The Anthropocene has arrived riding a wave of pollution. From "forever chemicals" to oceanic garbage patches, human-made chemical compounds are seemingly everywhere. Concerned about how these compounds disrupt multiple lives and ecologies, environmental scholars, activists, and affected communities have sought to curb the causes of pollution, focusing especially on the extractive industries. In Worlds of Gray and Green, authors Sebastián Ureta and Patricio Flores challenge us to rethink extraction as ecological practice. Adopting an environmental humanities analytic lens, Ureta and Flores offer a rich ethnographic exploration of the waste produced by Chile's El Teniente, the world's largest underground mine. Deposited in a massive dam, the waste—known as tailings—engages with human and non-human entities in multiple ways through a process the authors call geosymbiosis. Some of these geosymbioses result in toxicity and damage, while others become the basis of lively novel ecologies. A particular kind of power emerges in the process, one that is radically indifferent to human beings but that affects them in many ways. Learning to live with geosymbioses offers a tentative path forward amid ongoing environmental devastation.
Sebastián Ureta is Associate Professor at Departmento de Sociología, Universidad Alberto Hurtado. He is the author of Assembling Policy: Transantiago, Human Devices, and the Dream of a World-Class Society.
Patricio Flores is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. His research interests are at the intersection of environmental sociology and technology studies.
"Worlds of Gray and Green is a brilliant examination of the possibility of extraction without extractionism, of massive mining projects supporting ecological diversity rather than environmental devastation. Noting that even clean energy technologies will depend on the extraction of rare earths and lithium, the authors present to us a case study in which bios dance in an entangled embrace with toxic tailings hoping to choreograph a new form of survival—the fate of human life in balance." —Elizabeth A Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
"Here is an example of what taking multi-entities seriously does: it obliges thought away from the usual, the simple, the binary and towards the surprising. Adhering to an ethics of thinking through place, the authors of this book expose that in Carén— a dam for mining tailings—the complex composition of toxic tailings not only produces death but also generates life. That such life flows from destruction impinges on how we think about the planetary catastrophe we inhabit." —Marisol de la Cadena, author of Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds
"Worlds of Gray and Green is a captivating foray into the extraction ecologies of the Carén tailings dam in Chile. This book draws us into the intimate and consequential relationships between diverse biological and geochemical entities, asking us to attend to the technical contours of their co-shaping interactions with one another and with the larger social, political, and economic systems that they take place within. Bringing together insights and approaches from science and technology studies and the environmental humanities, the authors develop vital new approaches for seeing and storying the profound dangers—and the compromised possibilities—of inhabiting toxic landscapes." —Thom van Dooren author, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction
"Life in mining tailings? Through its smart and original analysis, Worlds of Gray and Green takes us into entanglements through which tailings engages not only with bacteria but also with carp, cows, and watersheds. The authors vitalize a geologists' aphorism: rocks are not nouns but verbs." — Anna Tsing, coeditor of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene
"This book provides an excellent critical analysis of the complex material, economic, territorial, sociocultural, and human-rights entanglements of large-scale geoengineered mining projects. As we sink further into the Anthropocene and our Sisyphean techno-fix responses, this book is a must-read—and it features a dragon!" —Myra J. Hird, author of Canada's Waste Flows, and Professor in Environmental Studies at Queen's University, Canada
"This is a highly original and important contribution to the literature on mining specifically and to environmental studies more generally. By opening up the complex relations and entanglements that are usually blanketed as the destructive effects of mining, Ureta and Flores contribute to emerging scholarship that examines the destructive effects of various forms of industrial transformations of landscapes and that also investigates the processes and entanglements produced by such transformations, without jumping to conclusions about their effects." —Knut G. Nustad, Professor in the department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, coeditor of Anthropos and the Material
162 pp.6 x 9Illus: 20 b/w photographs
9780520386280$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
May 2022