Environmental Humanities by Serpil Oppermann Serenella Iovino & Serenella Iovino

Author:Serpil Oppermann,Serenella Iovino & Serenella Iovino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 2017-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

PART I—PYRITES AND RESOURCES

The mining in Corta Atalaya joined the ranks of the Great Acceleration since the second half of the nineteenth century in shaping the world in which we live today. Resources and their extraction, accumulation, and circulation are crucial to the historiography focusing on this time and help understanding what followed. As natural and social scientists, historians, humanists and artists turn their attention to this period in search for answers to the challenges and concerns posed by the Anthropocene, the reach of a view of nature as resources takes another dimension. Global nutrient cycles, isotopic signatures, world trade, receding ice caps, wading mineral deposits, all come to matter and are made to account for present and anticipated changes through a similar idea of commensurability. Extractive industries like the one eviscerating the mountains around Corta Atalaya have an immediately evident import in these stories: still today the area is a lunar landscape, scarred by open pits, tracks, causeways, dams, heaps, holes and disseminated with the rusting skeletons and fractures of past operations. Looking closer at this landscape and the histories and practices that sculpted it, though, the idea of resources and their seamless movement and extraction literally hits the rocks.

Hugh Matheson, first chairman of the Rio Tinto Company Ltd, starts gaining experience in trade and in the pragmatics of the global financial market as this begins to take on a more homogeneous structure through modernity and imperialism. He makes his fortune with trades in China—especially opium—and becomes attracted to the concern in Riotinto by the fortune of Tharsis, another mining venture in the same region that had been taken over some years before by a British company and had encountered enormous success since then. As the occasion presents itself to purchase the mining rights for a bargain from the just declared and already troubled First Spanish Republic, Matheson brings together the capital needed, forms the company, and carries the first instalment of the payment to Madrid, riding with it on a train to protect it from the many warring factions opposing the government.

Still, the area needs large infrastructural transformations if it is to reward the company and its shareholders with the anticipated profit. Aside from building a costly and challenging infrastructure, from railways, to mining shafts and open pits, from dams, to roads, and even to entire villages, the company has to find the best ways to extract the precious minerals the founders are after, to treat them at large, efficient, and cost-effective scales, and then to sell them at advantageous prices. In the kind of financial trade Matheson is versed in, resources are commensurable, and their value and importance can be counted, in British pounds. And if infrastructure costs can also be entered in the logs and books of the company and reported to the shareholders, the actual extraction of the minerals is proving to be more refractory than the accounting of the newly established company expected.

To obtain copper and sulfur, lots of work is required: the overburden

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