Mining and Society

Dedicated to exploring the social, cultural, political, and environmental role of mines, minerals, and extractive resource industries around the world. Created and maintained by anthropologist Elisa Maria López, PhD.                                                                                                                                                  Cover Image 1: Stray cat drinking from pond at the abandoned Pyramiden Russian coal mining settlement. Svalbard, Spitsbergen Island, Norway. Photo by: Paul Souders | WorldFoto. // Cover Image 2: Watercolor illustration by Japanese coal miner Sakubei Yamamotodepicting husband and wife miners working underground. From 'Yamamoto Sakubei shobun, Chikuhô tankô emaki', Fukuokashi, Ashishobô, 1973. // Cover Image 3: Midsummer's eve 1901 on Kiirunavaara, Kiruna, Sweden. Photograph by Borg Mesch. // Cover Image 4: A protester in El Salvador holds a sign reading "No to Mining." El Salvador has chosen to protect water resources over mineral exploration and as result is being sued by Australian-Canadian firm OceanaGold at the World Bank tribunal for refusing to issue a mining permit to its subsidiary, Pacific Rim. Photo source: AP/Luis Romero, 2014. // Cover Image 5: Kumamon, mascot of Kumamoto Prefecture in Japan in a mine cart at the Mitsue Miike Coal Mine, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining.                                                                                                                                      

[miningandsociety]

"Paul Sheriff from Liberia during an internship at Trafiaktiebolaget Grängesberg-Oxelösunds Järnvägar, TGOJ [Sweden] to learn the CTC system to be used [at LAMCO] in Liberia."

Text on the back of photo: From Nerikes Allehanda, Friday 18/8 1961 – Liberian youth practicing CTC signals at Vanneboda: It may seem surprising that the staff at Vanneboda station and along the nearby railway lines are running around with an English dictionary in their breast pocket. But it is the case that they have a new addition to the staff. He is the soon-to-be 20-year-old Paul Sheriff from Liberia, who has come here to the high Nordic countries as an intern. He is to learn everything about the new CTC signal system, which is currently under construction, so that he can later lead similar work in Liberia. He arrived here on August 2, but has managed to learn a lot of Swedish in this short time. It is going very well thanks to the fact that his colleagues speak nothing but 'the language of honor and heroes'. But it is not without them also learning some English. Paul has been sent here to Sweden to familiarize himself with the new signal system that TGOJ is building. From a center in a few years' time, Skogstorp outside Eskilstuna will be able to direct all signals within a 300 km radius. The switch to the CTC system will mean increased safety and a significant reduction in personnel. Paul works for the Swedish company Lamco in Liberia, which is planning to switch to a fully automated signaling system based on the Swedish model. Paul made the long journey to Sweden in the company of many colleagues who were placed in different work areas in Eskilstuna, Oxelösund and Grängesberg. The purpose of these trainees is not only for them to learn Swedish technology, but they should also blend into the country's environment and learn Swedish working methods. - Paul is a rare talent, explains his supervisor and mentor, signal foreman Swärd from Eskilstuna. He understands everything quickly, and the language barrier does not pose any obstacles. He seems to be not only technically gifted but also has an unusual flair for languages. During these few days in Sweden, he has managed to learn so much Swedish that he can make himself understood by anyone. He is very ambitious. - I feel great in Sweden, says Paul himself and smiles broadly. In Liberia I am employed by a Swedish company and I have come into contact with many Swedes in my home country. Already in Liberia I liked your people a lot. But what I have experienced in Sweden has exceeded all expectations. People are so helpful! I would love to stay here! My greatest wish is to have the opportunity to further my education and get my engineering degree. And most of all I would like to stay and study in this country. I am investigating whether I can get some kind of scholarship. In that case, I might stay in Sweden for good."

Source: Swedish Railway Museum / Järnvägsmuseet https://digitaltmuseum.se/021018195705/paul-sheriff-fran-liberia-under-praktik-hos-trafikaktiebolaget-grangesberg

[davidvandartel]

My new project: ‘Ommelanden’. A publication on the northernmost region of Groningen. To be able to realize it, the book and other prints can be pre-ordered via the crowdfunding.

‘Ommelanden’ is about growing up in the northernmost part of the Netherlands. It is a portrait of close communities, love, endless fields and freedom.

‘Ommelanden’ refers to all the areas around the city of Groningen, a region in the Netherlands often simplistically portrayed as an earthquake zone, with relatively low incomes and a place people ‘travel to’. Together with writer Pepijn Keppel, I spent three months living in a house above Usquert, between the village and the Wadden Sea. During the time I lived there, I got to know many young people, each of whom cherishes this region in their own way.

