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

Erik Kojola

doi:10.2458/v27i1.23210

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

Highlights

Decisions about where, how, or whether to develop new resource extraction sites depends on how potential environmental impacts and economic benefits are assessed
Support from working class and rural residents and opposition from environmentalists to proposed mining is driven by nostalgia, fears of loss, and hopes to protect places and the region for future generations
How people remember the past and imagine future impacts of mining are radically different, based on divergent environmental imaginaries shaped by class, and by place of residence

Summary

Introduction

How, or whether to develop new resource extraction sites depends on how potential environmental impacts and economic benefits are assessed. Decisions about extractive development are conflicts between divergent environmental imaginaries constructed through cultural frameworks for understanding the past and the future. In this article I study the Northern Minnesota Iron Range – an emblematic rural mining region and one of the world's largest suppliers of iron ore – to explore the temporal dynamics of the politics of natural resources and prognosis (Mathews and Barnes 2016). Copper mining has become a major political issue in Minnesota with mobilization by supporters and opponents It is a symbolic struggle over the region's past, present, and future. I apply these approaches in my analysis section and conclude with some broader reflections and suggestions

Background: the Minnesota Iron Range and copper mining

Analysis: competing memories and future visions in the Iron Range

Findings

Conclusion