In what’s now Norway, the country with the world’s second-longest coastline, Neolithic fisher-farmers once harpooned enormous bluefin tuna. As centuries passed, Norwegians refined the arduous fishing process, becoming nimble conquerors of the sea. Plentiful species like herring became staples of diet and livelihood. But in the 1960s, annual herring catches that had measured 600,000 tons suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. The population had collapsed.

The cause, it emerged later, was technological. Norwegian fishers had adopted the power block to pull in nets mechanically, massively multiplying their catches. What they didn’t realize was how these hauls tested the limits of fish populations. The herring would take nearly 20 years to recover.

Now, new technology is allowing Norway to pioneer another kind of ocean harvest—and the consequences and damage could be even more devastating and longer lasting. On January 9, 2024, its parliament voted to permit deep-sea mining exploration, with hopes of being the first country to mine the seafloor commercially for minerals like copper and cobalt. Yet where the fishing industry needs stable fish populations, this prospective mining industry—which would extract to build modern electronics—has no inherent need to preserve life. The exploitation threatens to destroy complex ecosystems before scientists have even documented the life forms at risk.

Norway’s proposed mining is extreme even compared to proposals for deep-sea mining elsewhere. Most miners in other regions, including the central Pacific and Indian Oceans, want to harvest polymetallic nodules, which are mineral aggregations on flat seafloor areas. Mining Norway’s volcanic seabed would instead use remote-controlled machinery to completely remove hydrothermal vents and strip mineral crusts off seamounts.

It takes fierce machines to pry rocky surfaces from the seafloor. So far, the companies have kept their methods and equipment clandestine. Yet the enormous robots developed for ocean mining startups elsewhere offer clues as to what may be used: heavy-duty spiked drillers and cutters designed to crush into seamounts and vents.

These seamounts and vents, even inactive ones, support a surprising amount of life that can survive at extreme depths. The minerals on the volcanic formations offer hard surfaces for animals to cling to. Anemones attach to vent chimneys; sponge grounds grow, garden-like, across seamounts. Enormous basket stars with curling tree-like limbs whorl along the seafloor.

Deep-sea ecosystems also take a remarkably long time to establish themselves. On seamounts elsewhere, explained Tina Kutti, an ecologist at Norway’s Institute of Marine Research, some corals live for 3,000 years. While those exact corals may not live on Norway’s seabed, what’s there is likely ancient, too. According to Kutti, as a general rule, deep-sea fauna “grow really, really slowly. They have slow metabolic rates because there’s not so much food.”

And then there’s all the life that’s still undiscovered. The deep sea is incredibly hard for scientists to study. Their research vessels often have to beat harsh weather, while the scientists themselves have to search out geologic formations in pitch-black water, like “children wandering around a forest at night with a flashlight, trying to count trees,” said Eoghan P. Reeves, a geochemist at the University of Bergen. Sometimes, he added, they make discoveries “about places that have been studied for years, when we shine the flashlight in a slightly different direction.”

Even in more accessible marine environments, scientists have struggled to understand how ecosystems function. In parts of the once-bountiful Oslofjord, more than 80 percent of the cod are gone, thanks to overfishing and modern pollutants. Marine experts long thought ocean fish would repopulate the fjord, but recent research suggests uniquely adapted fjord fish are effectively irreplaceable. Other species have fared worse. Today, much of the Oslofjord remains nearly lifeless.

Farther north, fishers along Norway’s coasts noticed unusually large sea urchin populations starting in 1970. The grazing echinoderms devoured kelp forests, and other marine life disappeared with the kelp habitat. Only recently have researchers learned the cause: as technology increased catches and fishers targeted more species, the urchins lost their natural predators. The kelp is slowly growing back today.

One reason for these past collapses was a pervasive belief that fish were so abundant they couldn’t be exterminated—and therefore fishing didn’t need to be regulated. Ocean science, tracing causes of collapse and possible paths to restoration, was key to recovery. Herring made a comeback in under two decades through a fishing moratorium. Urchin harvesting might return kelp forests to the country’s north and central coasts. Even the decimated Oslofjord may stand a chance, with new fisheries management.

The relatively fast recovery of life in shallower seas has been a saving grace. But the consequences of deep-sea mining could last far longer than those of overfishing, given the slow pace of the ecosystems’ regrowth. Species that die at that depth might take centuries to regenerate, according to Kutti. For some, regeneration may not even be possible.

