Moving Mt. Emmons: From Critical Minerals to Critical Habitats in 1970s Globalization

• In Event: Critical Things: Extraction and Environmental Governance in the Long Twentieth Century

Abstract

In the 1970s, the tiny town of Crested Butte, Colorado, protested a multinational firm intent on blasting through their mountain. The desired target, molybdenum, had during World War II been deemed by the national security state a “critical” mineral for its usefulness to hardening steel. Earth moving in Colorado ensued on an unprecedented scale. But the situation had changed in just a few decades. A new generation of white, affluent nature enthusiasts relocated to Colorado in search of the Rocky Mountain High. These transplants pushed back against molybdenum’s continued extraction across new sites with the help of some well-positioned friends: the international NGO Friends of the Earth. A key feature of town activism mimicked the NGO’s multiscalar thinking, from local to global. The anti-mining coalition, for instance, refuted the narrative that molybdenum was a matter of national interest, fearing instead a scale-jumping environmental tragedy beginning with “critical” habitats. Local mountains, they claimed, would feed multinational profits and an international, post-industrial economy that ceased to benefit everyday Americans. Such claims buoyed an ultimately successful campaign against mining, even as it concealed much, erasing the often poor and marginalized communities around the world that had disproportionately borne such material burdens. Reflecting on this history, the paper will foreground the contingent rather than inevitable role that minerals played in a story of accelerating 1970s globalization. It will insist on the importance of people to constructing and deconstructing meanings around subterranean elements, delimiting whether they are “critical” or “hazardous.” And it will highlight the unequal playing field facing communities trying to say “no” to mining. Such lessons about contingency, meaning-making, and environmental justice are important to surface at a new moment of acceleration: the urgent but mineral-intensive transition to renewable energy.

Author

• Megan Black, MIT