Send message to Author

Short abstract

As power struggles unfold over access to ‘critical minerals’, I challenge expert and policy maker claims that energy transitions can be made ‘more equitable and just with more traceability and transparency about supply chains’.

Long abstract

Dust is the unruly consequence of extraction that reminds us how leaky both ‘nature’ and the taxonomic systems that support extractivism are. While the obedient matter of ore sits in orderly piles until human agents transport and transform it, dust defies capture and control. Dust hitches rides on the open trucks driving from mine to market but gets distracted and goes off to visit the soil, water and lungs on the way. It transgresses the boundaries between ground and air, inside and outside, resource and threat. The indiscretion of dust reminds us that our bodies and territories aren’t as separate and self-contained as they seem.

I present multi-sited research that links the practices of due diligence professionals in Europe with insights from field work on manganese mining in Zambia. By attending to (1) dispossession, (2) ecological degradation, and (3) commodity export dependence, I demonstrate that transparency is an arena for power struggles at multiple scales, characterized by socially constructed ignorance and a contingent web of pressures that stabilizes extractive relations while rendering them invisible. I argue that transparency configured through an extractive gaze produces de-humanized risk-subjects, proliferates toxic body-territories and generates a growing class of landless people who are surplus to capitalist labor requirements in the age of automation. Herein lies the potential for rupture.