A short history of uranium mining.

This reading of extractive enterprise, debris, and debility should be thought of as coextensive with what one might call a geology of empire; that is, it develops an analytic that reads the multifarious cultural manifestations of colonialism and capital through the fact of their geophysical eventuality. (Also, I will never be as amazing as Manu.) Here, the reading I develop is meant to resonate with Eyal Weizman’s work on the relationship between colonialism and climate change, and the ongoing physical devastation of places and populations around the planet. For Weizman, colonial regimes have not only contributed to ongoing processes of environmental degradation, they have authorized and legitimated themselves through reference to their status as agents of proper land management and environmental stewardship, over and against indigenous populations who are painted, inevitably, as incapable of properly harnessing the land and its resources. Here, too, the temporal and spatial registers suggested by such an approach defy conventional renderings of geopolitical frontiers, or normative modes of historical analysis. Indeed, as a global geophysical process, the unfolding of the Anthropocene has been coextensive with the temporal and spatial parameters of capital and empire; their histories, in other words, are inextricable from one another, just as their manifestation within history is bound to the reification of space, time, and “nature” as elements of a process of capital accumulation. As Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin have recently argued, the most compelling data regarding the eventuality of the Anthropocene draws together a range of geophysical samples which suggest climate change began with the advent of extended contact between Europe and the Americas. Not only did this period see the transfer and transformation of distinct biota, the introduction of new plant and animal populations, it brought together different viral forms and immunologies, eventually precipitating the mass death of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. With the decimation of the indigenous population, cultivated land throughout the Americas returned to forest, prompting a calamitous drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and precipitating what climate scientists have identified as a “little ice age.” As such, Weitzman’s approach to the study of colonialism and climate change might best be understood as one piece of a specific history of modernity, where modernity is understood as the cultural logic of capital realizing itself through the expansion of empire. ` What, of course, distinguishes empire as a social formation coextensive with the topos of the modern is its implication with the history of race as a mechanism of labor discipline. As Lewis and Maslin’s work suggests, the conditions that precipitated the mass death of the sixteenth century were those of a rapaciously extractive form of capital accumulation, one predicated upon the desire to expand and consolidate Castillian hegemony over Iberia and parts of North Africa. These conditions were, in turn, attached to a proto-capitalist, nascently biopolitical mode of statecraft which sought to secure its own continuity through ongoing intervention in the lives of its subject populations. As an extension of practices tied to the Reconquista and the flourishing of the Inquisition, during this period, notions of faith, biology, blood, and purity coalesced into a toxic stew which would eventually travel under the name “race,” a shorthand by which to fix as immutable the “natural inferiority” of subject populations, to transform notions of religious difference into biological destiny. The notion of race, from this perspective, might be thought of, more broadly, as a piece of the reification of nature—and of religion—the production of nature as resource to be colonized, exploited, and consumed—and the emergence of religion as a technique for the annunciation of the secular as the terrain of capital accumulation. Moreover, the concept of race might be itself read, in this sense, as a peculiar form of imperial detritus, a mode of bodily colonization and extraction that bears its own complicated relationship to geophysicality and the production and exhaustion of populations as resources. In this story, I approach the concept of race as a form of toxic debris, while reading the materiality of race through the social distribution of bodies and toxicities. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore has argued, race has no meaningful substance, but rather is begat by racism, itself understood as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Uranium extraction in the Southwest began many decades before the atomic age. Initially concentrated on Navajo lands near Four Corners, uranium ores were one of the inevitable byproducts of carnotite mining, itself the source of large concentrations of radium. First isolated by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, radium found almost immediate application in the field of medicine, supplementing the recently discovered x-ray as a means of treatment for various chronic and incurable diseases, from cancer to lupus, tuberculosis, and gout. Supply from Four Corners fed this early wave of experimentation with radiation therapy, until its unregulated commercial exploitation in the patent medicine and nascent “health” industries made clear its most deleterious side effects. By the start of World War I, radium from the Four Corners