Paper short abstract:

How does waste emerge as the core element of environmental conflicts? How do mining wastescapes (re)emerge as resources framed under the label of “sustainable” and “green” mining? I argue that extraction is simultaneously an act of injection, resulting in disproportionate amounts of toxic waste.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the material legacies of the late 19th century settler-colonial gold rushes in the contemporary gold rush to challenge the prevalent notions of “discovery” and “extraction.” The world has witnessed an unprecedented global proliferation of mining activities over the past four decades. Gold mining constitutes the bulk of this extractive moment, attracting nearly half of all the new mining investments. More gold has been produced since 1980 than all the gold produced up to that point. Originally confined to four settler-colonial countries in the late 19th century, the gold mining industry has now expanded globally, marking what could be termed the 'third gold rush' and giving rise to new wastescapes. Today, these wastescapes are transformed into novel resources with the help of microorganisms. By tracking the material conditions of possibility for the third gold rush, this paper explores: 1) How do waste and risk emerge as the defining elements of socio-environmental conflicts in the current mineral age? 2) How do the mining wastescapes (re)emerge as resources framed under the labels of “sustainable” and “green” mining? I argue that the assembled relations between humans, minerals, microorganisms, materials, formulas, and discourses lead to a crucial aspect of mining: the act of extraction is simultaneously an act of injection, resulting in disproportionate amounts of toxic waste. To theorize the scaling of extractivism at the global level, the paper proposes a shift in analytical focus from resource extraction to the production and reuse of waste as a vector of slow violence.