Mining Frontier Research Articles

Detecting gold mining impacts on insect biodiversity in a tropical mining frontier with SmallSat imagery.

Gold mining is a major driver of Amazonian forest loss and degradation. As mining activity encroaches on primary forest in remote and inaccessible areas, satellite imagery provides crucial data for monitoring mining‐related deforestation. High‐resolution imagery, in particular, has shown promise for detecting artisanal gold mining at the forest frontier. An important next step will be to establish relationships between satellite‐derived land cover change and biodiversity impacts of gold mining. In this study, we set out to detect artisanal gold mining using high‐resolution imagery and relate mining land cover to insects, a taxonomic group that accounts for the majority of faunal biodiversity in tropical forests. We applied an object‐based image analysis (OBIA) to classify mined areas in an Indigenous territory in Guyana, using PlanetScope imagery with ~3.7 m resolution. We complemented our OBIA with field surveys of insect family presence or absence in field plots (n = 105) that captured a wide range of mining disturbances. Our OBIA was able to identify mined objects with high accuracy (>90% balanced accuracy). Field plots with a higher proportion of OBIA‐derived mine cover had significantly lower insect family richness. The effects of mine cover on individual insect taxa were highly variable. Insect groups that respond strongly to mining disturbance could potentially serve as bioindicators for monitoring ecosystem health during and after gold mining. With the advent of global partnerships that provide universal access to PlanetScope imagery for tropical forest monitoring, our approach represents a low‐cost and rapid way to assess the biodiversity impacts of gold mining in remote landscapes.

Laws and Standards at the Mining Frontier: Negotiating Hierarchies of Rights and Corporate Power in the Surroundings of Coal Mines in Mozambique

Laws and Standards at the Mining Frontier: Negotiating Hierarchies of Rights and Corporate Power in the Surroundings of Coal Mines in Mozambique

Water Pollution and Environmental Policy in Artisanal Gold Mining Frontiers: The Case of La Toma, Colombia

Water Pollution and Environmental Policy in Artisanal Gold Mining Frontiers: The Case of La Toma, Colombia

Leaders’ distributional & efficiency effects in collective responses to policy: Lab-in-field experiments with small-scale gold miners in Colombia

Globally, small-scale gold mining (SSGM) is an important economic option for many rural poor. It involves local uses of shared resources, like common-pool contexts for which self-governance has avoided ‘tragedies of the commons’. Yet even ideal local governance of SSGM is not societally efficient given non-local damages that suggest external interventions for desired shifts. Because transactions costs are high for rewarding reductions in damages on remote mining frontiers, states could gain if rewards based on low-cost, group compliance measures could successfully induce cooperation in response to policy. However, as group-level rewards invite free-riding, such success requires local collective action. Since that guarantees neither efficient coordination nor equitable distributions of net benefits from compliance, we consider the impacts of emergent leaders on local responses to external policy. We employ framed lab experiments with 200 small-scale gold miners in Colombia's Pacific to explore leaders’ impacts on equity and efficiency in collective responses to external incentives. Allowing communication before individual choice, which raises efficiency but not always equity, we can identify emergent leaders of groups’ communications. Leaders raise compliance and affect how its costs are distributed, suggesting access to leadership roles matters.

Land, conflict and radical distributive claims in South Africa's rural mining frontier

The article presents an analysis of mine-community conflict in South Africa's rural platinum belt. We draw on a combination of detailed ethnographic research material and multi-scalar analysis of the political economy of mining policy. Our analysis reveals that such conflict is rooted in local claims beyond the labour market – in demands for exclusive control over land and mineral rents. The article engages with Ferguson's (2015) conceptualisation of the politics of distribution to demonstrate that radical claims on mining industry rents have escalated despite the South African state's introduction of progressive redistributive legislation. The post-apartheid institutional arrangements developed to mitigate inequalities in and around mining and address the historical exclusion of the black population have not proved effective. Instead, these measures have been undermined and subverted by powerful groups who funnel mineral rents into new forms of elite accumulation. This phenomenon generates and exacerbates inequality and conflict, because these redistributive institutions tend to exclude rural residents who hold customary rights to the mineral-rich land.

