{"id":763,"date":"2023-08-25T11:33:26","date_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/?p=763"},"modified":"2023-08-25T11:33:26","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:33:26","slug":"the-edges-of-extraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/2023\/08\/25\/the-edges-of-extraction\/","title":{"rendered":"The Edges of Extraction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

First Glance
<\/strong>Greetings from the weird part of Dublin Airport that is actually America. The path to the pre-clearance line is marked by a long series of American flags, and the security line is all faux-fancy wood paneling. It\u2019s 10:00 AM here and the person behind me in line ordered a croissant and a last pint of Guinness before their flight. It\u2019s weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also weird [smooth segue, I know] is that my parents, who I\u2019m flying home to see, have recently gotten into the show Aussie Gold Hunters<\/em>, which follows several teams of folks digging for gold in various parts of southern and southwest Australia. These prospectors use metal detectors and trowels to dig up land already cut over by industrial gold mining, searching for any small nuggets or deeper veins missed by the heavy-duty machinery. The show depicts their attempt to extract wealth from their series of small land leases as heroic – battling the elements day in and day out until they literally strike gold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Double Take
<\/strong>Last week, as part of an artistic research workshop on the subject of Working With Waste, I was able to watch Riar Rizaldi\u2019<\/a>s film Kasiterit<\/a><\/em>, which is set on the Indonesian island of Bangka, where one-third of the world\u2019s tin is mined. The film takes this premise in all sorts of fantastic directions, but one of Rizaldi\u2019s primary focuses are \u201cunconventional miners,\u201d who rake over the land and water previously exploited by Indonesia\u2019s state owned tin mining company to secure their own livelihood. There are few key differences between these Indonesian and Australian case studies. Tin mining on Bangka is a much wetter process. Rizaldi notes the low life expectancy of these unconventional miners (around 40) as they wade into bright blue tailing ponds to extract a living. The Australian miners may suffer heat stroke or sunburn if they stay out too late into the summer, but digging through the dirt for gold is just much less likely to slowly poison you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there is the attitude surrounding these two parallel extractions. The Aussie Gold Hunters<\/em> are rugged, independent, and celebrated. They have an entire TV show where most of the time is devoted to the wiggly sine-waves of metal detectors. The miners are almost all white, and are clearly hobbyists. Despite the potential for windfall profits, it\u2019s not enough to sustain the miners\u2019 livelihoods or mechanical investments. There is a clear colonial narrative in the way the miners, and the show, depict the Australian landscape as a wild thing needing to be conquered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, the Indonesian tin miners are an invisible source of labor outside of, yet supporting, the electronics industry. Rizaldi\u2019s film showcases the entanglements we all have with the island of Bangka: that a part of our electronics, and by extension our lives, are from<\/em> this place. So too are the miners working and living on the land as it becomes waste-land. Despite their labor being integral to the global electronics industry and having clear conventions and dynamics, they are labeled \u201cunconventional.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing\u2019s book The Mushroom at the End of the World <\/a><\/em>explores these exact dynamics through a case study of matsutake mushroom hunting in the northwestern United States. The camps of immigrants and drifters searching through logging forests for these fragrant specimens have different social and economic dynamics, but they follow the same pattern as our Australian and Indonesian miners. They work at the edges of capitalism and in its ruins, picking mushrooms from land originally exploited for different purposes. They haggle with mushroom buyers the way a gold miner talks up the value of a particularly unique-looking nugget. Only after these interactions is the material graded and assigned a market value. While it\u2019s in the hands of the miner, it remains outside the realm of capital, not quite waste, not quite byproduct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hindsight
<\/strong>As Tsing points out, the mushroom itself mirrors this relationship: matsutake grow best in disturbed and disrupted forest ecosystems, and thrive in the ruins. If Aussie Gold Hunters<\/em> contributes anything of value, it isn\u2019t the gold, but the depiction of the dense network of economic and environmental dynamics that play out in extractivist \u201cwaste lands.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lena, I\u2019m sure, would point to Newtown Creek<\/a> as another example, and in truth these dynamic living ruins are all around us. Rizaldi\u2019s film shows us as well that the products of these ruins are intimately woven into our technology and our lives. With Tsing\u2019s framework, capitalism seems less like a circle with a center and a periphery, but a branching network of nodes like a mushroom\u2019s mycelium. Even in the midst of it, we touch its fraying edges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First GlanceGreetings from the weird part of Dublin Airport that is actually America. The path to the pre-clearance line is marked by a long series of American flags, and the security line is all faux-fancy wood paneling. It\u2019s 10:00 AM here and the person behind me in line ordered a croissant and a last pint… Continue reading The Edges of Extraction<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[21,18,16],"class_list":["post-763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digestable","tag-architecture","tag-energy","tag-environment","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":764,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions\/764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}