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.