Chinese Laborers on a Mining Frontier : The Case of Copper Miners in Northern Luzon, 1856–98

Chinese Laborers on a Mining Frontier : The Case of Copper Miners in Northern Luzon, 1856–98

Graduated stringency within collective incentives for group environmental compliance: Building coordination in field-lab experiments with artisanal gold miners in Colombia

Small-scale gold mining is important to rural livelihoods in the developing world but also a source of environmental externalities. Incentives for individual producers are the classic policy response for a socially efficient balance between livelihoods and the environment. Yet monitoring individual miners is ineffective, or it is very costly, especially on frontiers with scattered small-scale miners. We ask whether monitoring at a group level effectively incentivizes cleaner artisanal mining by combining lower-cost external monitoring with local collective action. We employ a mining-framed, threshold-public-goods experiment in Colombia's Pacific region, with 640 participants from frontier mining communities. To study compliance with collective environmental targets, we vary the target stringency, including to compare increases over time in the stringency versus decreases. We find that collective incentives can induce efficient equilibria, with group compliance – and even inefficient overcompliance – despite the existence of equilibria with zero contributions. Yet, for demanding targets in which the reward for compliance barely outweighs the cost, compliance can collapse. Those outcomes improve with past successes for easier targets, however, so our results suggest gain from building coordination via graduated stringency.

Mining on communal land as a new frontier –a case study of the Kunene Region, Namibia

ABSTRACT This paper is about mining under communal ownership which makes this kind of mining a new mining frontier. The newness of the frontier is that it has introduced a series of institutional complexities that is uncommon to artisanal and large-scale mining. Mining companies have to negotiate deals with communities and their leaders to be able to prospect for mineral resources. We also argue that the state’s environmental legislation is poorly harmonised with the prevalent conditions in communal areas where mining is gaining greater importance. Legislation remains silent on the rights of those living on communal land. These rights remain in a state of confusion with often negative effects on the local communities who are exposed to a number of duplicating development programmes and legislative structures. The aim of this paper is to explore the dynamics communal mining in the Kunene Region in north-western Namibia.

Radical rentierism: gold mining, cryptocurrency and commodity collateralization in Venezuela

After the oil price collapsed in 2014, debates in oil-producing nations emerged around the importance of doing away with commodity dependence. Modernization plans and developmental projects sprung up among large and small producers alike. Nevertheless, some countries remain dramatically committed to rentier practices, and many in Latin America and Africa have engaged in new forms of resource dependence by expanding their mining frontiers. Further, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, new forms of online payments entered the global political economy and generated discussion among policymakers about the legality and implications of these payment mechanisms. In this article, I explain the linkages of two apparently disconnected forms of mining. Drawing on the case of Venezuela, I argue that the spread of small-scale, irregular and artisanal gold extraction and cryptocurrency mining is the result of the decaying rentier state in crisis. These originally decentralized and irregular activities were later endorsed and transformed by the state with the Orinoco Mining Arc project and the launching of the commodity-backed cryptocurrency, the ‘petro’. The state’s endorsement of these forms of mining translate into the collateralization of primary commodities and the emergence of new forms of authority in a radicalized form of rentierism connected with global financial circuits.

Discontent, Conflict, Social Resistance and Violence at Non-metallic Mining Frontiers in India

The twenty-first century is witnessing increased extraction of natural resources across the globe, which includes biomass, metal ores and tailings, fossil energy carriers, and industrial and construction materials. Increasing extraction of resources is largely a result of either intensification of extractive operations in existing extractive locations, or as a result of expansion of frontiers of resource extraction to new geospatial locations across the world. Amongst these, extraction of construction materials has been the highest in the last century. This article analyses conflicts surrounding such minerals which are non-metallic, low value, and extracted to a large degree by local or regional extractive agents, with a special focus on the social violence exerted in such conflicts.

Socioeconomic dynamics of a mining town in Amazon: a case study from Canaã dos Carajás, Brazil

This research focuses on a mining frontier in the municipality of Canaa dos Carajas, located in the Brazilian Eastern Amazon. The method involved a combination of secondary data with field research. The latter is based on in-person interviews with a sample of 253 households. The paper analyzes the municipality and its inhabitant’s socioeconomic situation and captures the views of residents about life in the town. The results showed that mining played an important role in increase of Canaa’s income and exports, despite the late 2000s economic crises. Consequently, many socioeconomic indicators improved in Canaa. However, inequality increase and employment fall associated with S11D operation pose challenges to the municipality—currently and possibly in the future. Canaa expects high amounts of royalties of iron ore exploitation. These royalties can help the municipality’s economy if the planning and political-institutional contexts are adequate. Field work dataset showed that Canaa’s population is essentially migrant who arrived after 2004 seeking work and income opportunities, as an effect of mining growth. Nevertheless, people became more skeptical as a consequence of S11D operation and jobs loss, many businesses closure and drastic reduction of movement in the city. The results show the challenge to convert the increasing income from different stages of mining activity into permanently better and broader public services. This result is especially important in the studied case of a recent town located in the southeast Amazonia, whose dynamics are strongly linked to mining economics, and faces effects of changes in stages of large-scale mining projects.

