburden.

Keywords
Overburden, Social Impacts of Mining, Recognition of Indigenous Peoples, Chile

Extractive waste is a socioecological process that conditions humans and the more-than-human world. This article considers contemporary visual culture that foregrounds the violence of resource extraction in places where waste perpetuates environmental injustice for the reproduction of fossil energy culture. The three artists I examine each engage with coal waste in particular as a form of extractive violence: J Henry Fair’s photography project Industrial Scars, Raina Martens’ ceramics project Transcorporeal Trash Communion, and John Sabraw’s painting series Chroma. While these artists call attention to the spaces where waste is present, Martens and Sabraw concentrate on social practices and ecological processes that connect situated experiences of environmental injustice. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary visual artists and cultural theorists convey uneven experiences of extractive violence when they centre cultural production alongside socioecological reproduction within the global energy culture.

Keywords
environmental justice, ecological art and activism, extraction, waste, energy humanities

In 2018, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), commissioned by the mining corporation Rio Tinto, released the list of metals they expected to be most impacted, in terms of increased demand, by upcoming technologies. Tin ranked highest as the most impacted. Almost one- third of global tin supply is extracted from two islands in the western archipelago of Indonesia, Bangka and Belitung. In this paper, I focus on fieldwork undertaken in Bangka Island and re-examine the materiality of tin and its complex entanglement with humans through psychogeophysics. This involves bringing a creative approach to the practice of the geophysical survey as a method and solo dérive. The practice of psychogeophysics seeks to provide an analysis of an island that has been actively mined and geo- transformed for millennia. I begin by exploring the history of tin on Bangka island, then focus on the construction of tin’s value and the dynamic relationship between humans, nature, and labour as conceived among different groups of people and issues; an entanglement between small-scale unconventional miners, mining company PT. Timah, the indigenous Orang Lom, and scientists speculating on phytomining in Bangka. The psychogeophysical approach implies a research practice of experiencing and encountering, which seeks to apply a critical epistemological instrument by which to gain knowledge regarding the way in which tin is enmeshed in the geophysical, political, cultural, and technological realm.

Keywords
psychogeophysics, practice research, creative arts, tin metal, materiality

Native title agreement-making or “contractualism” has become one of the dominant legible frames by which to understand Indigenous-settler relations in Australia, simultaneously providing benefits to Aboriginal groups yet constraining opportunities to configure these relations differently (Neale). In this paper, I examine the very first mining agreement of its kind in Australia: the Ranger uranium mine agreement negotiated in 1978. Borrowing Russian literary theorist Bakhtin’s analytic, I argue that the agreement is a “chronotope” with specific spatiotemporal dimensions. I focus on two key temporalities of the chronotope – the urgent temporality of development authorisation that conditions how, when and where agreements are produced, and the forward- looking “temporal inertia” that prospectively embeds these practices as precedents to be replicated in future mining negotiations. These two temporal logics shaped and were shaped by the spatial dynamics of the institutions tasked with negotiating the agreement, as events shifted back and forth between different venues. Exploring “how different legal times create or shape legal spaces and vice versa” (Valverde 17) reveals the productive and hegemonic conditions of the agreement chronotope in Indigenous-state relations in Australia as well as the compromised conditions for Indigenous institutional survival in the entropic north of Australia and beyond.

Keywords
extractivism, temporalities, development, settler-colonial relations, land rights

The idea of the past gestures at an individual or collectives knowledge of events which occurred before the present. Given this spacious conceptual fitting, the past can appear to be a vaguely theorized knowledge space. But, what makes the past? Is it existent only to be manipulated by culture? Or is it a resource which can be located? This essay seeks to explore what the past is in a world rendered in a new materialist spirit. New materialisms challenge scholars to discard the divide between socially construction and materiality. Through the concept of “resource materialities,” a genealogy will be constructed which links Science Technology Studies, the subfield STS of the Underground, and media theory together. Based on experience participant observing an archeological dig in Arkadia, Greece, this essay will then proceed to take seriously that the past is not a limitless symbolic resource by investigating two underground resources from which the past can be derived: ancient ceramic fragments and lignite coal deposits. The resulting account of the making of ceramic fragments as a knowledge resource and lignite as an energy resource intends to provide a description of the choreography required to produce these resources. Ultimately, this account provides evidence in support of the concept of “resource materialities.” In the critical space following, this paper will discuss problems with the relationality of resources and recommend action. Lastly, this essay concludes by exploring the consequences of this conceptualization of past making.

Keywords
resource, underground, archeology, energy, materiality