Regional Regulatory Regimes and the Political Ecology of Critical Miningrce.csuchico.edu/sites/default/files/online/slc/regional... · Today he's going to be talking about regional

Dr. Antoinette Martinez, CSU, Chico Anthropology Department Chair>> Today I'd like to introduce Jeffrey Jenkins, who is an MA grad from geography and planning here at Chico State. He is now a PhD student at Santa Cruz, correct. And let's see, his dissertation title, The Political Ecology of Critical Mining and Energy Projects in the New West. And he's not quite Dr. Jenkins yet, but this will be his dissertation title. He's well‐published and I think you can get a clue about what he's going to talk about today if you hear some of his titles, Technological Wilderness, Extraction, The New Green Rush for Critical Rare Earth Element Mining In The Western United States, and The Reproduction of The Clamick [phonetic] Basin, Struggle for Water In A Changing Landscape. Today he's going to be talking about regional regulatory regimes and the political ecology of critical mining development in the rural American West. So let's make him feel welcome.

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Regional Regulatory Regimes & Political Ecology of Critical Mining Development

Anthropology

Jeffrey Jenkins, PhD Student, Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz>> Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, first from the anthropology department, and also from the geography department for hosting this and making this possible. So today I would like to talk about regions, about politics and ecology, about the ecology of the political system, about what do we mean by critical, strategic metals and also focusing then on text of transformation and the construction of the rural American West. And in that context, I think that these two statements from two noble figures on maybe opposing it as the political spectrum are quiet interesting because they both talk about mining and forestry. And the capital accumulation from one within the other is put in different context by other of them. And particularly, Ronald Regan here in the 1980s when the planning rule for the national forest was first developed, talks about producing knowledge from these forests, and maybe not in this quote right here, but that's certainly a theme with‐‐throughout Marcus' work and I think you'll see what I'm getting at in a bit with these quotes.

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Regional Regulatory Regimes & Political Ecology of Critical Mining Development

Anthropology

So a brief outline of what I'd like to talk about today. I'd like to give you some background on the economic restruction, maybe the socioeconomic restruction of the American West might be a better term, and critical mining legacies, the environmental legacies, and the current context they're worrying [phonetic] from that, the political economic drivers of these critical and strategic metals both from policy, domestic policies in particular and energy efficiencies and innovation that drives that as well as the geopolitical events that happened to help shape the formation of these policies and innovation and mining of these metals. The theoretical frameworks that I'm engaged in are the New West as opposed to the so‐called Old West, and the regional eco‐transformation that occurs both ecologically and economically, how regions in the Western United States are transforming over the last 30 years or so. And also, looking at regulatory regimes and environmental governance, and I'll talk more about what I mean by those terms as we go through this talk. And also political ecology, in particular how the political ecology deals with knowledge and power productions and how that's based off people's livelihoods. So I hope to highlight this, two case studies, one in New Mexico and the other in Wyoming, to show how these mines and the people around them are shaping these regions through these processes.

Anthropology Regional Regulatory Regimes & Political Ecology of Critical Mining Development

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So let's start off with an example that we all know perhaps or is familiar to us here in California, which is the Gold Rush and the region making that happened throughout that. And that wouldn't have been possible without the mercury or the centibar or the quicksilver, however you'd like to call it, that was mined throughout the coastal foothills. You can see new Albertan mined there in the lower right‐hand corner. It's quite interesting to visit and there's a legacy from quicksilver mining, certainly a legacy throughout the Sierras coming down from all the old goldmine sites, and certain things happen with this regional regime of accumulation. There's innovation, for instance, the Pelton wheel here was the first powerhouse for hydropower in California, and it led to a center of accumulation most notably in the, as Grape Reckon [phonetic] refers to, the inverted mines of the skyscrapers in early San Francisco that allowed capital to be placed in and held in real estate. And different things were also developed from the mines that helped bring San Francisco to prominence such as the street cars, the elevators and those inverted mine shafts, skyscrapers, and a myriad of different other things that we could discuss another time. But I think what's important to note is the region making and the centrality of the capital accumulation in one spot throughout a whole region and how that shaped future energy industries.


