ABSTRACT
Second only to the organic things that feed, house, and clothe us, mineral and metallic things are the essential materials that have helped to create the world’s diverse human societies and sociocultural systems. Traditionally, most global environmental histories of mining have maintained a clear distinction between the site where a material is extracted and its subsequent processing, use, and disposal. Such an approach misleadingly separates the many positive benefits of using a mineral from the environmental costs of its extraction, undermining our understanding of both. This chapter suggests that we instead adopt a neo-materialist approach to the extraction and use of minerals, one in which the environmental consequences are inseparable from the inherent material potentialities of the minerals themselves as they flow through human lives. By moving beyond the modernist dichotomies that separate mine and city, nature and technology, biology and culture, and the ‘natural’ and built environment, we can better recognize and analyze the many ways that minerals help to create human power and culture even as they entangle us every more deeply in their own material demands. Minerals like copper or coal, I argue, are not merely passive things that humans use, but are rather the very things that make us human. In this sense, the environmental history of global mining is a fundamental aspect of every aspect of global history, social, cultural, and political.