Unlike with coastal environments, scientists are essentially starting from scratch to understand the deep sea. They currently lack the knowledge and technology to detect the damage deep-sea mining might cause—let alone regulate or mitigate it. Norway’s newly approved exploration process requires companies to conduct environmental baseline surveys. Yet these surveys will be of limited use, as they’ll only target areas with potentially attractive mineral deposits. “We have no data below 800 meters,” said Kutti. “It’s been shocking to us that the government hasn’t taken any big initiatives to start studying what fauna lives there on the seabed and in the water column.” Without independent research of the whole seafloor and how its ecosystems connect, attempts at regulation become shots in the dark.

“We [Norwegians] have a close connection to the sea, but also a history of using technology and bravery to conquer the natural power of the sea in quite brutal ways,” Truls Gulowsen, leader of the Norwegian Association for Conservation of Nature, told me.

While humans are capable of decimating ecosystems, we’re equally capable of safeguarding them by implementing restorative and protective measures. But there is another option, too: innovating away from environmentally harmful extraction. One alternative to deep-sea mining might be urban mining—recovering and recycling minerals from our built environment. Innovation isn’t just technology, after all. Sometimes, it’s the creativity to reimagine how things get done.

The post What Will Deep-Sea Mining Do to Norway’s <br>Oceans? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Being in mining was never part of my plan. As a young boy, I dreamed of becoming a priest with a pilot’s license, living and working in remote Australian communities. I got an advertising degree, joined the foreign service, and spent five years working for the government, including three years as a junior diplomat in Samoa. But I never really fit in. I resigned from the foreign service in January 1999, when I was 27, and returned to my hometown, the remote and dusty mining town of Mount Isa in outback Australia.

There, instead of attending cocktail parties and rubbing shoulders with prime ministers and ambassadors, I mowed lawns, raked leaves, and did landscape work. About 10 months into my career break, my older sister Cassie handed me a newspaper advertisement for a “Senior Advisor, Indigenous Affairs” position at Mount Isa Mines, one of Australia’s oldest and most profitable copper, lead, zinc, and silver mines. MIM, as it’s known, wanted to hire an Indigenous Australian who grew up in the local community and understood its issues and challenges—someone like me. I didn’t expect to get the job, but I did.

Today, more than 20 years later, I am one of just a few Indigenous senior leaders working in the Australian mining industry. As the Chief Advisor for Indigenous Affairs for Australia at the Anglo-Australian metals and mining corporation Rio Tinto, I help our executive leadership team and board of directors improve our relationships with, and outcomes for, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, employees, and communities.

People like me are go-betweens, walking in two worlds. We are translators for companies and communities. We help them understand each other to achieve mutual benefits.

There are many complexities and challenges. Mining, a symbol of industrial progress and wealth creation, has unfortunately also left a legacy of exclusion, displacement, and exploitation of Indigenous peoples worldwide. In Australia, where the main exports are iron ore, coal, gas, and gold, the industry has spent decades disregarding and excluding the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who are Indigenous to the nation’s lands and waters.

Back when I took my first industry job, at MIM, many in my community thought I was either brave or naïve. But I believe Indigenous peoples must sit at the decision-making tables within corporations, not as passive stakeholders but as active influencers. We can actively secure redress for past misdeeds and lead an approach within the industry that will respect cultural heritage, drive economic benefit, and achieve environmental integrity.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands and possessed the land under our own laws and customs. Science suggests that we’ve been here for at least 65,000 years; the British colonized Australia less than 250 years ago. Over time they took our lands from us, and wrote laws that made it hard for us to fight back.

Indigenous people were powerless observers. In the 1950s to 1970s, mining companies discovered iron, coal, uranium, and industrial minerals such as bauxite, copper, lead and zinc in many places. Indigenous people rarely had any say, or ability to intervene, when commonwealth, state, and territory governments granted companies mining leases. Outsiders oversaw the destruction of our sacred sites, without recompense.

That includes near Mount Isa, my hometown. When I stepped into my role at MIM in 2000, the Kalkadoon Traditional Owners of the region had no stake in, and received no economic benefit from, mining operations. Open-pit mines had left large, gaping craters in their ancestral land. The Traditional Owners had no formal engagement with the mine, no dedicated Indigenous employment programs, and no social investment initiatives. They were organizing a native title claim aimed at legally recognizing and securing the Kalkadoon people’s historical rights to their ancestral lands and seeking a more inclusive approach to land and resource management for the future.

Leadership at MIM recognized that it was time to develop a better relationship. That’s where I came in.

Understandably, people expressed a lot of frustration in the initial meetings between the company and the Indigenous community. I felt about as welcome as a roast turkey at a vegetarian dinner party. I was verbally abused, physically intimidated, and called all sorts of names (nicer ones included “company man” and “sell-out”)—by people who were almost like family to me.

