The ongoing transition towards more sustainable forms of social organization demands a substantive increase in the extraction and processing of several critical minerals. Especially the development of net-zero energy infrastructures rests on a growing availability of minerals such as copper, lithium, cobalt, and rare earths. Some of these minerals could be recycled from discarded infrastructures (as proposed by the urban mining movement). Some others could be used in a much more efficient way. But most of them will need to be extracted from their original bedrock. 

This relatively unchanged centrality of mineral extraction does not mean that the industry can simply keep practicing mining-as-usual. Decades of relentless and, largely, unregulated extraction of minerals throughout the world has left behind a legacy of regular disasters and extensive pollution. Especially in the global south, such damage has been usually accompanied by multiple forms of violence and dispossession against local populations, especially indigenous groups. Even the Cambridge English dictionary when defining extraction as "the process of removing something, especially by force", provides as a typical example of its usage the following phrase: "the extraction of minerals has damaged the countryside." Extraction and damage are inseparable, it seems. 

Besides this legacy, the urgent need to decarbonize our energy matrix is just one of our current environmental predicaments. Issues such as biodiversity protection and reducing pollution are just as relevant, and they are meant to be greatly affected by increased mining for these so-called "transition minerals". Especially in the global south, to simply extract these minerals in a traditional way would almost securely mean the production of novel forms of environmental damage and injustice. For example, in our country, Chile, the massive increase in the extraction of lithium - a critical mineral for the production of batteries - has been accompanied by multiple forms of ecological damage and violence towards the local indigenous population. 

We need to radically transform the principles and practices behind mineral extraction in the Anthropocene, so the search for minerals to deal with one critical environmental issue (such as climate change) does not end up worsening many others. To really engage with the challenges posed by this new geological epoch, then, we not only need massive amounts of transition minerals, but also the emergence of a transition mining industry, or an industry that can really engage in new forms of mineral extraction, stepping away from its traditional "devil may care" attitude toward its social and environmental impacts. 

The critical question is, hence, not whether extraction would continue to be relevant in the Anthropocene, but which kind of extraction are we going to pursue?

The book "Worlds of Gray and Green: Mineral Extraction as Ecological Practice" (University of California Press, 2022) claims that a necessary step towards rethinking extraction is to start seeing mines as complex ecological systems. Adopting an environmental humanities conceptual approach and through a case study focused on a large tailings dam located in central Chile, they highlight how the extraction of massive amounts of minerals not only cause disruptions to preexistent local ecologies. In parallel, extraction is centrally related with the emergence of novel arrangements of the living. From fish who live in the lagoon formed by tailings water to farmers who use the water coming from the dam to irrigate their crops, discards from mineral extraction have become key components of multiple local ecologies. In an area devastated by a decade-long drought - the main manifestation of climate change in Chile - the water coming from these tailings has been turned into a lifeline for multiple living entities on the area. 

Following geochemists Caldwell and Caldwell, in the book we understand such interactions as based on what they have called geosymbiosis or "a reciprocal relationship in which the restructuring and proliferation of a mineral affects the proliferation rate of an organism, and the restructuring and proliferation of the organism affects the proliferation rate of the mineral". Once released into an environment full of living entities, the minerals contained in tailings become entangled in multiple relationships with the biological entities living there. Some of these geosymbioses are toxic, no doubt about that. They cause damage and can even lead to the death of some biological entities. Others are mutualistic, in the sense of allowing a peaceful cohabitation between the extracted minerals and local biological entities. Most of them, we would say, exist between both extremes, allowing certain life in certain ways, but cancelling out many others. 

From a geosymbiotic perspective mineral extraction could be seen not merely as the removal and processing of inert materials, but also as a generative practice through which novel ecologies are produced. Commonly these novel ecologies are an utterly poor replacement for the ones that stood there before the mine's arrival. We believe this is not compulsory, but reflects the utter disdain of mining companies, regulatory authorities and experts, regarding the production of ecologies through extraction. If mines and extraction would be really thought about as spaces for the production of novel arrangements of the living, certainly more spaces for the proliferation of life within mining complexes would emerge.

In a time of climate emergency, when multiple ecosystems on earth are facing utter collapse, it seems critical to rethink mining complexes as spaces for the production of these novel ecologies. This would imply to importantly transform the way mining is thought and practiced, from bringing different kinds of expertise to mining sites (like ecologists or anthropologists) to understanding that the focus of the whole endeavor is not solely the extraction and processing of valued minerals. Many other processes must be considered, greatly surpassing what is generally understood as Community Relations. 

Seeing a mine from a geosymbiotic perspective forces us to accept that any large-scale intervention in the environment necessarily implies becoming responsible for managing the complex novel ecosystems we are creating. These ecosystems certainly comprise the valued minerals and the infrastructures used to refine and transport them, but also a multitude of other living and non-living entities whose wellbeing must become a matter of concern and care by the industry. Given the urgency of the environmental crises we are facing, these ecologies should not be seen as a nuisance, not even as a weird externality. They should be taken seriously, seeing them as offering a path to better align the mining industry with the massive challenges implied in carrying out industrial activities in a world facing environmental collapse.

Source - Mining Magazine

Popular Posts: