Suchergebnisse

Drawing together insights from neo-Innisian geography and environmental history, this paper explores the landscape and environmental changes engendered by 'cyclonic' patterns of development associated with uranium production at Uranium City, Saskatchewan. Strong postwar demand for uranium led to the establishment and rapid expansion of Uranium City on the north shore of Lake Athabasca as a 'yellowcake town,' dedicated to producing uranium oxide concentrate to supply federal government contracts with the United States military. In spite of optimistic assessments for the region's industrial future, the new settlement remained inherently unstable, tied to shifting institutional arrangements and external markets, and haunted by the spectre of resource depletion. The planning and development of the townsite at Uranium City reflected both neo-colonial desires to open the north to Euro-Canadian settlement and efforts by the state to buffer the stormy effects of resource dependency. Ultimately, however, quixotic government efforts to implant an outpost of industrial modernity in the Athabasca Region failed to forestall the inevitable winds of change, which left in their wake destructive legacies of social dislocation and environmental degradation, already evident with the near-collapse of the uranium export market by the early 1960s.

In drawing attention to how 'place' situates and configures scientific practice, recent scholarship examining historical geographies of science tends to overlook how natural places shape scientific ideas, practices and institutions. This paper suggests that environmental factors may be conceived in terms of the interplay of 'site and situation' in environmental science. It examines the pioneering marine pollution research program developed at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada's Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Beginning with an analysis of pulp mill effluent in Alberni Inlet on Vancouver Island, oceanographers at the station undertook studies aimed at minimizing threats to commercial fisheries from aquatic pollution on the B.C. coast. As a key site of pollution research, Alberni Inlet was situated within a variety of environmental, institutional and social contexts: the politics of resource exploitation in B.C., institutions of fisheries research and regulation, and the disciplinary practices of marine pollution science on the Pacific coast. By the 1960s, the board's Pacific Oceanographic Group had developed a leading research program in marine pollution science, and the Alberni experience formed the basis for a coast-wide inventory of environments receiving industrial wastes. Oceanographers framed pollution control in terms of 'assimilative capacity,' or the ability of natural waters to dilute, disperse and absorb industrial wastes without harm to valuable commercial fish species. As subsequent pollution problems revealed, however, this instrumental approach to environmental management tended to ignore ecological complexity and variability, and the unforeseen consequences of engineering natural systems as waste sinks.

For indigenous communities throughout the globe, mining has been a historical forerunner of colonialism, introducing new, and often disruptive, settlement patterns and economic arrangements. Although indigenous communities may benefit from and adapt to the wage labour and training opportunities provided by new mining operations, they are also often left to navigate the complicated process of remediating the long-term ecological changes associated with industrial mining. In this regard, the mining often inscribes colonialism as a broad set of physical and ecological changes to indigenous lands. Mining and Communities in Northern Canada examines historical and contemporary social, economic, and environmental impacts of mining on Aboriginal communities in northern Canada. Combining oral history research with intensive archival study, this work juxtaposes the perspectives of government and industry with the perspectives of local communities. The oral history and ethnographic material provides an extremely significant record of local Aboriginal perspectives on histories of mining and development in their regions. With contributions by: Patricia Boulter Jean-Sébastien Boutet Emilie Cameron Sarah Gordon Heather Green Jane Hammond Joella Hogan Arn Keeling Tyler Levitan Hereward Longley Scott Midgley Kevin O'Reilly Andrea Procter John Sandlos Alexandra Winton

The inevitable closure and remediation phase of a mine's lifecycle routinely causes negative socio-economic and environmental impacts for nearby communities. While closure planning is meant to ensure post-closure human and environmental safety, it tends to favour short-term technical fixes over longer-term socio-economic, cultural, and ecological considerations. For mines operating on Indigenous territories, where communities have complex and nuanced connections to land and varying levels of jurisdiction, these issues are further exacerbated by the exclusion of Indigenous voices from planning and decision-making. This research employed a qualitative document analysis of ten mine closure plans for mines in Northern Canada that are still operational to understand how the industry is actively planning for the closure and remediation of their sites. In particular, this work asks whether or not mine companies are incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into their mine closure plans, and how they are addressing the complex socio-economic aspects of closure. This analysis showed that mine closure plans across Northern Canada inconsistently apply Indigenous Knowledge and expertise, and the methods used for community consultation in mine closure planning are left vague. While differences in policy between Northern territories and regions account for some of these inconsistencies, a company's willingness to work beyond baseline requirements imposed by governments is also an important factor. Additionally, these closure plans further demonstrate that the industry prioritizes technical aspects of mine closure over the social, cultural, economic, and ecological. For mine closure to be successful in a Northern context it must incorporate community expertise, emerge from the values and priorities of the Indigenous peoples whose lands mines are operating on, and account for a wider scope of social, economic, and cultural impacts.

