Since the colonial conquests, societal relationships with nature in many parts of the Americas have been dominated by the extraction of metals and mineral resources. – especially gold, silver, zinc, copper, coal, and oil. The history of the entire continent has been shaped by the flows of extractivism and by making available and extracting (first) human, biomass and (later) fossil energy that enabled and intensified these flows (Topik 2006; Bakewell 1971). This relationship between the availability of different forms of energy, the materials that could be extracted by means of that energy, and the societal entanglements connected with both these processes are the core focus of this volume.

The history of mining in the Americas has involved the extraction of an ever-growing variety of materials and has entailed severe consequences,  and entailed severe consequences, such as alterations of the water cycle, ground pollution, destruction of landscapes and for the health of whole ecosystems. Gold, silver, copper and platinum were extracted and worked in pre-colonial societies, and indigenous knowledge and practices extensively shaped colonial mining. Nevertheless, mining took place on a far greater scale in the period of Iberian colonial rule. Indeed, the colonial silver mining industry at Potosí alone may have played a key role in fostering what Moore (2010) terms a “capitalist world-ecology.” Colonial as well as post-colonial mining regimes have had profound and measurable “proto-Anthropocenic” impacts on the environment as well as on the societies that were involved whether voluntarily or by force (e.g. Studnicki-Gizbert 2010; Wendt 2016b).

By the end of the nineteenth century, the asymmetric integration of Latin America into the world economy as an exporter of primary products was fully articulated as an economy based on export enclaves with brutal social and labor conditions. The following century brought ongoing intensification in the extraction of fossil fuels and minerals (as well as other raw materials), a process that is variously reflected in the growing scale of operations, in dramatically expanding frontiers of extraction, and in the range of subsurface resources that have been extracted. From the 1980s onwards these trends have only accelerated, due to the widespread embrace of neoliberal policy in Latin America and soaring demand for minerals and hydrocarbons that has been driven by rapid global urbanization and industrialization (Boyer 2016; Dore 2000; Bebbington and Bury 2013). Informal mining, especially for gold, constitutes an increasingly visible dimension of the expansion in mining frontiers, especially in the Amazon basin.

Since the early 2000s some Latin American countries, and in particular the oil-and gas-rich Andean states Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, shifted to a neo-extractivist socio-economic model, in which it was no longer transnational corporations exploiting raw materials and making profit, but nationalized companies controlled by post-neoliberal governments. Surplus revenues would be used directly to improve social structures and development (Burchardt and Dietz 2014; Gudynas 2010). Clearly, these neo-extractivist regimes – constituting a specific and new socio-environmental entanglement – were thus able to create wealth, well-being and self-sufficiency, at least temporarily, based on an economy which was, however, still precariously dependent on global oil-prices as well as on the fossil fuel that is most responsible for rising CO2 levels and global warming.

Mining, almost regardless of the ore that is mined for, has had adverse societal and ecological impacts on the local, regional, and at present, the planetary scale. The societal impacts range from indigenous and African slavery and indenture for the extraction of ores during the colonial period, and the consequent displacement of peoples for that purpose, leading to the disruption and loss of whole cultures and ways of life, to adverse health effects from residues and fall out generated by different mining operations. In Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America, the rapid expansion of extractive activity in recent decades has frequently been accompanied by intimidation and violence that is directed towards those who oppose it (Pedersen 2014). Since mining often generates some local jobs, it also generates conflict within communities between those who see mining as beneficial due to employment and those who oppose it. A well-documented contemporary case in point is the Canadian-owned Marlin gold mine in highland Guatemala, where opponents of the mine have also been at the receiving end of intimidation and violence from company employees and state authorities. In other words, the mine workers and their families who are most affected by the environmental effects of mining profit from and become dependent in their livelihoods from the existence of those mines. Concepts and social processes that are connected with the historical as well as present-day effects of mining and that are relevant for our volume are thus (forced) migration and displacement of people, social and geographical vulnerability, as well as environmental and racial justice, in particular with regard to the most recent phase of the Anthropocene.

Since the early 20th century, water-rich Latin American countries have started ramping up their alternative energy hydro-power plants. This technological solution is a suitable tool to decrease their CO2 emissions, even though this was not the initial motivation in shifting to hydroenergy. However, these large-scale engineering projects involve damming of rivers and flooding of land, often ancestral lands of indigenous peoples (e.g. Orellana 2005). So, despite producing “green” electricity, these large-scale infrastructure projects produce social and inter-ethnic conflicts. The same accounts for wind wheel parks, such as at the isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico.

In other words, alternative energy projects that would in fact be progressive with regard to reducing CO2 emissions often conflict with indigenous rights and usually – similar to mining activities – change the surrounding ecosystems on a large scale, thus creating situations where the solution to one crisis (climate/ energy), engenders a plethora of new ones (environmental justice, indigenous rights, rights of nature, biodiversity loss).

This brief overview over the longue durée entanglement of relevant (proto-) anthropocenic aspects of mining and energy in the Latin American context implicitly also entails the epochs of energy history, which partly overlap with the epochs outlined in our volume matrix. That is, pre-Columbian as well as colonial mining practices initially developed under the conditions of a solar (non-fossil) energy regime, putting systemic restrictions on the intensity and scale of mining operations. With some delay to the period of independence movements in Latin American countries, industrializing processes and thus also the “fossilization” of endeavors such as mining and the building of energy infrastructures set in. In many cases, industrialization and the use of fossil energy was pushed by foreign investment from countries of the Global North. The use of coal, oil and steam power for mining operations vastly enlarged their scope and hence their impact on the bio-, hydro-, lithos- and atmosphere. In other words, throughout what we call the proto-Anthropocene there is a global (but regionally and locally uneven) shift in energy regimes from solar to fossil (Sieferle 2001; Burke 2009), while it appears that during the latter part of the Great Acceleration there is now a shift back to a new solar energy epoch, albeit obviously under different technological conditions, as well as a renewed focus on geothermal energy. Again, as mentioned above, none of these renewable energy forms comes without its own set of local and regional conflicts and crises. This is tension between the need for a shift to renewable energy forms and the environmental and racial justice issues that are entangled with them are one of the major anthropocenic challenges our volume revolves around.

Christopher Jones coined the concept of Landscapes of Intensification (2014) in the context of the energy transition (solar to fossil) and coal and oil-extraction in the U.S. mid-Atlantic between 1820 and 1930. For Jones, Landscapes of Intensification not only contain the actual mining operations but also their appendant local, regional and, as we progress to the Great Acceleration, global (equally fossil energy-driven) transport infrastructures. The concept seems very applicable to the situation in Latin American countries and may provide an explanatory link between the local and the global or even planetary, another anthropocenic tension we are trying to navigate within this project. With regard to the epochs of energy history that overlay our matrix structure, we could simultaneously speak of Epochs of Intensification.