The social regulation of resource access and environmental impact: production, nature and contradiction in the US copper industry

Abstract

The ecological processes underpinning commodity production have been largely overlooked by theories of social regulation and governance. Conventional applications of regulation theory, for example, often reduce the complex interactions between the environment and processes of accumulation to an homogenous surface on which the institutions of social regulation are inscribed. By contrast, this paper illustrates how the metabolism of production – the flows of raw materials, energy, and wastes central to the production of commodities from the natural environment – can provoke its own set of contradictions for particular industrial sectors. These contradictions can emerge to challenge accumulation in specific industrial sectors when existing practices and institutions fail to ensure continued access to resources and/or to effectively regulate the impacts of production on the environment. This paper describes how historical patterns of using nature in one primary commodity sector – copper mining and processing – contributed to declining profitability in this industry during the early 1980s. The process of copper production is analyzed to identify a series of underlying ‘ecological contradictions’ that have the potential to impact profitability. The expression of these contradictions is then examined in the specific context of the US Southwest during the 1980s, with particular attention paid to conflicts over the environmental impacts of mining and the accessibility of land to mining firms. The emergence of social conflict over land access and the environment is interpreted in terms of the historical specificity – and obsolescence – of the framework of institutions, legislation and customary relations between corporations, the state and activist groups that had formerly contained and regulated these contradictions.