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So we're looking at these energy industries within regions and we could refer to these, the cycles of boom and bust, and look at maybe some of the not so good things that happen when a new mine comes into town. So we're all familiar with the shell boom right now and the hydraulic traction in North Dakota or in Pennsylvania or in New York or even here in California, but this isn't quite new. This actually happened and was pushed by the government in Colorado plateau in the 1970s under the Carter administration. And what ended up happening is these rural communities weren't ready for this big boom happening and there's a book that's written about it called The Boom Town Blues. And a lot of sociologists actually kind of jumped on this, the study of these rural communities in the 1970s. They went there, to communities like Riffle, as you see here on the left. And the community that was facing these negative impacts like drinking, divorce, delinquency and depression, the four D's as known by sociologists. The first one to fact these before the rest of the other communities was Gillette‐‐ Gillette, Wyoming. And so they termed this, these four D's, the Gillette Syndrome and this provided throughout the Colorado Plateau and all these boom towns. And like, many boom towns also went bust and so this only happened for a couple of years. But it's interesting to note the regional context there.


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So what do I mean by economic restructuring? Maybe socioeconomic structuring is a better way to put it, but it's global economics and interfacing with local economies, local livelihoods to restructure different ways of life as we know it up to that point and it's a continual process but I think you can break into three different periods. And the Old West, as it is so‐called, has been going on since Frederick Jackson Turner wrote his famous frontier thesis and since the expansion with the Homestead Act and so forth. But basically the Old West, as we can refer to it now, is extracted industry based in ranching, in timber, in agriculture and in mining. And this is driven by different economic emphasis, different causal factors through raw materials demand. And if we want to refer to the post World War II Old West, was driven by highway building and suburban building and also this increased production of post World War II context that served the global market. This shift happened then with the new west I would say around the 1970s and 1980s, the Regan recession happened, the outsourcing of a lot of our commodity markets and the reduction in rural property value and a lot of this house [inaudible] that occurred in the urban cities people fled to the wild and urban interface seeking the amenity value of the landscape, the Hilda is preserved rather than the Hilda is emendated from a mine taking it apart. And as part of this, service based industries emerged, second homes emerged and the extracted livelihoods went away.


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And with that, restructuring, this neoliberal restructuring in the Regan years came outsourcing of timber production, outsourcing of that sustained deal that they would have hoped for. And there were more jobs in order to keep the population base, but voting, but they were lower paying jobs and it was significantly restructured. Now we're in a context maybe after the 2007, 2008 recession, of further redistribution in the rural areas of this country and in the West in particular driven by new policies and innovations of extraction such as the Shell gas boom leading people to migrate to different places, that's one example. And it's neither the old West replacing the new or the new West replacing the old, but our archipelagoes of both of these and more of a patchwork quilt of the two coexisting.


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And you can see this map right here of rural job growth. And if it's a gray county, that means it's technically a metropolitan county so that's not counted. But these non‐metro counties are the ones that lost jobs are in yellow, and blue are the ones that gained jobs. And you can see ones that gain jobs fit into this next West framework and post‐recession era in that North Dakota there where the hydraulic fraction boom is happening, there's been a job gain. Likewise in Northern Nevada with skyrocketing of the gold price, there's been a lot more gold mining. And on a smaller scale, it's hard to tell here, but places around national parks such as Yosemite and up near Glacier National Park there is also job growth with people also seeking this amenity value of the landscape, not living in the park, but living near it and being able to access that landscape and the value of that being observed.


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So critical mining in the west has a very toxic, very radioactive environmental history from uranium to rare earths. And this is the rare earth mine in Mountain Pass, the Mojave Desert in California and it had a legion of spills and this is for a few different reasons involving permit. And I should note that with hard rock mines, meaning non‐cool, non‐fare earth, non‐iron mines, two‐thirds of mines fail after permitting. The mine industry is the biggest contamination, the largest contributor of pollution with national pollution discharge standards measured by the EPA in this country, more so than any other industry. And one example of this is the pipeline that broke when they were trying to clean it. Those familiar with Parose [phonetic] normal accidents book would find this is a unique case study because the way this pipeline broke was that they were cleaning it with a metal pig, which basically is a giant bullet they push in there and they push it through with pressure to clean this‐‐ all the sludge on the inside that, at this point for these materials, very radioactive. And what they hadn't noticed that they replaced‐‐ they had replaced one section of the pipe. Instead of being 8‐inches, it was 6‐inches. So when the metal pig reached there, it exploded and they didn't find it had spilled for I think a few days after, and this happened many times and it happened with about a dozen different agencies, had to coordinate the environmental cleanup with this and the barrels and also the air vector born distribution of radioactivity from the mine pit itself. For children who now have blood diseases because they lived‐‐ they went to school around the mine.


