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

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

What makes a resource critical? Through three presentations of original environmental history research projects, this panel asks critical questions about past and present extractive development booms trading in the language of national security and emergency demand. While lithium has been in the news recently because of its importance in electric vehicle battery manufacturing and the wider renewable energy transition, panelists here feature histories of common resources once considered critical, from molybdenum to groundwater to saltpeter. Together we show how the parameters of what constitutes political and economic “criticality” have shifted since the term first emerged in the mid-twentieth century in the context of World War II. By focusing specifically on the afterlives of critical resource economies, panelists broaden the temporal, geographic, and social scope of what it means for some material thing to be critical or “strategic,” a category of extraction deployed in a similar manner. Critical for what and to whom? As a whole, the panel argues that environmental historians and scholars more broadly must interrogate the acts of claims-making and elisions in the term, as well as the structures of power that enable those who use (or have used) it.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Vital Water Data: How an unbuilt nuclear-missile silo complex became a failed Las Vegas housing development, 1977-2012 - Taylor Elliott Rose, Yale University

• Moving Mt. Emmons: From Critical Minerals to Critical Habitats in 1970s Globalization - Megan Black, MIT

• Global Cities Imaginaries: Mining the Desert and the Production of Sacrifice Zones in the Andean Region - Dominique Mashini, Harvard University

Chair

• Mary X Mitchell, University of Toronto