Reclamation | Environmental Humanities | Duke University Press (2024)

Environmental Humanities (2023) 15 (2): 236–239.

Extractive reclamation takes many forms. From discrete processes of rehabilitating boreal forests to soil remediation and wetland and stream restoration, reclamation as an umbrella concept tends to involve returning a previously mined space to some semblance of its pre-mined state. But it can also involve dramatic revisioning of how land can be made useful.¹ In the context of ongoing social and ecological destruction wrought by fossil capital, reclamation of postextractive landscapes performs important ideological work in reproducing extractive capitalist lifeworlds.

To wrest reclamation from the fossil capitalists who wreck our planet, we must learn to see the reclamation process as a necessary site of social, cultural, and ecological struggle. Reclaimed extractive sites are artifacts of social mediation; they are conditioned by dominant political, economic, and juridical logics. The terms and conditions of these logics, however, are determined by the jurisdictions that define them. Geographers Caitlynn Beckett and Arn Keeling detail how reclamation is most often approached as a technological problem distinct from the extraction process—an ahistorical engineering challenge to undo the consequences of exhausted production.² Against narrow reclamation, Beckett and Keeling suggest that reclamation can also be a process of emancipatory world-building. They argue “for an expanded definition of mine remediation that encompasses concepts of social justice, repair, mediation, reconciliation, and care.”³ In this entry, we refine this expanded understanding of reclamation to critique existing modes and recast reclamation as a practice of emancipatory world-building that embodies a range of approaches from social-justice-oriented modes of care and repair to the kinds of Indigenous reclamation at the center of growing demands for Land Back.⁴

Though reclamation is a terrain through which capitalist lifeworlds are made and remade, it does not have to be this way. Extractive capital exhumes then exhausts, unraveling existing socioecological relations in the process. The limited spatial and temporal settings of actually existing reclamation have failed to address the costs of this unraveling. Environmental humanists should recognize reclamation as both a material and a discursive process and embrace reclamation’s ambivalence as a cultural form. Two sites from our research illuminate the existing limits of reclamation as a planetary mode of praxis in pursuit of social and ecological justice: the expanding prison industry in Appalachia in the United States and the tar sands of Northern Alberta, Canada. Separated by national borders and historical and ecological contexts, the material-cultural contours of these modes of what we call extractive reclamation reveal how postextractive reclamation is conditioned by dominant extractive relations. However, in their instability, we locate possible spaces to reclaim our future by imagining and building socially and ecologically just futures that free us from extractive forms of planetary existence.

Capital fully embraces reclamation wherever (and whenever) exhausted landscapes can be reimagined to once again reproduce extractive relations. Mountaintop removal (MTR), for example, is a form of surface mining where the destruction of nature is repurposed for the future production of value. As sociologist Rebecca Scott observes, land flattened by mountaintop removal “is an affirmation that nature is always already property waiting to be improved.”⁵ When resource-rich mountaintops are leveled, they become a rare commodity: flat, developable land that has been used for anything from golf courses and data centers to prison sites and waste repositories.⁶

Over the past three decades, twenty-nine prisons have been built in Appalachia, as post-MTR moonscapes are reclaimed as carceral landscapes.⁷ Some workers formerly employed in the mining industry are being retrained to extract value from prison labor.⁸ Still, cracks appear in the foundations of this reclaimed form of value extraction. In the case of the Central Appalachian federal prison US Big Sandy, these cracks are quite literal. When the prison was under construction in the early 2000s, parts of the structure started to subside into the unstable ground, earning the prison the symbolically charged local nickname of “Sink Sink.” More recently, local skepticism toward the economic and environmental benefits of building rural prisons has provided the catalyst for engaging activist strategies, such as when local activists turned the cost of a new prison into a hashtag (#our444million) used by residents to imagine alternatives to carceral capitalism’s way of life.⁹

Over in Northern Alberta, home to the world’s largest industrial project in the form of the oil sands, the limits of existing reclamation rise to the surface. In the tar sands region where bitumen is extracted, separated, upgraded, and refined, the waste tailings produced by this process are unique in their material makeup. Initially planned for release back into the Athabasca River after treatment, the material character of oil sands tailings resisted current methods of treatment, deemed unsuitable to be returned to the flows from which they were first diverted.¹⁰

In a concentrated expression of organized abandonment, ponds of waste tailings have accumulated at an alarming rate, now exceeding 1.3 trillion liters spread primarily across Treaty 8 territory. A 2020 study found that the ponds have breached containment and are slowly feeding back into the Athabasca, the very condition the ponds were created to avoid in the first place.¹¹ In relief to the pace and scale of this contamination in both spatial and temporal terms, only one site has been officially reclaimed and returned to the state since the oil sands project went fully online in the late 1960s. This single successful reclamation site, which sits at the edge of a still-active mining site, emerges as a proof-of-concept that rationalizes further extraction. And while Indigenous nations whose ancestral territories are affected by extraction play an increasing role in reclamation, lessons from the Land Back movement reveal the inherent limits in actually existing reclamation’s concluding gesture—to render extractive landscapes back into the settler-colonial territorial formation known as Crown Land. In the case of the tar sands, such rendering is the locus of potential for reclamation.

The reclaimed mine landscape is an ambivalent cultural form that often reproduces extractive relations. For this reason, another reclamation is not only possible; it is necessary. Dominant extractive views are conditioned by cultural logics that perceive landscapes and their relations as resources for the taking. In our extractive present, these “resource logics” extend to reclamation efforts as exhausted landscapes become a kind of tabula rasa for the reproduction of extractive relations, disconnected from histories and legacies of resource extraction, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism.¹² The existing sites of extractive reclamation we have detailed are designed to further reproduce extractive relations and will continue to do so as we fail to see reclamation as a cultural form that performs ideological work. In short, reclamation is necessary to salvage a future from that which is abandoned by extractive capitalism. The task at hand is to shape reclamation around a vision of the world where reclamation is no longer needed.

References

© 2023 Jacob Goessling and Jordan B. Kinder

2023

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