In the early morning of January 24, 1978, the nuclear-powered Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 crashed on the barrens of the Northwest Territories. The crash dispersed radioactive debris in a wide trajectory across northern Canada, with multiple communities falling within the debris field.The lengthy clean-up that followed was shaped by government understandings of the northern environment as mediated through authoritative science and technology. This authority was to be challenged from the very beginning of Operation Morning Light. Constant technological failures under northern environmental conditions only increased the uncertainty already inherent in determining radioactive risk. Communication of this risk to concerned northerners was further complicated by language barriers in the predominantly Indigenous communities affected. Although Operation Morning Light was shaped by uncertainties, archival records of this clean-up are still ultimately defined by government narratives of scientific authority, narratives which leave little room for the concerns of affected Indigenous communities.

To date, research on mine remediation in North America has focused primarily on technical management; relatively less is known about the historical, political and social dimensions of remediation. Remediation, as a continuation of the mining process, alters local landscapes and economies and can be both dangerous and beneficial for surrounding communities. Because remediation projects tend to focus on the technical aspects of clean-up, such projects risk overlooking the environmental injustices associated with past development and obscuring blame or responsibility from industry and government for environmental degradation. Insofar as it is understood as cleaning up or repairing environmental damage, remediation is generally seen as "doing the good" and is less amenable to political or ethical challenges based on community concerns or values. This paper argues that greater attention needs to be paid to public participation and justice concerns associated with cleaning up mine sites. Drawing from the literatures on ecological restoration, environmental justice, reconciliation, discard studies, and matters of care, we highlight critical, yet overlooked issues in the remediation of post-mining landscapes. We argue that remediation projects present a unique opportunity for the negotiation and articulation of morals, values, histories, and physical experiences associated with mine sites and we seek to re-frame remediation as an ongoing, creative process of community healing.

This article addresses the often ignored history of Indigenous responses to environmental pollution. Focusing on resistance to arsenic pollution from Giant Mine in Canada's Northwest Territories, Sandlos and Keeling explore how Indigenous communities mobilized knowledge around environmental pollution, conducting their own studies when government research minimized or ignored their concerns about the health impacts of pollution, participating in public hearings, and continuing to push for research into the long-term health effects even after the mine closed. The authors show how this resistance to environmental racism is connected to other Indigenous struggles over industrial development and to issues such as land claims, sovereignty, and colonial dispossession.

For fifty years (1949–99) the now-abandoned Giant Mine in Yellowknife emitted arsenic air and water pollution into the surrounding environment. Arsenic pollution from Giant Mine had particularly acute health impacts on the nearby Yellowknives Dene First Nation (YKDFN), who were reliant on local lakes, rivers, and streams for their drinking water, in addition to frequent use of local berries, garden produce, and medicine plants. Currently, the Canadian government is undertaking a remediation project at Giant Mine to clean up contaminated soils and tailings on the surface and contain 237,000 tonnes of arsenic dust that are stored underground at the Giant Mine. Using documentary sources and statements of Yellowknives Dene members before various public hearings on the arsenic issue, this paper examines the history of arsenic pollution at Giant Mine as a form of "slow violence," a concept that reconfigures the arsenic issue not simply as a technical problem, but as a historical agent of colonial dispossession that alienated an Indigenous group from their traditional territory. The long-term storage of arsenic at the former mine site means the effects of this slow violence are not merely historical, but extend to the potentially far distant future.

For indigenous communities throughout the globe, mining has been a historical forerunner of colonialism, introducing new, and often disruptive, settlement patterns and economic arrangements. Although indigenous communities may benefit from and adapt to the wage labour and training opportunities provided by new mining operations, they are also often left to navigate the complicated process of remediating the long-term ecological changes associated with industrial mining. In this regard, the mining often inscribes colonialism as a broad set of physical and ecological changes to indigenous lands. This collection examines historical and contemporary social, economic, and environmental impacts of mining on Aboriginal communities in northern Canada. Combining oral history research with intensive archival study, this work juxtaposes the perspectives of government and industry with the perspectives of local communities. The oral history and ethnographic material provides an extremely significant record of local Aboriginal perspectives on histories of mining and development in their regions. With contributions by: Patricia Boulter Jean-Sébastien Boutet Emilie Cameron Sarah Gordon Heather Green Jane Hammond Joella Hogan Arn Keeling Tyler Levitan Hereward Longley Scott Midgley Kevin O'Reilly Andrea Procter John Sandlos Alexandra Winton ; The University of Calgary Press acknowledges the support of the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund for our publications. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. ; Yes