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So this is‐‐ kind of highlights one instance and you can see people there and their space suits, as I like to call them. I guess it's just Kevlar. I mean‐‐ what would you call that? Tyvex I guess cleaning it up, but with the vacuum cleaners there. But it's just a neat photo, I think. This is a critical desert tortoise habitat as well, which makes it interesting.


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And the other legacy of course is uranium among these many [inaudible] and critical metals. And this is a photo on the right of the Ross Adams Mine, which is on Price of Wales Island southeastern Alaska near Catchacan, and it's Alaska's only former uranium mine. This mine was‐‐ didn't have a mill there so they took the ore and they shipped it all the way down to‐‐ up to Columbia, to Hanford, and they milled it on a Native American reservation and here's a photo of them doing that there. I was here just this last summer and actually saw this. They don't have any of the structure there anymore but you can see where the dock used to be and there's a big radioactive sign there. What's [inaudible] to that and what's indicative of the current growth of the critical mine industry in the United States is there's a proposed rare earth mine there. The mineralogy is very similar. In fact, Mount Pass was initially discovered by uranium explos. And so the policies have shaped one another I would argue.


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So we talk about critical and strategic metals. What are they? Which ones are they? Very handy, there's a periodic table of elements in this room so I maybe didn't even have to put this on here and I'm by no means a chemist but I can tell you that the lanthanide series there on the bottom row of the periodic table is‐‐ are all rare earths and the ones on the farther right of that upper row are more critical, they're heavy rare earths and so they have stronger properties. Basically, rare earths share a valance of the electrons in a certain configuration to have unique physiochemical configuration to drive magnetic processes that increase efficiency when they're put with other metals. And then there's various other metals on here. Tellurium, initially mined in Telluride, Colorado, is used in solar panels. Helium is actually becoming a very critical gas metal, but a gas. There's a whole helium reserve here in Texas and that's a huge issue right now that you should all look up. It's quite interesting that we shouldn't really be putting those things in our balloons. We shouldn't, really. Just look it up. It's kind of funny, kind of ironic. And then of course uranium here, more radioactive than the others, and that's it's unique physiochemical property. Not strategic, but I'll tell you how it will quickly become so.


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The modern critical and strategic mineral uses that we use today are overwhelmingly things that have‐‐ that we use for green energy, but as I'm going to show you, this is a facade of actually defense strategic metal uses for maintaining our American military hegemonic power, right. Uranium obviously is a fuel source. In these wind turbines, and every wind turbine, the very large ones, the largest ones, there's a permanent magnet that drives it, there's about $300,000 worth of rare earth elements, prior drones for their tracking beacons and tomahawk missiles use it and night vision goggles use it for a way to clarify that sight. And the cell phone, the ear buds that you use, the touch screen, the vibration, the‐‐ actually just the miniaturization of it itself is only capable with rare earths in the circuitry. It's very complexly designed so it's hard to get rid of and to recycle. That's part of the problem here in this policy is the end of life, which is a separate conversation. Most interestingly, do you see that striped pattern there on the lower right‐hand corner? That's just the tri‐color band of an old color TV riding on a cathered rate tube. But it was developed using europium, which is a rare earth element. And one could say that without rare earth's europium being used in color TV's, maybe we wouldn't have the same sociostructure of the 2.1 person, modern nuclear family so to speak.


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That's a bad pun, but basically these things are responsible for developing the elemental inputs for our culture here in America. And applied today, the Prius is the most intensive rare earth consumer product on the market. It has about 30 pounds of rare earths and they co‐occur, or they co‐occur in the mineralogy that they are used in different ways. Many are used in this Prius for polishing the windshield in the actual nickel metal hydride battery, the engine, and actually the catalytic converter to reduce emissions that relies on several different rare earths for the oxides.


