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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the sociospatial relations shaped by sediments in post-mining landscapes, focusing on practices of mitigation, river engineering, and environmental restoration. Drawing upon closed mines in Japan, it analyzes how these practices reorganize the geographies of ruin and life.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the ends of mining are lived and unlived by tracing sediment movements in post-mining landscapes. It centers negotiations between abandonment and inhabitation to join anthropological research on material lives of pollution, from its transboundary movements (Murphy 2013; Fortun 2014) to the possibilities of life (Tsing 2015). Specifically, it asks: how do a closed or abandoned mine and its surrounding river basin become a designated site of restoration or deemed needless of repair, and how do practices of mitigation, river engineering, and environmental restoration constitute (as) boundaries of “natural,” “habitable,” and “toxic”?

Based on 29 months of multi-sited, patchwork fieldwork at a closed mine and river basin in eastern Japan, alongside comparative research at other mines, this paper examines how sediments from mining—and the infrastructure that produces, deposits, and contains them—shape and reshape geographies of ruin and life. It analyzes the murky boundaries of where ruination begins or ends: mines left unattended may be mobilized as natural resources, such as when acidic drainage fosters rare mosses or sulfurous deposits contribute to onsen tourism. Some mitigation dams are rewilded habitats for endangered species, where mining sediments are soils that support reed wetlands. At the same time, residue leakage persists, and flooding vulnerabilities are unevenly distributed, with the remains of displaced households submerged in dams.

Through mapping the sociospatial relations shaped by sediments in the afterlives of mining, this paper contributes to discussions on the tensions between repair and abandonment, return and leaving in late industrial landscapes.