Divergent memories and visions of the future in conflicts over mining development

Erik Kojola

Abstract


Conflicts over extractive development often center around predicting future profits and economic growth, and estimating industrial pollution. How these projections are understood and seen as legitimate and trustworthy depends on social actors' environmental imaginaries and timescapes. Thus, I examine the temporal and cultural dynamics of natural resource politics, particularly how affective connections to the past and future mobilize support and opposition to new mining. I use the case of proposed copper mines in the rural Minnesota Iron Range region to explore the different environmental imaginaries and timescapes that mining opponents and proponents use to understand the potential socio-environmental impacts, and to legitimate their positions. Proponents, including long-time and working class Iron Range residents and mining corporations, view the region as an industrial landscape built by mining and hope new proposals will renew the past to create a prosperous future. Meanwhile, environmental groups who oppose mining view the region through an environmental imaginary based on outdoor recreation, and draw on collective memories of family and youth trips to understand new extractive projects as a rupture to their vision of the future. I show that resource extraction is understood through temporalities that differ across intersections of class and region, and that emotional meanings of the past and visions of the future animate contemporary political action.

Keywords: Resource extraction, mining, environmental imaginaries, timescapes, collective memory, environmental politics, emotions


Full Text:

PDF

References


Abram, S. and G. Weszkalnys. 2013. Elusive promises: planning in the contemporary world. New York: Berghahn.

Acharya, R.N., K.P. Paudel and L.U. Hatch. 2009. Impact of nostalgia and past experience on recreational demand for wilderness. Applied Economics Letters 16(5): 449–453.

Adam, B. 1998. Timescapes of modernity: the environment and invisible hazards. London: Routledge.

Adams, A.E., T.E. Shriver, A. Saville and G. Webb. 2018. Forty years on the fenceline: community, memory, and chronic contamination. Environmental Sociology 4(2): 210–220.

Andrews, E. and J. McCarthy. 2014. Scale, shale, and the state: political ecologies and legal geographies of shale gas development in Pennsylvania. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 4(1): 7–16.

Appadurai, A. 2013. The future as cultural fact: essays on the global condition. London: Verso.

Appel, H., A. Mason, M.J. Watts and M.T. Huber (eds.). 2015. Subterranean estates: life worlds of oil and gas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Backes, D. 1991. Canoe country: an embattled wilderness. Minocqua: NorthWord Press.

Baker, Z., J. Ekstrom and L. Bedsworth. 2018. Climate information? Embedding climate futures within temporalities of California water management. Environmental Sociology 4(4): 419–433.

Bear, L. 2014. Doubt, conflict, mediation: the anthropology of modern time. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(S1): 3–30.

Bingham, C. and L.L. Gansler. 2003. Class action: the landmark case that changed sexual harassment law. New York: Anchor Books.

Bjorhus, J. 2019. Twin Metals wins renewal of federal mining leases in northeastern Minnesota. Star Tribune, May 15.

Blunt, A. 2003. Collective memory and productive nostalgia: Anglo-Indian homemaking at McCluskieganj. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21(6): 717–738.

Bocock, R. 1986. Hegemony. New York: Tavistock.

Bonnett, A. 2010. Left in the past: radicalism and the politics of nostalgia. New York: Continuum.

Bonnett, A. 2016. The geography of nostalgia: global and local perspectives on modernity and loss. London: Routledge.

Bonnett, A. and C. Alexander. 2013. Mobile nostalgias: connecting visions of the urban past, present and future amongst ex-residents. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38(3): 391–402.

Boym, S. 2001. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.

Brubeck, K. 2016. Obama administration takes steps to protect watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. U.S. Department of the Interior. December 15.

https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/obama-administration-takes-steps-protect-watershed-boundary-waters-canoe-area

Burnham, M., W. Eaton, T. Selfa, C. Hinrichs and A. Feldpausch-Parker. 2017. The politics of imaginaries and bioenergy sub-niches in the emerging northeast U.S. bioenergy economy. Geoforum 82: 66–76.

Campbell, G., L. Smith and M. Wetherell. 2017. Nostalgia and heritage: potentials, mobilisations and effects. International Journal of Heritage Studies 23(7): 609–611.

Cronon, W. 1996. The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature. Environmental History 1(1): 7–28.

Davis, F. 1979. Yearning for yesterday: a sociology of nostalgia. New York: Free Press.

Donovan, A.R. and C. Oppenheimer. 2015. Modelling risk and risking models: the diffusive boundary between science and policy in volcanic risk management. Geoforum 58: 153–165.

Earthworks. 2017. Financial Assurance and Superfund: who should pay for mine clean-up, industry or taxpayers? [Accessed June 6 2018]. https://earthworks.org/issues/financial_assurance_bonding_and_cercla_108b/

Ely Echo. 2017. What now? Editorial. June 30.

