Description
This paper examines discourses and realities of mine site rehabilitation in so-called Australia. It investigates claims that mining can not only repair damage done to the land, but actually ecologically improve the land. It shows how these outlandish discourses draw on colonial environmental imaginaries of Indigenous landscapes as ‘barren’ and colonial capitalist ideologies of improvement. It further shows how parallel logics of rehabilitation facilitate the exploitation of labour – rehabilitation discourses reassure mine workers that they can break their bodies on the mine site, in anticipation of their future repair. I challenge the widespread belief (even among environmental groups) that it is possible to rehabilitate mine sites, let alone improve them (rehabilitation is in most cases physically impossible). This brings into sharper focus a) how (the promise of) rehabilitation is a lullaby which allows damage to occur in the first place, and b) (together with my second paper) the work that mining does in settler colonial contexts. I argue that while mining claims to produce improved lands, it in fact produces landscapes which are drastically less usable by Indigenous people (and others) and thus an attack on Indigenous sovereignty. This paper intervenes in debates on the possibilities of regeneration from colonial capitalist ruination (Tsing 2003, Khayyat 2022).
