Reconfiguring Productivity, Un-Abandoning Lands: A Look at the OSMRE Abandoned Mine Reclamation Awards Program

Keywords: Mine reclamation, SMCRA, ecological restoration, accumulation by restoration, ecosystems services
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Throughout the United States, states and municipalities turn to mine reclamation as an engine for economic prosperity by mitigating hazards to human health, property, and production. By mitigating these hazards, abandoned mine lands (AML), located primarily in rural areas, are un-abandoned – the pollution, physical changes, and consequential uselessness are remediated – rendering wasteland potential property. This remediation readies the land for productive use. The federal agency that administers mine reclamation seeks to justify the extensive time and monetary investments states and Native nations make into mine reclamation by demonstrating mine reclamation’s economic benefits. In 1993, this agency began a program that awarded coal and hard rock mine reclamation projects that had not only achieved the goals of the federal law regulating mine reclamation, but exceeded the scope of these goals. This process of remaking environments is unique, because while reclamation requires the restoration of both ecological and economic productivity to the landscape, project quality and success is overwhelmingly measured and quantified in economic terms. I argue that studying projects recognized by the OSMRE AML Reclamation Awards allows us to understand how economic productivity is reconfigured and measured in the face of ecological and economic crisis. Through document and media analysis about award-winning reclamation projects, I investigate claims about the value re-conferred to AML. To frame my analysis, I draw from political ecologies of value (Kay 2018, legal geographies of property (Blomley 1998), and the roles that environmental laws play in codifying moral and political-economic structures (M’Gonigle and Takeda 2013).