Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will explore how technology featured as salvation versus damnation in the debate around the social impacts of the Rocky Hill Coal Mine in Gloucester.

Paper long abstract:

Earlier this year, Judge Brian Preston of the NSW Land and Environment Court rejected a proposal to mine in the Gloucester Valley, arguing that the proposed Rocky Hill coal mine 'would be in the wrong place, at the wrong time.' The implications of the decision are forecasted to be significant for the fossil fuel industry, with climate change and social impacts being central to the rejection of the mine.

Drawing on insights from an ongoing multi-sited ethnographic project with mining affected communities in NSW, I will explore some of the dynamics around mining, place, technology and temporality. I will focus specifically on the case study of the Rocky Hill Coal Mine. In 2018, I acted as an expert witness on the social impacts of the mine in the Land and Environment Court. Through my work on the case, as well as my ethnographic work in Gloucester, I became attuned to how the proposal, the court case and the local narratives surrounding the proposed mine at large centred on questions of how to manage and mitigate impacts through technological regimes. Core elements of the debate were, firstly, the type of impact that technology would have on ecological and social landscapes and, secondly, how technology could offer solutions to these impacts. In this paper, I will explore how technology and ecology intersected in the calls to both support and reject the mine and analyse how these speak to deeper ontological notions of place (Askland and Bunn 2018).