Embrace the Waste: Reassessing Post-Mining Reclamation

• In Event: Remediating Remediation: Imagining Alternatives for Assessing and Redressing Environmental Harm - I

Abstract

Post-mining landscapes embody ongoing societal and environmental transformations, witnessed in the economic booms and busts that accompany extractive industries, and the widespread environmental impacts they produced. Today, historic waste streams continue to manifest from a vast global network of abandoned mines, a problem that land managers and mining communities have been left to negotiate. This new heritage of the Anthropocene has been treated as an environmental problem by government reclamation agencies, archaeologists, and heritage organizations, a practice that obfuscates the cultural value of the wastescapes themselves and the significant historical lessons that contamination and pollution may hold for future generations.
This paper frames post-industrial wastescapes and contamination as significant cultural heritage, arguing that these technological by-products have physically, socially, and chemically connected distant and disparate populations across space and time. In doing so, I expand the spatiotemporal framework in which mine sites are often analyzed, generally positioned spatially as local occurrences, and temporally with a defined beginning and end. This paper reassess how we value the cultural nature of pollution and post-industrial wastescapes, asking how considering contamination as artifact can affect how we interpret a post-mining landscape, but also how we designate its spatial and temporal bounds. Where does the wastescape begin, and where does it end? How can interpreting the dark heritage of industrialization inform current challenges related to remediation, sustainability, and human-environment interactions?

Author

• John Baeten, Indiana University