Over time, I built connections and trust. Soon after I started at MIM, I went to my boss, the mine site’s executive general manager, and convinced him to provide office space for the Traditional Owners to organize their title claim and conduct meetings. It was a small thing, but it signalled goodwill. Kalkadoon leaders still use the space today, as the registered office for their Native Title corporation.

This was an important lesson: A simple gesture of respect goes a long way—often much further than years of legal negotiations or purely transactional interactions. In September 2001, the Kalkadoon people, the Queensland Government, and MIM, among other mining companies, negotiated an Indigenous Land Use Agreement that paved the way for roughly 90 exploration licenses in the vicinity of Mount Isa. And that was only the start of what has become an enduring relationship between MIM and the Kalkadoon people.

I believe we are entering a new era of recognition for Indigenous people’s rights. The looming fight against climate change compels companies to listen to us. It’s often stated that Indigenous peoples represent about 5% of the world population but hold 80% of the remaining natural resources and biodiversity, including critical minerals. What will be the role of Indigenous people in the “just transition” to a low-carbon future—and is a green future that depends on more mining even possible?

Indigenous people still struggle. Our life expectancy is about 20 years less than non-Indigenous Australians, and I have seen many family and community members die early from preventable diseases. Proportionately, we are the most incarcerated people on earth. Our languages are disappearing, and colonization has eroded our cultural practices.

Still, I’d like to think we’re in a better place overall than when I started in this industry. Indigenous communities have more equal say, and greater control, than ever before—and the fact that more Indigenous people are coming up through the ranks and taking our rightful place in seats at corporate tables across the country has a lot to do with it. My hope is that the economic and social position of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, too, will rise.

The post I’m Indigenous Australian, and I Work for a Mining Company appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the Western U.S. and the north of Chile, large-scale mining has produced similar landscapes of extraction: open-pit and underground mines, smelter stacks, and large masonry structures. Transportation networks connected remote places to the world market, while many labor camps evolved into complex and vibrant communities. They also left their footprint on the natural environment: Polluted water and toxic fumes have made many of these sites inhabitable.

No other company left such a strong imprint in the mining regions of the Americas as the Anaconda Copper Mining Company—a “monstruous and complex organization,” in the words of historian K. Ross Toole—whose investments stretched from Butte, Montana to the Chilean desert. As the energy transition and its demand for lithium, cobalt, and other minerals drives a new mining boom, the history of Anaconda’s copper mining towns in Nevada and Chile can help us reimagine a just future not only in terms of how we power our lives, but in terms of fostering sustainable communities.

Though Anaconda’s history started in the late 19th century, much of the contemporary mining landscape dates to the boom that followed World War II, when growing demand, technological improvement, and massive capital investment, drove to increase production across the western hemisphere. As construction became more efficient, engineers spent considerable time perfecting the layout of crushing plants, smelters, and other facilities. At the same time, the company dedicated energy to perfecting the layout of workers’ domestic lives.

In the early 1950s, Anaconda started working in Yerington, Nevada. While many investors had tried to exploit the mines in the area with little success, in just two years, the company started producing cement copper at its new mine about 70 miles southwest of Reno. Isaac Marcosson, a journalist who wrote a 1957 history of Anaconda, called Yerington a “miracle” for transforming a “waste area” into a “productive community.” Its facilities included an open pit mine, metallurgical plants, and a townsite for workers called Weed Heights. Yerington was part of Anaconda’s larger corporate network. The mine required sulfur, which was brought from the Leviathan mine, some 50 miles away on the eastern slope of the Sierras, and its copper was sent to Montana for smelting and refining.

In the late 1950s, Anaconda built a modernist fantasy at 7,500 feet of altitude in the Chilean Andes. Chilean and foreign visitors marveled at the mine’s efficient organization and its perfect layout. While buses transported people back and forth to the mine, the ore moved quickly from the mine to the crushing plants to the concentrator. Before traveling to Anaconda’s elaboration plants in the United States, El Salvador’s copper took its final shape at the Potrerillos Smelter.

The designs of both the Yerington and El Salvador mines reflected ideas about efficiency and modernization that were coming into vogue at the time. In April 1960, Anaconda board president Clyde Weed wrote in the Engineering and Mining Journal that El Salvador was a great engineering achievement made possible by the combination of “capital, technical skills, and modern specialized equipment” and the “willingness of Chilean workmen.”

The mines, however, left permanent scars on the land, “ugly reminders of the visual and environmental price of extracting resources,” in the words of geographer William Wyckoff. In the north of Chile, Anaconda had started dumping copper tailings in the Pacific Ocean as early as the 1930s, destroying the local maritime life and embanking the bay. Yerington closed in 1978, shortly after Atlantic Richfield Company bought Anaconda. Like other abandoned open-pit mines, its pit quickly filled with toxic waste, leaving Nevada and Environmental Protection Agency authorities trying to sort out responsibilities and devise a cleanup strategy.

