Mining, Landscape Change, Gender, and Environmental Justice
Nancy Langston
Umea University, Sweden
nelangst@gmail.com
Across the globe, mining has been fundamental to economic, social, and
environmental change. Mining has fueled the growth of colonial powers and the rise of
multinational corporations; it has stimulated the migrations of capital, labor, and cultures;
and it has polluted ecosystems and bodies. Yet only recently have environmental
historians paid sustained attention to mining.
In this talk, I will examine gender, toxicity, landscape change, and indigenous
land tenure in two mining landscapes: the Lake Superior Basin in North America, and
Sapmi across northern Scandinavia. Both regions have a history of intensive and
extensive iron mining, both underground and above-ground. In both regions, historic
conflicts over indigenous land tenure rights, toxic transformations, and gender continue
to play an important role in current mining controversies.
Gender: Miners are typically assumed to be men, and indeed, in much industrial
mining history, the people who dig under ground have typically been men. But assuming
that mining is about male labor ignores the complex patterns of human and nonhuman
work that have historically been involved in transforming minerals under the ground into
commodities above the ground. Today, an estimated 30% of the 13 million artisanal
miners around the world are women. Historically, across much of the world, women were
essential to mining. Yet colonialism altered gender roles in mining, changing women’s
labor as well as their customary rights over mineral wealth. As mining became
constructed as a masculine endeaver, the women involved in mining often became
invisible, their labor and their toxic exposures increasing marginalized.
Land tenure and environmental justice: Indigenous communities have often
borne the greatest burden from the toxic wastes and social instability fostered by mining
projects, but they have rarely had much decision-making power in the planning process.
Indigenous lands have been turned into sacrifice zones for resource extraction; urban
centers of power have seen them as resource colonies. Even when treaties and laws
require consultation, indigenous communities have rarely been meaningfully involved in
the planning process. It has been even rarer for affected communities to make the final
decision about whether a new mine should be approved.
Landscape change and toxic exposures: Not surprisingly, mining has led to
tremendous environmental change. Yet environmental degradation is not inevitable from
mining, even if change is. This portion of the talk will examine the complex links
between watershed change, forest change, and toxicity in two regions, focusing on how
the history of ecological change following abandoned mines has shaped the ways
communities decide about new mines.
Environmental history reminds us that there is nothing natural or inevitable about
resource development. Resources are contingent and they change over time. Calling
something a resource pulls it out of its intricate social and ecological relationships and
isolates it in our gaze. Yet those isolations are illusions. Societies still live in intimate
relationships with larger landscapes, even if people think technology isolates them from
ecological constraints. When minerals are dug from the ground, when trees are cut in the
forest, when flood waters are diverted, when rivers are dammed, when animals are
changed from fellow creatures to resources, subtle processes of toxic transformation are
set into motion that have legacies far into the future.