Toxic endurance and social becoming: Environmentalism in the shadows of Andean extraction

Abstract

As industrial mining has expanded its global frontiers so too have critiques of the environmental impacts on isolated peasant and indigenous populations. In the Andes of southern Peru, contemporary mining enfolds impoverished and ‘forgotten’ regions into the promises of bright new futures, animated by the promises of extractive development discourse. In doing so, contemporary industrial mining enacts and evokes latent forms of ‘social becoming’. While the poisonous consequences of living in the vicinity of extraction and environmental degradation are popularly known, they are understood, initially, as a price to be paid for development and historical neglect. The ‘externalities’ of industrial promise for local populations require what this paper terms as ‘toxic endurance’. However, ‘endurance’ is an exhaustible and unequally distributed quality, and calculations must consistently be recalibrated to determine whether silence and uncertainty remain viable strategies in the Andean search for a ‘better life’. Through the parameters and limits of endurance, and contrary to assumptions, this paper will highlight the incentives for complicity with, and acquiescence towards, environmental degradation by those in the precarious shadows of mining.