Workmen from an Anaconda smelter in Montana. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.

Despite these environmental tensions, Wyckoff reminds us not to forget that mines “have also been places of work that produced paychecks and built communities.” People fostered a sense of belonging in isolated places and under harsh conditions, building homes even as their lives were marked by backbreaking work, violence, and conflicts.

In the 1950s and ’60s, narratives of technological progress and efficiency also included workers’ living quarters. Historically, mining companies relied on the company town model, whose replicable urban grid and company-run social services promised order that would increase worker efficiency and avoid tensions that could undermine production. But many of the old camps fell short of expectations, and company abuses, control, and material limitations created sparked conflicts and strikes.

The new camps built in the 1950s attempted to remake the company town model by improving living conditions. Anaconda called Weed Heights the “most beautifully constructed and maintained mining camp in the United States”—an attractive place to raise a family, own a home, and pursue the American Dream. Rent was low, and residents could apply for a one-, two-, or three-bedroom house. Built at the height of what the historian Lizabeth Cohen refers to as the “consumer republic,” shopping areas guaranteed residents access to consumption in all forms: restaurants, sports, and recreation. There was also a ballpark, sports courts, and a swimming pool. “Neat” and “order” frequently appeared in the town’s descriptions.

Similarly, in El Salvador, the company’s architects wanted to avoid the “industrial look” and “develop an attractive, modern town that would be a highly desirable place to work and live.” Workers’ duplex houses, made of concrete blocks and painted in pastel colors, contrasted with the arid landscape, while the curved streets gave the illusion of an American suburb. By the late 1960s, the town had about 8,300 residents and, in addition to the curving streets of duplex homes, infrastructure that included a modern hospital, a school, and stores.

The Anaconda era was tainted by its projects of social engineering, its anti-union practices, and impact on the environment. Living conditions were better than those of many other working-class suburbs, but geographical isolation and managers’ control over the living and working spaces created many tensions. In Chile, the Cold War political climate and the attitude of U.S. corporations created sharp divisions between managers and employees. Conflicts were common, and strikes lasted for weeks at the time. In 1971, the Chilean government nationalized U.S.-owned mines, including Anaconda’s properties.

Today, few mines consider building permanent camps or invest in local communities. Instead, they prefer to bus in workers, establish commuting systems, or offer temporary dormitory-style lodging near the worksite. These practices have created new problems, such as long and dangerous shifts and workers isolated from their families for extended periods of time. In places like Chile, the low-income communities that surround mining complexes have become sacrifice zones, areas that are heavily dependent on mining-related informal jobs and commercial activities and that bear the harsh environmental consequences of extraction.

Rethinking mining booms in a time of climate change and job insecurity should start by incorporating input from a diverse array of voices, including labor unions, environmental activists, businesses, and local populations. Only through working closely with communities directly impacted by mining can the transition to renewable energy truly create a sustainable future.

The post Is There Such a Thing as a Sustainable Mining Boom? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If you know where to go in Death Valley National Park, Wrangell-St. Elias Park and Preserve, Glacier Peak Wilderness, or Bears Ears National Monument, you might come across the remnants of a tramway or a pile of mine tailings or a rusted tank. The artifacts of industrial activity can be startling in the otherwise tranquil natural scene. But there is no mistake. Despite being miles inside a national park, a designated wilderness, or some other conservation area, you can encounter mining claims—they are everywhere. With resource development on public lands once again a matter of national debate, it has become increasingly important to look back and ask: How did protected places and mining get so entangled?

One hundred and fifty years ago, Congress established two foundational precedents for our national landscape a mere 10 weeks apart: the Yellowstone National Park Act, setting in motion “America’s best idea,” and the General Mining Act, which opened public lands to mining exploration. Between March and May, it seems, President Ulysses S. Grant swung from one apex of the pendulum to the other, making it impossible to settle and privatize the public land in Yellowstone while making it easy to extract valuable minerals from almost anywhere they were found without paying a cent. While these decisions seem diametrically opposed, they have shared priorities that ushered in a new land regime in the U.S., based on a fundamental notion of American land defined by a history of Native expropriation, economic liberalism, and segregated land uses.

On March 1, 1872, President Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Act. It “set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people” some two million acres in the northwestern corner of Wyoming, leaning just a bit into Idaho and Montana. In this remarkable landscape of geysers and bison and bright sulfuric pools, no one was permitted to settle or occupy the land. The resources—timber, minerals, and the like—were to be kept “from injury or spoliation” and all natural spectacles would be retained in “their natural condition.” No “wanton destruction” of game or fish “for the purposes of merchandise or profit” would be permitted.

