Remembering and Imagining the Underground: Contested Timescapes in Mining Conflicts

• In Event: STS Underground - II: Subterranean Timescapes

Abstract

Conflicts over mining often center around competing claims to the past and visions of future and how different social actors and institutions assess potential risks and benefits from extracting underground minerals. Through concepts of collective memory and future imaginaries, I examine the importance of time in how subsurface materials are socially understood and contested to advance STS and political ecology scholarship. I use the case of proposed copper-nickel mines in the Minnesota Iron Range region to explore the different collective memories and timescapes that mining opponents, proponents, and state institutions use to make sense of potential impacts on the socio-environmental landscape. Proponents view the region as an industrial mining landscape and hope new proposals will renew the past and create a prosperous future. Industry creates a narrative about future abundance that obscures uncertainties of fluctuations in global prices and reliability of new technologies to prevent pollution. Meanwhile, environmental opponents view the region as a recreation landscape by drawing on collective memories of recreation to understand new extractive projects as a rupture to their vision of the future. Environmentalists highlight the long-term pollution from mining that extends beyond the time horizon of existing institutions. I show that resource extraction is understood through temporalities that differ across intersectional social differences and that perceptions of the past and visions of the future are shaped by power, memory, and knowledge. I contend that attention to memory and imaginaries are productive for understanding how mining becomes a site of contention.

Author

• Erik Kojola, Texas Christian University