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And so these have been deemed strategic and critical in many different ways. There's a myriad of lobbying groups out there that want to get these things mined in the US. So there's all these different matrices. Two‐policy documents though highlight the government's involvement with agencies. And that's the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy have both produced documents on identifying critical and strategic metals for their unique uses. And what's happened along with this is a lot of legislation, and particularly from outsiders who live in states that have these mining reserves, these resources of rare earths in them, they are for some reason more interested than other senators. But it suffices to say that critical and strategic means, that it's something used for a need that's specific to military and destroy [phonetic] civilian needs as I've shown in these uses and it's not found and produced here in the United States, at least currently at sufficient levels that is.


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And so innovation in one technology versus the other helps drive demand. That's based in turn on policy. So for instance, in order to meet greenhouse gas emissions, we have different policies of CO2 reduction as part of the Obama administration's plan and one could then think that okay, for a battery then, for an electric car, do we invest‐‐ do we develop lithium batteries or nickel metal hydride batteries. Nickel metal hydride batteries are much more abundant in rare earths. And so if we would do that, then the rare earth curve of demand would be that blue line up at the top. But if we go with lithium or a combination of other types of batteries, it would be one of the lower curves. And so these‐‐ the innovation is definitely part of the conversation here.


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So much so that the US has actually set up maybe a dozen, 15, different innovation centers around the US for developing different critical and strategic physical, chemical types of reactions that can be used and produced in technology on a commercial scale. So this is a huge government subsidizing, this part of the conversation as well. And these, at least the Ames Research Center in Ames, Iowa, which is now the Rare Earth Innovation Center, has existed since the late '50s as a product of the Cold War. It was initially put in place to develop uranium technologies. And so I think there's actually still a few people there that first started working there and I'm hoping to catch them before they retire or otherwise by the end of this next year.


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Geopolitics drive demand as well. And what happened with some fishermen in the South China Sea is quite interesting. This happened, I think, 2010, and basically Japan and China claim the same islands, the Senkaku Islands, and they're very rural. I think maybe only seven people live there. But they overly‐‐ China believes that the continental shelf is the exclusive economic zone. Japan believes that as is in treaty, 200 miles from your location is your zone or 40 miles from where your‐‐ any outline rock cropping is. So these are very small islands, but these rocks, they measure out 40 miles from them and that's their territory. So they're in dispute because there's actually huge natural gas deposits in this region. So what happened was that China had some fishermen fishing there. Japan's Coast Guard came in and said you can't do that. It escalated into the little bit of gun diplomacy and what ensued was China reducing all of its rare earth exports. At this time they were the only rare earth producing country in the world. And Japan really needs them because they produce a lot of electronics for the rest of the world, and the US needs them because we do as well, but we also rely on Japan for that. So it affected a lot of things and it sent rare earth prices through the roof multiplying by an order of magnitude in many cases, especially the more critical rare earths like dysprosium.


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In terms of uranium, it's not strategic or critical right now but it will be. It will be in January and I'll tell you why. The US and Russia came to an agreement called Mega Tons to Mega Watts, which is to reduce the Cold War stockpile of nuclear warheads and basically converting that uranium from high grade weapons grade uranium to low grade energy uranium. And then they had an agreement, we'll use that to fuel the rods that go into nuclear power plants throughout the world, including the US. So we get a steady supply of uranium from old war nuclear warheads, from Russia. And we get about 25 percent of our uranium from there. It's quite a bit. That deal was initially made in 1993 and it set to go for 20 years. So it expires at the end of this year.


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So in this context, I'm looking at two different mines, one rare earth mine, one uranium mine, and they're both on national forests, in Wyoming there's a rare earth mine and New Mexico's uranium mine and they're in different regional context as I'll tell you in a bit. But that's the location of the two.


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These are the different regions that I want to talk about as regulatory regimes. The forest service has zoned regions where policy is implemented in a certain way. The regional forester, the head bureaucrat or the head person in that region is responsible for implementing policy and approving things. So there is a governance at that level. In the Black Hills, I'm looking at the Wyoming portion of the Black Hills, here on the very left where the mine is proposed, and it goes across the state like to South Dakota, and in New Mexico in that shade area is actually about, you know, Grant is where the Roca Honda Mine is proposed. Which the Roca Honda Mine will be the largest uranium mine in the US, it's proposed. They're both in environmental review right now and I think that's important to note because I think that's where the most potential for environmental conflict can happen but also the most potential environmental collaboration in terms of shaping the knowledge goes into how these mines go through with their environmental review. So you can define regions a lot of different ways. The nearest city, Rapid City or Albuquerque, the four corners or the Black Hills, the different Native American claims to them, which have a long history in and of themselves and I don't have time to talk about today, but I think it's very interesting and part of the environmental justice way of confronting these is happening right now, as I'll tell you that.