But on May 10th, President Grant enacted a bill that has facilitated wanton destruction across many of the country’s public lands and created massive wealth for a few. The General Mining Act of 1872 declared all the U.S. public domain where valuable minerals might be found to be “free and open to exploration and purchase.” This legislation legitimized mining on all surveyed or unsurveyed lands for personal or corporate gain. (The mining that preceded it, such as the California Gold Rush of 49er fame, was simply overlooked trespassing.) The law remains in effect, an emblem to the exploitation of natural wealth for profit as the highest possible good assigned to the natural world.

Both laws thrummed with the cadence of dispossession. From the earliest days of the republic, the nation’s land policy was to take from Indigenous peoples—by war, by treaty, by duplicity or fraud, it did not matter—and then transfer into the private hands of yeoman farmers producing food and virtue on homesteads scattered across the continent. These 1872 laws were partly made possible by the fact that the federal government had ended treaty-making in 1871. Underneath the seemingly empty “pleasuring-grounds” of Yellowstone were the forced absences of Apsaalooké and Shoshone peoples and many other Indigenous Nations in Yellowstone and subsequent public parks.

Similarly, the great mineral rushes, both before and after the 1872 law, routinely invaded Indigenous territory, often in explicit violation of treaty agreements. This stripped land, wealth, and health from Native peoples and provoked ongoing violence, exemplifying a common North American story. The 1872 laws made land either a museum or a sacrifice zone, not a place to live. National parks—and later, national forests, monuments, grasslands, or wildlife refuges—and mining sites, once Native homes, quickly redefined those residents as trespassers.

Both laws also hailed to corporate boards. The Northern Pacific Railroad’s tracks were not laid down yet, but the route took it near Yellowstone’s northern boundary. Like many of the transcontinental railroads, the Northern Pacific faced financial trouble and guarded its territory fiercely from competition. Jay Cooke, the head of the company, saw the possible park as a future revenue stream, and used his influence to encourage Congress to create the park, further entangling corporate interests with national parks.

The General Mining Law benefited entrepreneurial and corporate development in a much more straightforward way. Obtaining land for mining was simple: locate valuable minerals; claim and take them. If they wanted, the mineral developers could also pay a low fee of $2.50 per acre for placer claims and $5 per acre for lode claims to buy the land. These easy terms conformed to a guiding belief of nineteenth-century economic liberalism- that the government was supposed to facilitate economic development (and then stand back). The federal government and U.S. taxpayers receive no royalties from the minerals subject to the mining law. Over the next century, an area almost the size of Connecticut dropped into private hands on the cheap. Although popular culture depicts a lone grizzled man with a mule and a pan bent over a creek, mining looked much more like underpaid workers with drills rat-a-tatting in the deep dark of western mountains.

In contrast to the conservation and recreation opportunities offered by the creation of the national parks, the General Mining Law brought about major environmental harms, including terrible waste, and continues to do so. Although few large-scale hardrock mining operations have launched in recent decades, 100 million acres of public land can still be explored and, if minerals are located, the process of claiming and taking them is largely the same as it was in the 1870s. Though Congress put a moratorium on patenting the claims in the 1990s, ending outright ownership, extracting minerals does not require land ownership- and mining claims close off the lands to other uses.

Meanwhile, environmental regulations and the bonds posted to support reclamation often are insufficient. To date, more than 50 billion tons of waste have been left behind after mining and processing, harming all manner of lakes and lands surrounding mines. The law’s rare reforms include a leasing system for some resources (like coal and gas) and improved environmental remediation. But the General Mining Law enjoys strong allies in resource-dependent congressional districts who have resisted the few calls for fundamental reform, such as fair royalties and a fund to clean up abandoned mines, that have popped up from time to time.

How can we square Ulysses S. Grant’s contradictory imperatives—to protect the natural world at all costs versus to exploit it without concern? In addition to the way both laws alienated land from its original inhabitants, they reveal a fundamental idea that animates American culture and law: that land is meant to be owned or controlled. From that perspective, tonnage and tourism, price per ounce and entrance fees, show themselves as simply different forms of commodification. While open-pit mines differ from the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, both require, according to the prevailing ethos, an owner or management goals approved by Congress.

One hundred and fifty years later, we find it hard to conceive of any other way. People have inhabited the continent since time immemorial, but this system is only a century-and-a-half old: Change is possible.

The post What Do Mining Claims and National Parks Have in Common? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In early modern times, and really up until the 20th century, one could argue that silver, not gold, was the precious metal that ruled the world. Though minted in Spanish America or Europe, silver coins could be used to buy pepper in Sumatra or cotton fabrics in Bengal, and the same money could be spent on troops or warships. Any monarch or state with ready access to silver harnessed the sinews of war.