Post-neoliberal energy modernity and the political economy of the landlord state in Ecuador

This paper offers a value-theoretic critique of ‘post-neoliberal’ energy production in Ecuador. The Ecuadorian government is attempting to end the dependence on finite hydrocarbon resources and unite energy infrastructure with industrial competitiveness through the transformation of the country’s ‘energy matrix’. Based on extensive field research, we argue that the project reveals the contradictions of the landlord state’s attempt to mobilise circuits of ground rent and foreign debt to create cheap energy as a comparative advantage for national industrial development. Riding high on global commodity prices and tapping into a huge stream of Chinese investment, the government massively increased investment in new sources of hydroelectricity and energy infrastructure. Whilst ostensibly bringing about a reduction in energy production costs, this has come at the price of leveraging the country’s natural resources (oil and minerals) and, paradoxically, creating an oversupply of hydroelectricity. Drawing on a Marxist reading of the landlord state and tracing the flows of ground rent, capital and energy we reveal how, far from the claims of post-neoliberal modernity, the project is in fact deepening resource dependence by channelling hydroelectricity towards the nascent Ecuadorian mining frontier.

Shelf Projects: The Political Life of Exploration Geology in Senegal

Since the early 2000s, southeastern Senegal has emerged as a premier gold exploration and mining frontier. At present, the Sabodala gold mine, owned by the Canadian company Teranga Gold, is the only operational gold mine and mill in Senegal. But two more open-pit gold operations are scheduled to open this year, and several other companies have announced discoveries of industrial-scale deposits. By documenting the shifting ownership and exploration of the Sabodala deposit, this article draws attention to how the protracted phase of mineral research shapes the political life of mining operations in Africa and elsewhere in the global South. Geological exploration in colonial and post-colonial Senegal, as in much of Africa, has relied heavily on the expertise of indigenous miners and smelters. Mining Sabodala has thus unearthed multi-vocal and contested histories of gold discovery. Historians of science have established that field assistants and experts in Africa have produced agronomic and medical knowledge typically credited to “the West.” By extending this argument to gold exploration, the article brings African history into dialogue with an emergent anthropology of subterranean knowledge production.

Becoming the Nuclear-Front-End

Uranium mining often escapes the attention of debates around the nuclear industries. The chemical elements’ representations are focused on the nuclear reactor. The article explores what I refer to as becoming the nuclear front – the uranium mining frontier’s expansion to Tanzania, its historical entanglements and current state. The geographies of the nuclear industries parallel dominant patterns and the unevenness of the global divisions of labour, resource production and consumption. Clearly related to the developments and expectations in the field of atomic power production, uranium exploration and the gathering of geological knowledge on resource potentiality remains a peripheral realm of the technopolitical perceptions of the nuclear fuel chain. Seen as less spectacular and less associated with high-technology than the better-known elements of the nuclear industry the article thus aims to shine light on the processes that pre-figure uranium mining by looking at the example of Tanzania.

Captivity, Displacement and Migration Among Indigenous People on Mining Frontiers

Os centros de mineração foram destinos comuns para a migração indígena durante o período colonial devido à alta demanda de mão de obra indígena que para lá se deslocava principalmente pela quase inexistência de indígenas sedentários nas regiões mineradoras. Uma revisão da bibliografia recente de vários estudiosos sobre os padrões de migração indígena em centros de mineração aborda tópicos afins, como migração forçada, deslocamento e cativeiro, relacionados à violência. Conhecimentos acerca temas do papel das mulheres nesse tipo de processos também constituem problemas das pesquisas relacionadas. As diferentes abordagens adotadas por especialistas neste tópico e, portanto, um conjunto de descobertas diferentes, também devem ser consideradas.
 