[bad-moodboard]

19th century coal miner’s canary, with an inscription that reads, “In Memory of Little Joe. Died November 3rd 1875. Aged 3 Years”.

[thunderstruck9]

Laurie Sverdlove (American, b. 1944), Longyearbyen, 2016. Oil on canvas, 44 x 36 in.

[emmaklee]

Royal Hungarian salt mine (circa 1940)

[visualjunkee]

SALT OF THE EARTH: High in Peru’s Andes Mountains, members of a 600-year-old co-op harness gravity and sunlight to harvest the world’s most elemental seasoning - photography: Juan Manuel Castro Pieto - text: Katy McColl - Modern Farmer Summer 2016

“Members of the town’s co-op harvest a small batch of early salt crystals; they’ll return when the water evaporate and leaves behind a much larger haul. Their high hats identify the pair as mestizas, women of mixed native and foreign heritage.”

“Roughly 3,000 shallow salt pools cover Qaqawiñay mountain near Maras, Peru.”

[throughtheglue]

Chapel of St. Kinga. The deepest underground chapel in the world. They still hold weekly mass here.

Everything you see is salt, except the humans.

[ciej-decolonize4climate]

Salt to Stars: The Environmental and Community Impacts of Lithium Mining.

A comic by the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice with art by Sophie Wang, text under the cut. This is part of a toolkit to challenge greenwashing in the climate movement. Please share to support Indigenous water protectors and non-extractive decolonial solutions to climate change!

In the highlands of the Andes, Indigenous peoples have used lagoons of ancient brine to interpret the night sky since time immemorial. These lagoons are sacred cultural sites and home to their ancestors, some of the earliest forms of microbial life.

This region is one of the driest deserts in the world. (The Salar de Atacama receives ~80 mm/3 inches of rain per year. Sahara desert 100 mm.)

Even so, ecosystems--including people--have adapted to the hyperarid, hypersaline environment. Organisms include stromatolites, extremophile bacteria, flamingos, llamas and vincuña, brine shrimp, and halophyte grasses. People living in the salar regions are agro-pastoral farmers, meaning they integrate crop and livestock cultivation. They have always managed the existing water systems to grow food crops and to sustain their animals and families.

The extremely salty water is called brine. The brines formed millions of years ago when the climate was wetter, as rain and snow carrying dissolved minerals collected in closed basins. Strong sunshine and dry conditions have concentrated this water over thousands of years. Brine rich in lithium and other minerals is part of a complex interconnected groundwater system, that supports Indigenous peoples and their traditional ways of life.

Mining companies, see this sacred landscape only as profitable resources. Lithium mining is expanding here to make electric vehicle batteries and other so-called “renewable” energy storage infrastructure.

In fact, investors and prospectors call lithium “white gold.” But to Indigenous peoples around the world, gold rushes have meant genocide and ecocide.

To mine lithium, brine is pumped into shallow pools where the water is evaporated and the minerals are collected. Lithium mining is groundwater mining, and the groundwater in the Atacama desert is nonrenewable. Lithium brine used to make “renewable” energy storage is a nonrenewable resource. 1 olympic size swimming pool of water = 23 Tesla vehicles. Tesla’s production goals = 20 million vehicles per year by 2030 (that’s 869,500 olympic size swimming pools per year).

Indigenous communities are resisting the destruction of their sacred waters and traditional homelands. Many say “No” to lithium mining. Communities the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, Argentina, blockaded the highway in February, 2019 to protest violation of consultation rights.

Many fear the destruction of ecological, cultural, and spiritual life cycles and further displacement of indigenous communities, forcing people off their homelands and into the cities where they become the racialized urban poor. Farmers are already noticing a sharp decline in their crops.

Electric vehicles and lithium batteries are not sustainable nor climate change solutions.. They only shift exploitation and extraction to differerent non-renewable resources and people.

True solutions to climate change require radical re-imagining of our extractivist practices. Like our Andean Indigenous compas, we must see ourselves as part of the same interconnected world, human and ecology, from salt to stars.

[agelessphotography]

Lithium Mines #1, Salt Flats, Atacama Desert, Chile 1/9, Edward Burtynsky, 2017

[brooklynyogi-blog]

Walker Evans, Bessemer, Alabama, 1936

[miningandsociety]

As I have recently confirmed via the hash tag #cats and crystals, cats are attracted to crystals in a very interesting away. I took this photo at a farmhouse in the far north of Norway in 2007. This cat (called Bobolink) used a chunk of rock crystal as his pillow/snoozing spot every day. 