But to understand what the costs and benefits of this first global currency were—how it changed the lives of the people who mined it and the natural environments that were upended along the way—consider the story of Potosí, a silver mining town established in highland Bolivia in 1545. Potosí offers sharp lessons about who wins, who loses, and how profoundly a mother lode of shiny metals can shape a region over the course of nearly 500 years.

Potosí, located at a breathtaking 13,200 feet above sea level in the eastern cordillera of the Bolivian Andes, still produces silver today, but miners tend to make more money from related base metals, mostly zinc and lead. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, when silver first went bust, Potosí’s salvation was tin. For a very long time, the Rich Hill, or Cerro Rico, of Potosí had it all, save gold.

But today the city fights for its life amid a drying climate and collapsing, over worked mines. The talk of the town today, despite its toxic environment and challenging altitude, is tourism. The fact that Potosí still lives by mining after nearly 500 years is a riddle that only makes sense in a woefully poor and underdeveloped country.

And this tension—how a place so rich in natural resources could remain so impoverished—has made Potosí a poster child of the so-called resource curse. Locally, the Cerro Rico was and remains the “mountain that eats men.” In colonial times, many of those men were native Andeans sent underground or into mercury-soaked refineries against their will, while the fortunes of Spain’s kings rose and fell on Potosí silver futures. In his still-popular polemic on underdevelopment, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano declared Potosí the epitome of colonial excess.

But a closer look at historical sources suggests that Potosí was something more complex and contradictory than the passive canvas for Spain’s “giant sucking sound” imagined by Galeano. Yes, the colonizer exhausted the mountain. Yes, the colonizer shamelessly abused Bolivia’s native Andean population. And yes, everybody inhabiting Potosí abused the natural environment, fouling streams and stripping every twig from every bush or tree for hundreds of miles around. Indeed, for its first hundred years Potosí could be described as an oasis of horror in a sea of ichu grass—an early modern nightmare.

Countless Andean workers and generations of outraged Catholic priests pled the case for reprieve before the Habsburg monarchs of Spain only to see the infamous draft of indigenous labor, the mita, revived again and again.

Yet, even with this dark knowledge in mind, one stumbles upon paradoxes that complicate the story. The search for silver was not monopolized by European colonizers, and control over the mines and their products was always contested. Though disadvantaged by law and custom, some native Andean miners and refiners made fortunes. Andean women drove a thriving informal economy by seizing on the city’s insatiable need for food and drink, aided by an accidental royal tax exemption.

Unintended consequences and spontaneous acts of charity abounded despite an atmosphere of greed and shortsightedness. The complexities of mining and refining, particularly as shafts dove deeper and ores grew refractory, led to a wide range of technical innovations that then reverberated around the region and the globe. While Potosí’s royal mint was staffed almost entirely by enslaved African men from Angola and Congo, the coins it produced supplied the world with ready money, which transformed societies in ways both positive and negative everywhere it traveled.

Panoramic view of Potosí, Bolivia. Courtesy of Martin St-Amant/Wikimedia Commons.

As early as the 1590s, Potosí’s decade of peak production, the city, mines, and refineries prefigured industrial capitalism at its best and worst, its most innovative and its most destructive. Stamp mills crashed all night, and miners worked around the clock. Everyone suffered the effects of airborne mercury, lead, and other toxic metals in addition to consuming foul water. Yet financial innovations followed on technical ones, giving rise to whole new classes of entrepreneurs, among them the long-distance coca traders of Cuzco, Peru. Merchants from Lima, Peru, brought Chinese silk, Basque iron, and Sri Lankan cinnamon to a wide range of colonial consumers. Potosí consumed the world even as the world consumed Potosí.

A fountain of fortune, Potosí’s iconic Cerro Rico promised socioeconomic gain for all types of people and both sexes, transforming a rigidly hierarchical world where self-fashioning was dangerous. Women and men from many corners of the world came here rather than to Madrid—the center of empire—to flip their own fortunes. With a restless population well above 100,000 at a time when Paris and London were not much bigger, Potosí was a beehive of opportunity for smooth and rough operators: pickpockets, pícaros, charlatans, and assassins. The city’s brothels and gambling dens were infamous, as were its comedians and other entertainers. For over 100 years Potosí boomed before its first great bust.

Another paradox of Potosí was its longevity. The Cerro Rico sputtered after 1650 but never gave out. It was still mined in 1825 when Simón Bolívar climbed it to celebrate his liberation of a continent.