 Palavras-chave: Paisagens. Mineração. Cativeiro. Deslocamento. Migração.
 
 Abstract: mining centers were common places for indigenous migration during the colonial period, because of the high demand on foreign indigenous labor, mainly due to the low sedentary indigenous population in the mining regions. A literature review on the recent work of several borderlands scholars on indigenous migration patterns into mining centers sheds new light on related topics, such as forced migration, displacement and captivity, which relate to violence. It also sheds knowledge on topics such as women’s roles in these type of processes. One thing to consider are the different approaches taken by experts on this topic, and thus, the different set of findings.
 
 Keywords: Landscapes. Mining. Captivity. Displacement. Migration.

Aestheticising the Blackfoot Valley (Montana, USA), or How to Reconcile the Mining Frontier and the Eco-Frontier

This article presents a Rocky Mountain valley in the state of Montana (USA), a central symbolic space of the American West that is heavily marked by the identity-charged notions of “wilderness” and “frontier”. With a rich history in mining, logging and ranching benefitting pioneers, the Blackfoot Valley today is an excellent example of the frontline between this extractive history (which is not entirely past) and nature conservation, a genuinely active eco-frontier initiated at the federal, state, local and individual levels. Varying representations and appropriations of mountain areas tend to create socio-economic divisions in the valley’s population. An entirely private, site-specific art project (Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild) creates the possibility of offering an alternative resource to be shared by eco-gentrifiers and a local population adjusting to a post-extractive order, and indeed its site-specific works resonate with both the valley’s mining past and its untamed nature. Does this project mean that there are shared values in this rural space undergoing strong social change? And although it does make it possible to spatially reconcile a mining frontier on its way to heritagisation with a vibrant eco-frontier, will it really help reconcile mountain-dwelling populations with very different socio-economic trajectories over the long term?

Narrations and practices of mobility and immobility in the maintenance of gender dualisms

This paper analyses the role of practices and representations of mobility in supporting particular kinds of gender orders. While scholarship has shown the various ways women are materially and symbolically ‘fixed’ in place, less attention has been paid to how discourses and practices of mobility interface with systems of gender differentiation more broadly. This work is based on a robust empirical base of 55 interviews, 90 h of participant observation and an analysis of museum displays in Kalgoorile, Western Australia, an iconic frontier mining town selected for this investigation as a site of strongly bifurcated gender discourses. Analysing our field data through the lens of feminist theory which problematizes gender binaries, we argue that while some narrations of gender mobilities serve to reinforce gender binaries, lived practices of movement can also destabilise (idealised) notions of gendered movement. This paper extends conceptual work by advancing understanding about the role of mobility within systems of gender differentiation, showing how lived practices of mobility are just as likely to challenge idealised patterns of gendered movement as they are to reinforce these patterns.

Entangled Territories in Small-Scale Gold Mining Frontiers: Labor Practices, Property, and Secrets in Indonesian Gold Country

Summary Small-scale gold mining territories emerge at the nexus of land use, property, and labor relations in some of Indonesian Borneo’s most vibrant and populated spaces, entangling state actors while sitting comfortably beyond the reach of formal state authority. Based on 7 months of field research in a key gold-producing region of West Kalimantan, I argue that gold’s presence, discovery, and informal extraction creates resource frontiers, and that within these frontiers, mining labor practices, property relations, and gold mining-related secret knowledges converge to generate resource territories. While development practitioners, agrarian scholars, and government officials represent mining sites as chaotic and lacking institutional order, I show that a clearly understood organization of life and work animates the territorial subjects and territorialized spaces that small-scale mining populates in both urban and rural mining territories. The article challenges views of territory and territorialization as an imposition of government on the people and resources within spatial boundaries. Territories with no formalized boundaries in Indonesian gold country emerge through specific production practices engaging labor, resource access, and situated knowledges. The complex entanglements of legalities and illegalities suggest that smallholder gold production spaces are ungovernable through centralized state regulatory institutions.

Charcoal and Blood: Italian Immigrants in Eureka, Nevada and the Fish Creek Massacre. By Silvio Manno.