Ferry, E.E. and M.E. Limbert. 2008. Timely assets: the politics of resources and their temporalities. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Forgrave, R. 2017. In northern Minnesota, two economies square off: mining vs. wilderness. New York Times. October 12.

Forsyth, T.J. 2003. Critical political ecology: the politics of environmental science. London: Routledge.

Freudenburg, W.R. 1992. Addictive economies: extractive industries and vulnerable localities in a changing world economy. Rural Sociology 57(3): 305–332.

Frickel, S. and W.R. Freudenburg. 1996. Mining the past: historical context and the changing implications of natural resource extraction. Social Problems 43(4): 444–466.

Gabriel, N. 2014. Urban political ecology: environmental imaginary, governance, and the non-human. Geography Compass 8(1): 38–48.

Goldman, M., P. Nadasdy and M. Turner (eds.). 2011. Knowing nature: conversations at the intersection of political ecology and science studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hemphill, S. 2005. Explaining the Iron Range character. Minnesota Public Radio. September 19. http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/09/19_hemphills_mayasichsidebar

High, S. and D.W. Lewis. 2007. Corporate wasteland: the landscape and memory of deindustrialization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Hillman, M. 2007. Forty years ago, the Pioneer Mine shut down. The Timberjay. March 24.

Hodgkin, K. and S. Radstone. 2003. Contested pasts: the politics of memory. London: Routledge.

Horowitz, L.S. 2010. 'Twenty years is yesterday': science, multinational mining, and the political ecology of trust in New Caledonia. Geoforum 41(4): 617–626.

Huber, M.T. 2013. Lifeblood: oil, freedom, and the forces of capital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jasanoff, S. and S.-H. Kim. 2015. Dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jones, O. and J. Garde-Hansen. 2012. Geography and memory: explorations in identity, place and becoming. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kinchy, A.J. 2012. Seeds, science, and struggle: the global politics of transgenic crops. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Kneas, D. 2016. Subsoil abundance and surface absence: a junior mining company and its performance of prognosis in northwestern Ecuador. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22: 67–86.

Kojola, E. 2019. Bringing back the mines and a way of life: populism and the politics of extraction. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109(2): 371–381.

Kraker, D. 2016. Mine layoffs bring new calls to remake Iron Range economy, but into what? MPR News. April 11.

Kubal, T. and R. Becerra. 2014. Social movements and collective memory. Sociology Compass 8(6): 865–875.

Ladino, J.K. 2004. Longing for wonderland: nostalgia for nature in post-frontier America. Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5(1): 88–109.

Ladino, J.K. 2012. Reclaiming nostalgia: longing for nature in American literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Lamppa, M.G. 2004. Minnesota's iron country: rich ore, rich lives. Duluth: Lake Superior Port Cities Inc.

Lavanger, J. 2018. Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. MNopedia. Minnesota Historical Society. January 21. [Accessed April 20 2018]. http://www.mnopedia.org/place/boundary-waters-canoe-area-wilderness-bwcaw

Le Billon, P. and M. Sommerville. 2017. Landing capital and assembling 'investable land' in the extractive and agricultural sectors. Geoforum 82: 212–224.

Legg, S. 2004. Memory and nostalgia. Cultural Geographies 11(1): 99–107.

Lewin, P.G. 2019. 'Coal is not just a job, it's a way of life': the cultural politics of coal production in central Appalachia. Social Problems 66(1): 51–68.

Li, T.M. 2014. Land's end: capitalist relations on an indigenous frontier. Durham: Duke University Press.

Li, T.M. 2014. What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39(4): 589–602.

Li, T.M. 2017. Rendering land investible: five notes on time. Geoforum 82: 276–278.

Lipsitz, G. 1990. Time passages: collective memory and American popular culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Manuel, J.T. 2015. Taconite dreams: the struggle to sustain mining on Minnesota's Iron Range, 1915-2000. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mathews, A.S. and J. Barnes. 2016. Prognosis: visions of environmental futures. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22: 9–26.

Meersman, T. 2010. Proposed copper-nickel mine draws 'extraordinary' interest. Star Tribune. February 5.

Messer, C.M., T.E. Shriver and A.E. Adams. 2015. Collective identity and memory: a comparative analysis of community response to environmental hazards. Rural Sociology 80(3): 314–339.

Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. 2019. Nonferrous metallic minerals development process. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/lands_minerals/metallic_nf/development.html

Mische, A. 2014. Measuring futures in action: projective grammars in the Rio +20 debates. Theory and Society 43(3–4): 437–464.

Molden, B. 2016. Resistant pasts versus mnemonic hegemony: on the power relations of collective memory. Memory Studies 9(2): 125–142.

Mukta, P. and D. Hardiman. 2000. The political ecology of nostalgia. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 11(1): 113-133.

Myers, J. 2013. PolyMet review goes public. Duluth News-Tribune. December 7.

Myers, T. 2016. Acid mine drainage risks: a modeling approach to siting mine facilities in northern Minnesota USA. Journal of Hydrology 533: 277–290.