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And then, you know, some or similar livelihoods, you group a region based on similar livelihoods, forestry or ranching, or tourism, et cetera in this new west or next west context. But what I'd like to propose is that we could look at them as being historically contingent upon this Cold War uranium boom and now the rare earth boom. Here in Grants and New Mexico it's very close to Los Amos National Laboratory. There is many other uranium mines that operated there through the 1970s into the '80s. People still have a collective memory of their relatives getting very sick or dying from that and all the science that went into that. And then the Black Hills, in the South Dakota portion just beyond Rapid City, this is where the Minute Man Array was put underneath the ground, which was about 100, and this was in a bunch of different states, but there they had probably I don't know, 50 different nuclear warheads that were under different rancher's properties, totally secured but ready to go off like that if the USSR attacked us. So these, by the material basis for preventing the Cold War from going into a hot war, right. These were what staved off World War III. And part of that is a nuclear radar facility, the only radar facility was powered by a nuclear reactor which is actually right next to the mines near the town where it's being permitted.


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So when we talk about regulatory regimes, we can talk about regulatory theory or regime theory. Just to quickly note on this though, these regulatory processes happen at a lot of different scales, right, the local property rights, the national regulatory policies or the global commodity markets. And when I say regulation, I also mean governance and I mean a collectively arrived upon set of social standards of what people throughout the years have created in terms of legislation to a bruit conflict and come to terms with the reconcilable contradiction between capitalism's need to expand and grow and also by doing so, degrading the environment and taking out from under it the conditions which it needs to grow the material basis. So regulation helps mediate that. And regimes then are different‐‐ use a time periods of different ways of regulating, right, in terms of different principles, norms, rules and decision making. And these are often informal arrangements. They're not just the regulation. It's formal that I just mentioned.


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So regimes can be on a local scale the way ranchers do a particular environmental practice or they could also be the way a state goes about doing something behind the cabinet doors but is not otherwise formerly put into law, but it is the way it's carried out. So with knowing that, we should also note that these regimes that were made for the expressed purpose of conserving the environment often times do a really good job, but they also are not necessarily the institutions most important for causing or addressing the environmental change and so new regimes are often sought. So it's important for us to understand how groups and institutions gain this accessing, being a key word, we interpret issues, we utilize that knowledge and we apply this power to influence decision and policy outcomes on different scales.


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So the case study for regional regulatory regime that I'd like to look at, and I am looking at, is the US forest service regions, forest regions two and three, the southwest region and the Rocky Mountain region. And what has happened over the last year is the Obama administration passed through the forest service under the National Forest Management Act the 2012 plan rule. And it's different than previous iterations, the one initially created under the very liberal economic regime of Ronald Regan and subsequently in 2000 and I think there was some in between‐‐ some rules passed. But basically it establishes for the guidelines and standards of how the regional forester, under the National Forest Management Act, implements regulations. It changed those to ecological sustainability, which might sound good, but that's a lot different than the species viability used to invoke the Endangered Species Act, which conserves a lot of landscape just for one particular flora or fauna and it doesn't address biodiversity as strictly and so it creates more of a flexible multiple use that the regional forester can interpret and implement. And when you put the general mine law of 1872, yes, the mine law that hasn't changed since 1872 which gives any American the right or any corporation the right to explore and make claim and go through with mining on federal land. When you put that into the mix, the regional forest district ranger has to give mining as the highest use, that's under the 1872 mine law initially created when they were mining for gold with pans, right.


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And we pay the same amount, companies rather, pay the same amount to mine gold now or to mine anything that's hard rock. This mine law only applies to hard rock mining and the regulations are a lot different for coal mining and oil and gas. So many people have tried to change this, but it allows an incentive, the benefactors are you for mining companies to invest in US lands. So the only thing really holding companies back then is their elements or their material, their metal, being economically recoverable. That is, do we have the right technology, the right sets of‐‐would environmental review prevent it from going through and how long is that going to take, on average 7 to 12 years. And in that context, can they wait that long for a volatile market as rare earths are and uranium has been. That's the only thing holding companies back. But I would argue that with strategic and critical mineral designation of these particular elements, that it's incentivized in certain specific geographies of people in the environment for these mines to come to bear. So that's kind of the current context. So it's all about who makes decisions and how and by what criteria.