Charcoal and Blood: Italian Immigrants in Eureka, Nevada and the Fish Creek Massacre. By Silvio Manno. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2016. ix + 278 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95, paper.) Silvio Manno examines immigration dynamics, labor unrest, and a violent clash that laid bare a heated socioeconomic battle on Nevada’s mining frontier. Set in the 1870s, this book traces the development of class identity among Italian charcoal burners in Eureka, Nevada, as they struggled to raise the rate for a bushel of charcoal. By mapping relationships within the Italian American community that shaped larger economic conditions, Manno describes how higher status, established Italian Americans possibly helped funnel lower-status countrymen into Nevada and how, in return, the new migrants became loyal patrons of Italian … sondra.cosgrove{at}csn.edu

Capturing the Landscape of New Spain. Baltasar Obregón and the 1564 Ibarra Expedition by Rebecca A. Carte

Reviewed by: Capturing the Landscape of New Spain. Baltasar Obregón and the 1564 Ibarra Expedition by Rebecca A. Carte Luis Fernando Restrepo Carte, Rebecca A. Capturing the Landscape of New Spain. Baltasar Obregón and the 1564 Ibarra Expedition. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2015. 164 pp. Besides the attention given to figures like Cabeza de Vaca and Estebanico, the colonial archive related to Northern Mexico and Southwestern US has received limited attention by colonial Latin American literature scholars with few exceptions such as Maureen Ahern and José Rabasa. Rebecca Carte’s Capturing the Landscape is an excellent contribution to fill that void in colonial studies. Its environmental perspective also offers important insights into the multilayered processes of colonial and imperial inscriptions of the land. Based on a careful close reading of the Historia de los descubrimientos de Nueva España (1584) by Creole writer Baltasar de Obregón, Carte’s study offers a critical analysis of the cultural production of landscapes. The northern frontier is “captured” by textualscapes like Obregón’s Historia, that register and appropriate the land, endow it with meaning, recodify or suppress existing landscapes and inscribe it in the colonial, imperial and Christian telos. Written twenty years after his participation in the Francisco de Ibarra “pacifying” expedition to the mining frontier in Northern Mexico in 1563, the Historia, as many relaciones de méritos y servicios, seeks to offer the Spanish Crown valuable information on the territories, its wealth, and the prospects for colonization and evangelization of the region. Stressing the hardships endured by the expedition participants, the Historia seeks royal recognition and compensation. The Historia incorporates information from the previous expeditions to the region, viewed from the new conquest paradigm developed by Phillip II in his Ordenanzas de 1573, responsive to the demands of a detailed mapping of the territory, justifications for the war against the Indians, and the evangelization project. Here, however, the imperial inscription of the land is not done top down, through the new cartographic imagination of the Renaissance, rather bottom up, from the itinerary itself, inscribing the territory traversed. Knowledge generated by the praxis of colonialism itself. The reality is that neither Ibarra nor the expeditions before him had really been successful in the northern frontier military campaigns referred to as the Chichimeca Wars. In this context, the Historia seeks to make real the imperial aspirations. Obregón’s texts oversell the Spaniards’ accomplishments, projecting the past (history) and the present (itinerary) onto the landscape and presenting the territories as a (future) possession of the Spanish empire. Carte’s study brings these issues to the forefront in a well-documented and competent reading of a lesser-known text that is placed into the wider colonial experience. [End Page 193] The book is divided in four chapters. In the introduction, Carte outlines the conceptual framework used to examine the cultural and discursive production of landscapes, mainly through the concept of textualscapes, following Arjun Appadurai’s fluid and perspectival view of spatial constructs. Landscapes are not static backdrops but a process, a site of dynamic relationship between the land and people (11). The first chapter examines the discursive elements of the Historia and its context. The text draws from different genres, including history, the relación, heroic account, etc. It inscribes the landscapes described into a wider framework that includes the Spanish colonization and European history. The second chapter discusses how European cosmography and the praxis of colonialism shaped the vision of the land, contrasting the top down mapping project in the renowned Relaciones geográficas with the narratives emerging from the ground up with information about mineral wealth, population, and other matter relevant to the colonizing project (47–48). Obregón’s Historia is rich in the descriptions of harsh mountainous terrains versus more ‘accessible’ lands, which Carte analyzes through the concepts of topophillia and topophobia, highlighting “the affective ties with the material environment” (59). The third chapter examines the multiple perspectives that coexist of any given territory, and the power dynamics at play in their production, reproduction, negotiation and suppression. Obregón’s textualscapes write over a pre and coexisting indigenous landscape. The rough terrains that Obregón considers...