mines was also being used in the phosphorescent paint employed by watch-makers to highlight luminous watch dials for use in the dark of trench warfare. If the nineteenth century saw a slow and steady expansion of the state and its war machine over an ever-more rationalized sense of space and the distribution of force over a field of battle, irradiated watch dials allowed for a similar extension of command over time, the capacity to coordinate attacks between entrenched antagonists even under cover of night. The war machine would later give impetus to an expanded market in another of the primary byproducts derived from carnotite ore, mineral vanadium. First discovered by Mexican chemist Andres Manuel del Rio, in 1801, vanadium was, for much of the nineteenth century, a mineral curiosity, notably largely for the wide range of colors produced by its salts. By the late nineteenth century, vanadium was being added to the hulls of warships to shore them up and defend against explosive projectiles. By the dawn of the twentieth century, metallurgists had begun experimenting with its application in the production of steel alloys. They found that the introduction of small amounts of vanadium to steel created a far harder, and more resilient, steel alloy; an alloy which was soon applied to a wide array of industrial processes. The first extensive use of vanadium steel in commercial production came with the introduction of the Ford Model T, in 1908. Because vanadium steel was light, relative to other steel alloys, it enabled Ford to solve the dilemma of the “weight-to-power ratio” that had plagued other attempts at bringing automobiles to a wider commercial market. Crucial components of the Model T could be made to bear up under greater expenditures of energy, thus allowing the Model T to propel itself with greater speed, and less inertia. Ford’s adaptation of vanadium steel to automotive production would yield enormous dividends for both the war machine and the industries to which it was symbiotically tethered. During World War II, demand for vanadium and vanadium steel skyrocketed, while economists worried over the capacity of the US vanadium industry to meet the demand wrought by a global projection of US military power. It was, of course, in the context of World War II that the US government first became interested in the uranium deposits of the greater Southwest. That these were in in proximity to Los Alamos—site of the national laboratory tasked with the development of a nuclear weapon—was, at least initially, a happy coincidence. The majority of the uranium used in the Manhattan Project was, in fact, drawn from the Eldorodo Gold Mines near Port Hope, Ontario, and the Shinkolobwe mine in what was then the Belgian Congo. Fearing American dependency on foreign supplies of uranium, the officer overseeing operations at Los Alamos, General Leslie Groves, purchased the uranium stockpiles of the US Vanadium Corporation. Because uranium ore was primarily a byproduct of carnotite mining, the first uranium industries in the United States grew up around the carnotite mines of southern Colorado; yet, as the hot war with Germany and Japan gave over to the Cold War between the US and the Soviets, the field of uranium extraction expanded to meet the growing demands of nuclear proliferation and the arms race. During the earliest years of the Cold War, uranium mining spread through New Mexico and Arizona, with some of the largest and most productive mines located in Laguna lands near Albuquerque. Until the mid-1970s, Laguna lands produced nearly fourteen percent of the uranium at use in the United States, even as the uranium industry expanded to consume lands sacred to the Acoma, the Najavo, the Hopi, and the Zuni. Uranium mining proved an immediate economic boon to the indigenous communities of the greater Southwest. Its long-term consequence with respect to the health of those communities has been more difficult to gauge. As Gina Stuart-Richardson has indicated, as a commercial industry, uranium mining is propelled by a market-based conception of value that can little appreciate questions related to historical preservation. For Stuart-Richardson, “historical preservation” provides a rubric, from within the juridical calculus of the settler state, whereby indigenous communities assert themselves as subjects of the land that emerge from a sense of their ontological implication with its geophysicality. “Native people see themselves as coming from lands that are imbued with sacredness, and then eventually returning to that land in a cycle that is as old as the generations who have inhabited it…” she writes, “[L]and plays [a role] in identity creation, and how the ways one views the land can substantially affect the way identities are created.” As wrought by industrial mining, the material alteration of the geophysical processes enfolded within the topography of the greater Southwest taxes conditions of indigenous survivance. While survivance at is broadest indicates a form of communal health in which the affective circuits that constitute subjectivity are threatened through a massively destructive intervention upon terrestrial substance, in this instance, such renderings of health are clearly bound up with questions of the physical capacity, debility, and debilitation of indigenous peoples as embodied subjects. Uranium mining, after all, does not simply alter the physical shape of the terrain; rather, such alterations are coextensive with the radioactivity mining uncovers, and the radioactive wastes it leaves behind.