Introduction: timescapes of extraction

This book aims to contribute to this growing literature by putting together mining and post-mining in a global perspective; that is, by approaching the spatial and temporal articulations of mining and post-mining as interrelated and coexisting features of the same global minescape. The main point we want to make is that placing mining and post-mining in a global perspective helps us account for the interconnections between the diverse and diversified worlds of resource extraction and their lasting effects over time, and to think about their legacies as intimately connected to the contemporary extractive geographies. To do this, we propose framing mining and post-mining sites through the idea of the ‘global life of mines’, which we conceive as a methodological framework for addressing the variations and permanence of resource extraction and its aftermath. Taken together, the chapters in this book offer insights into the multiple temporalities entangled in the timescapes of resource extraction (D’Angelo and Pijpers 2018a, 2018b) and how such temporalities, far from being captured by conventional linear chronologies (of clocks, calendars, calculations, estimates), coexist and interact in producing the global minescape. Thinking about mining and post-mining in terms of their ‘global life’ means to combine the spatialities of dispersed sites of (post)extraction with a timescape perspective that highlights the temporal intricacy and multifaceted temporal dimensions of socio-environmental life (Adam 1998). Consequently, the ‘global life of mines’ entails understanding extractive spaces through time and the temporalities of extraction through space. This book brings into conversation researchers who address different dimensions, implications and temporalities of resource extraction and its aftermath. In this Introduction, we highlight a ‘global’ outlook as a productive way of thinking about extractive activities and their afterlives. We clarify the meaning of the global, what is global in the life of mines, and how we believe it is crucial to bring together mining and post-mining in a comparative perspective. We think of the global life of mines as a comprehensive framework for thinking about circuits of extraction, mining sites and their exhausted landscapes as intimately interconnected.