“Men Who Love a Fight with Nature”: Mining Engineers and the Necropolitics of Mine Waste in California and South Africa, 1870-1910

• In Event: Racial Capitalism, Scientific Infrastructure and the North American Mineralogical Frontier, 1850-1920

Abstract

Engineers are usefully characterized as “boundary objects” operating between numerous fields, such as capital and labor, scientists and technicians, and the human and nonhuman world. This characteristic makes engineers uniquely suited as an entrée into environmental history. This paper focuses on a group of US mining engineers who managed gold mining sites in the US West and southern Africa around the turn of the century. I first turn to gold and mercury extraction sites of 1870s and 1880s California, where I argue that mining engineers developed theories and practices about racial capitalism and humans’ relationship to the nonhuman world that were instrumental in setting a course toward the spatially and racially differential exposure to on-going environmental harm. I then show how these practices were globalized by transiting on gold mining on South Africa’s Witwatersrand. There, many of the same engineers were instrumental in determining the scale and location of the ecological issues involved in mine waste, especially what residents racially described as the “demon dust” that waste produced on an enormous scale. Importantly, the paper considers the necropolitical dimensions of the “slow violence” enacted by mining engineers, which contributed to urban racial segregation in Johannesburg and increased rates of respiratory disease among African and Chinese residents. Finally, I consider contemporary issues and activism surrounding environmental racism and the legacies of extraction in Johannesburg.

I argue that despite the way that mining engineers theoretically abstracted nonhuman worlds across California and South Africa and subjected them to the capitalist imperative of growth, those very nonhumans resisted and refused such abstraction. In fact, this was something mining engineers implicitly recognized, but I show how white masculinity was central to concealing and defusing the cognitive dissonance involved in mass destruction.

Author

• Douglas Jones, York University