[thelongvictorian]

A mining town by moonlight (1869) by Hermann Ottomar Herzog (1832–1932). Born Germany, died USA. 

[facelesscinema]

That’s a million-dollar opal you’re holding. Straight from the Ethiopian Jewish tribe. I mean this is old-school, Middle-earth shit. 

Uncut Gems | Benny & Josh Safdie, 2019

[rjzimmerman]

Brazil's Bolsonaro moves to free mining, hydro dams on indigenous lands

Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro unveiled a controversial bill on We...

Excerpt from this story from Reuters:

Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro unveiled a controversial bill on Wednesday that would allow commercial mining on protected indigenous lands, delivering on a campaign promise that has shocked tribal leaders and environmentalists.

The bill to regulate mining including oil and gas projects, as well as hydroelectric dams, on indigenous reservations for the first time, will be sent to Congress this week. Brazil’s constitution currently does not rule out mining on reservations, but does not allow it because it has not been regulated.

“This is a big step forward, but it will face pressure from environmentalists,” Bolsonaro said in a speech.

Bolsonaro has long railed against Brazil’s indigenous people for occupying too much land, 13% of the country, and hindering economic development of untold mineral resources hidden there, from gold and diamonds to niobium and rare earths.

But leaders of most of Brazil’s 300 tribes oppose mining on their reservations and say that allowing commercial mining would undermine their communities and wipe out their cultures already threatened by increasing invasions by illegal loggers and wildcat miners.

Environmentalists who see the indigenous communities as the best guardians of Brazil’s tropical forests warn that mining will speed up deforestation.

[terminalpolitics]

Companies are making billions in lithium mining. But these indigenous people are being left out.

Hunt for mineral known as ‘white gold’ intensifies in the Andes, but those who live on the land say they are being tossed aside

They herd llamas and goats on arid land, knit Andean hats for extra money and chew coca leaves to fight off the altitude’s dizzying effects. They live in mud-brick homes with roofs made of sheets of corrugated metal weighed down with rocks against the stiff winds.

Yet beneath their ancestral land lies a modern-day Silicon Valley treasure: lithium.

The silvery-white metal is essential for the lithium-ion batteries that power smartphones, laptops and electric vehicles, and the popularity of these products has prompted a land rush here. Mining companies have for years been extracting billions of dollars of lithium from the Atacama region in Chile, and now firms are flocking to the neighboring Atacama lands in Argentina to hunt for the mineral known as “white gold.”

But the impoverished Atacamas have seen little of the riches….

In visits to all six of the indigenous communities, which lie on a mountain-ringed desert about 25 miles from Argentina’s northwest border with Chile, The Post found a striking contrast — faraway companies profiting from mineral riches while the communities that own the land struggle to pay for sewage systems, drinking water and heat for schools.

“We know the lithium companies are taking millions of dollars from our lands,” said Luisa Jorge, a leader in Susques, one of the six communities around the salt flats. “The companies are conscious of this. And we know they ought to give something back. But they’re not.”

Many in the communities also are worried that the lithium plants, which use vast amounts of water, will deepen existing shortages in the region, which receives less than four inches of rain a year. At least one of the six communities, Pastos Chicos, already has to have potable water trucked in… READ MORE.

“We don’t eat batteries,” the hand-painted sign read. “They take the water, life is gone.”

[agelessphotography]

Lithium Mines #1, Salt Flats, Atacama Desert, Chile 1/9, Edward Burtynsky, 2017

Pigment inkjet print Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York City, New York

[miningandsociety]

Kowalski: 80s New Wave/Avante-Garde/Industrial mining synth from the Wupper Valley

Readers of the blog may recall an earlier post about mining anarchist punks from the Ruhr District of Germany, one of the most important mining and industrial regions in Europe. Unsurprisingly, the region’s industrial heritage spanning hundreds of years found expression in much art and popular culture, and Germany is a well-known crucible of what has to be known around the world as industrial music.  

In addition to Crass’s last concert in Wales (the subject of the previous post), my partner Per also brought to my attention a synth band from Wuppertal, Germany called Kowalski, whose 1982 debut album, Schlagende Wetter, features a cover with the band dressed as coal miners. The title refers to a high-explosive gas mixture that was the cause of many mining accidents. Interestingly, “Kowalski” is also the second most common surname in Poland, and is derived from the word kowal, meaning “blacksmith”.

In looking up info for this post, I also found a video of a 2018 live performance of the song “Steel Machine” (second track on Schlagende Wetter) in which the band is wearing headlamps and plays against projected images of factories and smelters. Check it out!