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And when I talk about political ecology for those of you familiar with it, it's the constant shifting dialectic between society and land‐based resources and it unfolds usually over regions, as first expressed actually by‐‐ into this course of soil erosion by Blaikie/Brookfield. But it continues to unfold over regions because within this region you can take a local process of how somebody, a land user for instance, might manage their land or interface with their land based on their livelihood ranching or forestry or for their own use or part of the company. And you can put that into a progressively larger set of context based on global, political economic factors and you can go up from that and use a region and the processes of accumulation unfolding over a region to interface the global and the local. And during this media by regional processes, one could also say that we need to look at the production of environmental knowledge from all the different actors involved on the ground. And in terms of knowledge production I think Robins here provides a very act [phonetic] quote saying the state is not generating a unique form of knowledge, instead it's fractured knowledge of reproduction machine that participates in the epistemological or ways of knowing, that's epistemology, alliances on the ground and rights of landscape, the not by bully or writ but through institutional formation. And these institutions are not necessarily environment protection agency foresters. There's all local institutions that are developed both informally and formally based on collective governance.


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So my research questions then are: how do these epistemologies constructed from these different livelihoods, legacies and acceptance of expert science, how do they shape environmental knowledge? And how do these decisions coproduce between the actors of community, the state and the market for environmental governance? And also, how do these regulatory regimes utilize the regional scale to mediate between the accumulation of capital and the definitions of ecologically sustainability? So I think I gave you kind of a background on that, but what I'd also throw in there is that they're historically contingent based on the environmental legacies and the pre‐existing livelihoods and that kind of feeds into these other questions. So now I hope to show you some case studies.


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And the model that I've used to look at these two different mining regions is this triangle of environmental governance first proposed by Lemos/Agrawal who are kind of going off Elinor Ostrom's model of her environmental governance, look at state, the community and the market and looking at how different configurations [inaudible] lead to co‐management, public and private partnerships or private and social partnerships. And within this we have, I have extrapolated to say that part of the community we have maybe environmental advocates who believe in pristine ecology, meaning conservation of the land without people, Native Americans who believe in spiritual ontology, different from epistemology, different reality, but also believe that the landscape should be conserved with people because there's no such thing as this pristine wilderness, and wise‐use advocates who argue that they can manage land better on this community level, maybe it was a rancher or whatever else. And in the market shaped by obviously global finances of a particular element, how the volatility plays into the production of needing that element to be critical or strategic, and the corporate expertise and the mining companies, a mining company has to have a certified expert. They have to sign off at the beginning of the environmental document saying I'm an expert in geology.


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And that plays into, especially if what their background is, have they mined rare earths, have they mined uranium before, have they worked for a company doing that. In the case of the rare earth mine here, they haven't done a rare earth mine yet. In the labor pool, and specifically how informed is that labor pool and in what way do they interface technology. Mining has changed dramatically over the last 30, 40, 50 years, from one being very labor intensive to one being very technologically capital intensive with many machines. So you need a very specific set of skills to interface that labor. And the state being the local government or county, does it have zoning, what are its local laws of land use. And the state permitting agency, does it have a field office maybe near there and not have spatially throughout the landscape with different field offices, but also what levels of technocratic expertise do they have. For instance, in Wyoming the state expert there is a geologist and he said oh, we're going to do everything the right way. We're going to get a biologist, hydrologist, all these things but, you know, I don't know who they are because I'm the only one in the office. And the federal resource agency on the regional scale in this case being the forest service.