When the Spanish colonizers left Potosí in the 1820s, the British, French, and ultimately Yankees came, each seeking to do what they believed the despised Spanish had been too stupid or technologically backward to do. In reality, it was Bolivians, including native Andeans as well as the descendants of Spaniards, who kept Potosí alive in the 19th century, often reviving old technologies and managing risk in ways not amenable to industrial capitalism as practiced in the Northern Hemisphere. There were ways to mine silver without thinking of how to maximize returns to shareholders.

There was always more silver inside the mountain, which many believed to be magical, a mother’s womb or Pachamama capable of regeneration. Even in the earlier years, when times got hard, mine owners and native prospectors fanned out into the countryside in search of new bonanzas, transforming a distant mountain or remote range into a fleeting shadow of the great Cerro Rico. Each hinterland boom produced its own wave of violence, harsh justice, wasteful spending, and environmental destruction, but each also produced new innovations amid labor shortages and discoveries of different ore types. One such innovation—born of short hands and hard rock—was to blast out ore with black powder, not safe, but effective.

Only with cyanide processing, hydroelectricity, and railroads in the early 20th century did Potosí begin to look something like a Leadville, Colorado, or a Virginia City, Nevada. A modern brewery arrived to supply miners with Potosina Pilsener by 1907.

But there was always something different in Potosí despite the modern accouterments, something ancient. As in colonial times, modern mining in Potosí has always toggled back-and-forth between the big and the small, the heavily capitalized and the informal or cooperative. A main driver of these swings has been the perennial uncertainty of global commodity prices, coupled with Bolivia’s extreme poverty and shifting government directives.

Eduardo Galeano may be right that what matters in the end is underdevelopment, extraction without compensation, wanton brutality, enduring racism, environmental degradation, all the worst effects of the resource curse in a former colonial backwater. Outsiders are to blame, from Spaniards to Yankees.

But if one asks Bolivian miners inside the Cerro Rico today what they make of Potosí’s strangely durable legacy, they are apt to say that the whole thing, from the very start, has been a devil’s bargain. The resource curse set loose in Potosí now lives inside us all.

The post How a 16th-Century Bolivian Silver Mine Invented Modern Capitalism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I have annual passes to both the U.S. and the California Parks and Recreational Areas. So when someone asks what we need in terms of parks, my visceral answer is always: More! But others view the National Monument and National Park systems differently. Right now, the Trump administration is re-evaluating them with an eye towards shrinking some and opening up others to mining and development.

The economist in me wants to ask: What are the trade-offs of making such changes in our parks? And how are such changes valued?

Let’s start by acknowledging there is always a trade-off between economic activity and the environment. Everything we do—from sheltering and feeding ourselves, to going to movies and ballgames—changes the natural environment around us. And this is not new. Pre-Columbian hunter-gatherers altered the environment as they burned Great Plains grasses in their quest for buffalo burgers.

What are the costs of such alteration? For a long time, planners have sought to ascertain the value of urban open space. A recent study by Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes and Colorado State University professor John Loomis tried to estimate the value of the National Park Service system. It is a big number, $92 billion. But even then, they admit that many aspects of the park system are undervalued because putting any price on them would be speculative at best.

Among these difficult-to-price aspects are the health and psychological benefits to those who use the parks—and to those who don’t use the parks, but who benefit from changed behavior by those who do. Their analysis also does not consider the opportunity cost of the parks—in other words the money that might be made were they not parks, but privatized for housing, mining, logging, or commercialized recreation.

The Trump administration’s current evaluation is focused on those parks that are designated as National Monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906. While there are huge challenges in conducting a cost-benefit analysis of the National Monuments, it is still a worthwhile exercise to think about the values that can be pinned down.

Let’s begin with an easy example. The Statue of Liberty is a National Monument. It sits in New York Harbor on Liberty Island, prime real estate. In 2016 there were over 4.5 million visitors. They paid about $27 each to visit, which includes the boat ride to and from, and admission tickets to all or part of the monument. If we compare this to Manhattan skyscrapers that have an average age of over 60 years, then over the same amount of time visitors will have spent more than $7 billion at the monument.

Again, we don’t count those who benefit because others have been inspired by their visit to the Statue of Liberty, nor the value of connecting us to our heritage. It is undeniable that these are significant.

On the road to Bears Ears. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

An alternative to the statue would be a skyscraper. The island would be prime real estate for building exclusive condos with views of the city and the harbor. The value would be diminished by the fact that domestic and maintenance workers would have to be paid more to get over to the island, and that access to the city would require a boat ride. So perhaps the comparable development is the Kushner family’s 666 Fifth Avenue office tower, another prime property.

