ABSTRACT
Introduction Metals and minerals enable our lives in multiple ways as essential components of many of the artefacts and tools we use daily – from mobile phones to computers, kitchen utensils to vehicles, and construction materials to ingredients of medicines. Minerals have historically been crucial to economic growth, as they are to the material basis of post-industrial societies (Lynch 2002, Theis and Tomkin 2012: 212-213, 226). Yet, from a social work, and particularly from a social, ecological and environmental justice perspective (see Rambaree in Chapter 8),1 the ongoing over-extraction and consumption of minerals is a deeply problematic and complex phenomenon. This is because the extraction and consumption of minerals reflect the long-term wielding of political and economic power both within and between societies, and so their positive and negative consequences along the chains of production tend to be highly unevenly divided.