Nesbitt, J.T. and D. Weiner. 2001. Conflicting environmental imaginaries and the politics of nature in central Appalachia. Geoforum 32(3): 333–349.

Neumann, R.P. 2005. Making political ecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Norgaard, K.M. 2011. Living in denial: climate change, emotions, and everyday life. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Norman, E.S., C. Cook and A. Cohen. 2015. Negotiating water governance: why the politics of scale matter. Farnham: Ashgate.

Olick, J.K. and J. Robbins. 1998. Social memory studies: from 'collective memory' to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices. Annual Review of Sociology 24(1): 105–140.

Olick, J.K. 2011. The collective memory reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peet, R. and M.J. Watts (eds.). 1996. Liberation ecologies: environment, development, social movements. London: Routledge.

PolyMet. 2016. Five reasons PolyMet mining is good for Minnesota. Go PolyMet. June 10. [Accessed May 30 2019] http://gopolymet.com/news/5-reasons-polymet-mining-is-good-for-minnesota-2/

Proescholdt, K., R. Rapson and M.L. Heinselman. 1995. Troubled waters: the fight for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. St. Cloud: North Star Press of St. Cloud.

Radstone, S. and K. Hodgkin. 2003. Regimes of memory. London: Routledge.

Raynes, D.K.T., T.L. Mix, A. Spotts and A. Ross. 2016. An emotional landscape of place-based activism: exploring the dynamics of place and emotion in antifracking actions. Humanity and Society 40(4): 401–423.

Richardson, R. 2014. Getting the details behind copper-nickel mining in Minnesota. The Brainerd Dispatch. January 30.

Robbins, P. 2012. Political ecology: a critical introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Roberts, I. 2008. Collective representations, divided memory and patterns of paradox: mining and shipbuilding. Sociological Research Online 12(6): 1–19.

Scott, R.R. 2010. Coal heritage/coal history: progress, tourism, and mountaintop removal. In Gray, H. and M. Gomez-Barris (eds.). Toward a sociology of the trace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pp. 137–166.

Scott, R.R. 2013. Environmental affects: NASCAR, place and white American cultural citizenship. Social Identities 19(1): 13–31.

Sheppard, E. and R.B. McMaster. 2008. Scale and geographic inquiry: nature, society, and method. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Slotkin, R. 1981. Nostalgia and progress: Theodore Roosevelt's myth of the frontier. American Quarterly 33(5): 608–637.

Smith, A.L. 2004. Heteroglossia, 'common sense,' and social memory. American Ethnologist 21(2): 251–269.

Smith, L. and G. Campbell. 2017. 'Nostalgia for the future': memory, nostalgia and the politics of class. International Journal of Heritage Studies 23(7): 612–627.

Smith, M.L. 2014. PolyMet mine debate has competing visions for up North. Star Tribune. February 8.

Spiegel, S.J. 2017. EIAs, power and political ecology: situating resource struggles and the techno-politics of small-scale mining. Geoforum 87: 95–107.

Stock, J.H. and J. Bradt. 2018. U.S. Forest Service (USFS) environmental assessment (EA) on proposed 20-year mineral leasing withdrawal in Superior National Forest. U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Strangleman, T. 2013. 'Smokestack nostalgia,' 'ruin porn' or working-class obituary: the role and meaning of deindustrial representation. International Labor and Working-Class History 84: 23–37.

Szolucha, A. 2018. Anticipating fracking: shale gas developments and the politics of time in Lancashire, UK. The Extractive Industries and Society 5(3): 348–355.

Threadgold, S., D. Farrugia, H. Askland, M. Askew, J. Hanley, M. Sherval and J. Coffey. 2018. Affect, risk and local politics of knowledge: changing land use in Narrabri, NSW. Environmental Sociology 4(4): 393–404.

Turner, B.S. 1987. A note on nostalgia. Theory, Culture and Society 4(1): 147–156.

U.S. Census Bureau. 2018. Annual estimates of the resident population for Ely, MN.

U.S. EPA. 2015. Superfund financial responsibility. September 28. https://www.epa.gov/superfund/superfund-financial-responsibility

Weszkalnys, G. 2014. Anticipating oil: the temporal politics of a disaster yet to come. The Sociological Review 62: 211–235.

Weszkalnys, G. 2016. A doubtful hope: resource affect in a future oil economy. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22: 127–146.

Wheeler, R. 2014. Mining memories in a rural community: landscape, temporality and place identity. Journal of Rural Studies 36: 22–32.

Wheeler, R. 2017. Local history as productive nostalgia? Change, continuity and sense of place in rural England. Social and Cultural Geography 18(4): 466–486.

White, J. 2017. Climate change and the generational timescape. The Sociological Review 65(4): 763–778.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2458/v27i1.23210

Copyright (c) 2020 Erik Kojola

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.