For indigenous communities throughout the globe, mining has been a historical forerunner of colonialism, introducing new, and often disruptive, settlement patterns and economic arrangements. Although indigenous communities may benefit from and adapt to the wage labour and training opportunities provided by new mining operations, they are also often left to navigate the complicated process of remediating the long-term ecological changes associated with industrial mining. In this regard, the mining often inscribes colonialism as a broad set of physical and ecological changes to indigenous lands. This collection examines historical and contemporary social, economic, and environmental impacts of mining on Aboriginal communities in northern Canada. Combining oral history research with intensive archival study, this work juxtaposes the perspectives of government and industry with the perspectives of local communities. The oral history and ethnographic material provides an extremely significant record of local Aboriginal perspectives on histories of mining and development in their regions.

In humanity's relentless search for the industrial minerals that undergird our modern technology and economy, we have extensively and comprehensively ravaged natural landscapes. Sites like the Berkeley Pit in Montana or Western Australia's Kalgoorlie Super Pit exemplify the awesome scale of these transformations. Indeed, as an industry quip has it, mining is primarily a waste management business. Mineral solid waste accounts for the largest proportion of total global industrial waste production, and mining often generates toxic by-products ranging from heavy metals to process chemicals like cyanide. The effects of these wastes may persist long after mine closure and abandonment, requiring long-term care and maintenance. Under pressure from governments and environmental groups in recent decades, the industry has begun to address these considerable and controversial legacies of extractive development.

Industrial mining in Canada's territorial north has produced negative social, economic, and environmental consequences for aboriginal communities in the region since the early twentieth century. Many of these historical impacts persist: toxic sites associated with abandoned mines located within aboriginal traditional territories have become a source of great concern in recent years. It is difficult, however, to analyze historic mining activity within the traditional siting debate that has dominated the environmental justice movement in North America, as mining companies invariably locate where economic ore bodies exist. Instead, we argue that northern mining conflicts might best be understood through a productive alliance of North American environmental justice with insights from political ecology, a sub-discipline that has traditionally focused on environmental injustices in Third World settings, particularly local conflicts over access to resources that originate with colonialism and the expansion of global capital.

Although mine closures are an inherent feature of extractive industry, they tend to receive less attention in the literature on deindustrialization than the closures of manufacturing and other heavy industries. Until recently, the settler-colonial context of hinterland mineral development and its impact on northern Indigenous lands and communities in Canada have also remained largely unexplored within this literature. Mineral development is historically associated with the introduction of a colonial-capitalist industrial modernity across Canada's northern regions. Yet the boom-and-bust nature and ultimate ephemerality of mineral development has meant that resource-extractive regions have also been subject to intensive "cyclonic" periods of closure and deindustrialization. This article examines the experience of deindustrialization on the part of the Inuit community of Arctic Bay, who were largely "left behind" by the closure of Nanisivik, Canada's first High Arctic mine. Through documentary sources and oral history interviews we illustrate how, for Arctic Bay Inuit who were engaged in the cyclonic economies of Nanisivik's development and closure, there were myriad dimensions of social loss, displacement, and resentment associated with the failure of this industrial enterprise to deliver promised benefits to Inuit, beyond more commonly understood socioeconomic impacts such as job loss.

This paper analyzes a community-based project to communicate toxic dangers to future generations at Giant Mine, an abandoned gold mine near Yellowknife. Since 2013, the authors have worked with community groups, government, the Yellowknives Dene First Nation to develop a strategy for communicating the arsenic hazards at Giant Mine to future generations. Our experience suggests that any communication strategy must commemorate the multiple ways different constituents have known the mine. We also argue that any program to commemorate hazards for future generations can be a useful tool to address painful memories of historical environmental injustices associated with mine pollution. ; Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada

This paper analyzes a community-based project to communicate toxic dangers to future generations at Giant Mine, an abandoned gold mine near Yellowknife. Since 2013, the authors have worked with community groups, government, the Yellowknives Dene First Nation to develop a strategy for communicating the arsenic hazards at Giant Mine to future generations. Our experience suggests that any communication strategy must commemorate the multiple ways different constituents have known the mine. We also argue that any program to commemorate hazards for future generations can be a useful tool to address painful memories of historical environmental injustices associated with mine pollution.