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So with respect to time, I'll just go through these by touching on a few things. I'm not sure why my other photos didn't appear there but basically for the Wyoming rare earth mine, there's the mine location on the top there and then there's a processing plant, the hydrometallurgical facility, which is realized on skilled engineers to process these elements. They're very process intensive and the mine that's happening up there near Sundance, and yes, that is where the kid got his name. That's what it said on the sign as you go into town. Quick County here where this is located, only has 7,000 people. So people are talking about this. If you wear for instance a mountain hardware fleece vest into town, people will call you out as an environmentalist from California. So you stick out. It's that kind of community. You can park at the very entrance of the door you want to go into. And so it's then in terms of the mining company, obtain a social license to operate, it's quite strategic and in some sense the mining company represented is on both ends of that photo are representing a check to the woman in the middle who works for the ambulance company in town. They didn't really have working ambulances in Sundance. So the mining company decided to buy some new ones. And this is acquiring a social license to operate. They're given many other things. It would take a few slides to list them all.


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And I think this is because I'm using Power Point that was on Open Office, but this is supposed to be some nice photos of coal mining in the Powder River Basin, which is right next to where these mines are being permitted. The Powder River Basin in Wyoming actually is responsible for 40 percent of the coal production in the United States, and that's the context of the livelihoods these people are working in. The mine is actually being permitted in a coal mining environmental review framework because there's no institutional memory of permitting a hard rock mine in this part of the state. So coal is definitely a part of the environmental review picture.


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And here's actually some uranium mining that was proposed here in the '70's. And the Black Hills Alliance is noble for being a governance that was an institutional governance with Native Americans and non‐Native Americans to fight off both uranium mining and dumps. And now actually as this map shows, there's a lot of uranium institute leeching proposed for space [inaudible] hydraulic fracturing for uranium, which has potential to contaminate your ground water. It's kind of a big deal. That's the radar station I mentioned right there, right next to the mine, that has some radioactive leakage.


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And so in this context then, you can see the different actors within Wyoming, no zoning at the local governments. Distance‐wise, the department of [inaudible] quality is near there but it only has one expert in geology and it's the Rocky Mountain Forest Agency. Very strong activist community, ranchers and coalminers also very vocal about‐‐ really not about the environment, but not having trucks going down their rural roads, but people that are coal miners don't want to have to drive very far off to work. They want to work at home. Native American presence not so strong. That's again, kind of a complex story. And then the rare earth market being very volatile and this being a surface mine with lots of field labor and again, that the geological experts.


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And just to touch on the uranium resources proposal for the Roca Honda mine, there's many other proposals for mines to institute the uranium down here in New Mexico. This is just their New Mexico grants mineral belt map. But they actually have been doing this for a while in Texas. So they have done this on a very large scale. They have the nuclear regulatory commission permit and there are other places they're proposing to mine [inaudible] leaching of uranium is in the Black Hills of Wyoming. And you can see the map here of where their claims are on forest service land, and along with BLM, the BLM actually takes care of all of the subsurface rights. And this is just a photo here of what institute leeching looks like taken from their website.


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And the livelihoods in Northwest New Mexico are very multiple use, tourism, people going to the national forest to go hunting, to go off road vehicling and then ranchers being right there on the land.


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But part of something that is in contestation to that land use is the land use of the Diné, the Navajo nation there. And they've been affected by mining for a long time for uranium specifically. But this is when people were crawling down into tunnels with machines to mine, not when they were institute leaching it. Nevertheless, that's Mount Taylor right there which the uranium mines are all at the base of and this is actually a spiritual site for Native American communities who have a very different not just epistemology but a very different ontology of what is reality and what is that mountain to them. And so the forest service actually used the National Historic Preservation Act to list the entirety of Mount Taylor as a cultural site, which has no legal bearing but sets a precedent for this regime of accumulation against it to basically not extract from within there and that's been contested on the state and federal circuit courts. But what I think is most interesting is that the Native American communities here are using environmental justice as part of their cultural history to fight against the environmental review process of the mine.


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And you can see that here. There's not really much of an environmental activist wholly defined community but there's different Native American environmental justice groups and ranchers and there's actually a Christmas tree farm near the mine and, you know, people want to have this land use for their expressed purpose and it's overlapping with the mine, with the Native American ontology and with the ranching. And interesting, the state I think is going to be very strong in this. The state widely conceived as those three players because the district office for the New Mexican environmental department is actually in Grants and the forest service region is actually in Albuquerque about an hour and a half away, the regional headquarters. And the‐‐ Cibola County does have zoning whereas Wyoming doesn't. So it'll be much different. And uranium, like I said, we won't know how that will play into this permitting process of strategic or critical designation because it's not‐‐ it will not be as such until 2014. But I think it's also interesting to note the institute recovery of uranium has been a much different method of interfacing, how labor and expert knowledge interfaces and people themselves, their body interface the subsurface and how that's shaping the knowledge of environmental review.