The Kushners paid $1.8 billion for it, and The New York Times reports that they expect to spend $3.3 billion to renovate it. When you add this up—$5.1 billion—it is clear that the Statue of Liberty Monument (with a value of $7 billion-plus) is worth more than the alternative condo skyscraper occupying the same land.

And this is just the pure economic cost-benefit analysis. It leaves out the non-pecuniary value of being inspired by Lady Liberty, of connecting us to our heritage, and of reminding Americans that we were all once immigrants yearning to breathe free.

So it’s clear why no one, as far as I know, is contemplating selling or leasing parts or all of Liberty Island. But what about Bears Ears National Monument, the first target of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s effort to shrink national monuments and open them up for development?

I’m betting that, at least until recently, you never had heard of it. Bears Ears is in a remote part of southern Utah.

But as an example, Bears Ears is instructive—and the economics are a bit more complicated. First of all, Bears Ears, like many monuments, is free to visit. So we don’t have admissions revenue to look at. Plus, the remoteness of the park means it will not have the same level of visitor traffic as the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Of course, luxury condos are not an alternative in such a remote place. But you can make the case that mining is an alternative use.

Now let’s consider the full value of Bears Ears. It spans an area with a fossil record from the age of the dinosaurs, one of the most complete records we have. The value in studying this record is that we may obtain a better understanding of the fossils from this time spanning the Triassic and Jurassic periods. Also, Bears Ears is home to more than 1,000 archeological sites dating from when early Native Americans lived in the area. This civilization vanished and new knowledge on how climactic changes seemed to have decimated their civilization is going to be useful for our grandchildren (or maybe even ourselves). The monument also has other values—to the visitors who make the trek there, and to Native Americans who still live in the area and have a spiritual and heritage connection to many parts of it.

What are we giving up by protecting this potentially useful historical, cultural, and scientific research site? Uranium. The Daneros Mine in Red Canyon is an existing uranium mining operation in the Bears Ears area that was purposely left out of the monument. But the monument effectively prevents further exploration and mining inside its boundary.

Here is the context. Uranium prices have been falling since they peaked in 2007, and economics teaches us that this happens when demand falls or supply increases. So if other parts of Bears Ears were not great places to mine before the monument was declared, they certainly are not now.

The counter to that point is: Uranium prices may change someday. How and when is hard to predict. But uranium ore is important, and could be critically important to our national security. Still, this is unlikely. The U.S. demand for uranium is not likely to increase anytime soon, as reactors like San Onofre in California close and other reactors—such as two to be built in Jenkinsville, South Carolina—are abandoned in mid-construction. Indeed, there is so little demand that most of the uranium now mined from southwest Utah is exported.

In such a case, where we are dealing with “might-be’s” instead of quantifiable benefits, we can turn to optimal decision theory to help us make wiser choices.

The optimal decision is the one that provides at least as good an outcome as all other available decision options. So if the costs of the “might-be’s” are not immediate, they receive little weight. In the case of Bears Ears, the optimal decision now is to leave well enough alone and to keep an eye on the “might-be’s” just in case.

In other words, if we don’t need to make a decision, the optimal action is to make contingency plans for the time when a decision must be made.

A secondary argument for opening Bears Ears to mining is that it takes time to open a mine and begin ore production. So if we need uranium for national security, we could be behind the production power curve. The answer to this is quite easy. If quick access to uranium is valuable, then instead of exporting it from the Daneros Mine to South Korea, the federal government should purchase and stockpile it. The reason why this is superior is that uranium seams play out, and if they are opened today they still might not be available when a national crisis requires them. Thus the uncertainty of the need for the strategic ore drives the decision to preserve Bears Ears.

There is also the issue of jobs. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, this amounts to less than 40 jobs. In an economy of 147 million jobs in the United States and 1.5 million in Utah, this is no more than spit in the ocean. So the strategic metal arguments are the ones to consider seriously, and they point to no economic alternatives superior to doing nothing with Bears Ears at the moment.

My guess is that other National Monuments would end up with a similar cost/benefit calculus. There may be legitimate arguments about future needs, either by those who will benefit from maintaining the park in perpetuity, or by those who see a national interest in exploiting resources from the park at some point in time. But the absolute wrong economic decision would be to change a “might-be” to a “must,” thereby creating a cost in the loss of the park.

That brings me back to my personal interests in parks and monuments. Of course, I don’t want to see even one-tenth of one acre given over to mining or development. But the point that should drive decision-making is not personal preference, but analysis of costs and benefits to society as a whole. And it’s clear that careful study and a willingness to admit what we don’t know can lead to a better solution for such places than short-term changes in policy to satisfy exploitation interests.

And if we don’t take care to respect the analysis, you might find yourself booking a tour of the unique architecture of Liberty Island Condos in the middle of Upper New York Bay some day.

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