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So I hope that through that I've kind of shown you how this regional regulatory regime is based off these demands for materials and those are driven by geopolicyand innovation and how this has contributed to economic restructuring the regimes accumulation rural American West and how these regimes of accumulation have attempted to kind of perturb these regimes of ecology and there's more to that too that I could talk about. But I will just say that these are contingent, historically contingent on livelihoods and legacies and that I do believe that the regulation at the regional scale is a way of mediating between socioeconomic conflict. So I thank you for listening. I'll take any questions.

[ Applause ]

Yeah?

Audience Member>> So you briefly mentioned the potential for [inaudible] extractions leaching into groundwater. [ Muffled speech ] Can you comment on the risk and also do you know of any of that [inaudible] happening in the local region [inaudible].


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Jeffrey Jenkins>>Well certainly here in the Sierras this region broadly defined that's been an issue with mercury coming down from legacy gold mining and there's I think Iron Mountain Mine is one of the worst toxic sites. I think it's [inaudible] city out of any super fun site in the US and that's near Mount Shasta. In terms of these regions, the institute leeching I think is particularly interesting to look at in these rural communities. Because in a very rural community without water infrastructure, people rely on ground water for their water and there's no way of telling what type of normal accidents could occur with that. In Wyoming they have a unique way of looking at it. They compare it to the agriculture that the water spickets, I forget what they're called, but they go around in the fields, the center turn out that it's‐‐ and they were saying oh, well the mineral mine, the mineral water the mine takes is‐‐ what would that‐‐ and then he calls somebody down the hall that's a rancher, what would that be equal to in terms of how much a field uses each day. So the ways that people equate these things and make sense of them is also part of it.

Audience Member>> You mentioned these two uranium mines. What's the‐‐ what is the‐‐ what's driving the demand for the uranium? You mentioned at the beginning the electric cars and so forth. Can you expand on what's‐‐ what exactly is driving the demand for this search for uranium?


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Jeffrey Jenkins>> Yeah. So aside just from the demand that will not be met by the 25 percent reduction when that doesn't happen this next year, throughout the world developing nations as well as developed nations want to‐‐ are still I think for something like 100 nuclear power plants on the docket for development, like, in development right now, how Fukushima has changed us all is another interesting question. I don't think it has enough if nations want to develop, they feel like they have the right to do that, these bricks so to speak. And so I forget how many are proposed or if any are at all right now in the US, but they actually have the numbers on that website. But I think the demand for the growth in new nuclear power has a green solution to meet carbon emissions is part of their conversation. Yeah.

Audience Member>> How are you going to do with these research interests after you get your PhD? I mean, I can tell you're just, you know, you're very motivated.

Jeffrey Jenkins>> That's a good question. I'm trying just to get to the PhD. But you know, I think, like, the framework of regional regulatory regimes can be applied to‐‐globally to different‐‐ as a new kind of way of looking at how accumulation occurs throughout regions and how‐‐ ways people produce knowledge. But it's certainly a topic that's not going to go away. Australia has a new rare earth mine now. China still has 95 percent of the market and so just looking at that larger picture, I think I'm still progressively contextualizing that. I think that's the continual process. Thanks. Yeah.


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Audience Member>> Very interesting, stimulating talk. In the model that you presented, you talked to power in that [inaudible]. That is, I didn't get a sense of the asymmetry with respect to the power relationships within there, which is an issue of concern.

Jeffrey Jenkins>> Thank you. Yeah, I think what I'm hoping to do in terms of social network analysis type of method is use that triangle and the ways that knowledge is‐‐converges on those VIN diagrams to basically weight those different circles. And so this is conceptually speaking, but then that triangle ends up turning a certain way and then you can kind of have a model to see how knowledge is informing certain actors throughout this network or this assemblage if you want to include the environmental landscape as well. But I think access and knowledge and access to the land is part of power and well, I think it deserves more attention. Thank you.


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Regional Regulatory Regimes and the Political Ecology of Critical Miningrce.csuchico.edu/sites/default/files/online/slc/regional... · Today he's going to be talking about regional