Regulating the Mount Polley Mine Disaster

Neoliberalism, Objectivity, and Settler-Colonialism in British Columbia

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14288/bcs.no221.198706

Keywords:

mining, Mount Polley Mine, disaster response, trade and commerce, industries

Abstract

This article uses the Mount Polley mine disaster to examine the extent to which the belief in the objectivity of Western scientific knowledge has been fundamental to the BC government’s ability to liberalize conditions for extraction. We examine the Mount Polley Mine Corporation and the province’s role in the 2014 Mount Polley mine disaster and consider how modes of scientific representation worked to set the conditions for the disaster and downplay its impacts. We argue that engrained societal beliefs in the objectivity of Western scientific knowledge were crucial to the ability of the province and the company to abstract the disaster from the violent dispossessive conditions from which it unfolded. 

Author Biographies

Neil Nunn

Neil Nunn is an environmental law, and justice scholar whose research examines the relationship between large-scale social and ecological disruption and settler colonialism in British Columbia. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at UBC’s Allard School of Law and completed a PhD from the University of Toronto’s Department of Geography and Planning in 2022. His doctoral research took the 2014 Mount Polley Mine disaster, the largest of its kind in Canadian history, as an entry point to consider how the disaster is relationally connected with broader patterns of socioecological disruption in the context of British Columbia’s colonial history. He is currently working on a book project that builds on this PhD research under contract with UBC Press.

Anna Stanley, Geography, Environment & Geomatics, University of Guelph

Anna Stanley is assistant professor in the Department of Environment, Geography, and Geomatics at the University of Guelph. Her work engages resource extraction, environmental governance, and the political
economy of settler colonialism in Canada.

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Published

2024-07-30

Issue

No. 221: Learning from Disaster: A Decade After the Mount Polley Tailings Dam Failure (Spring 2024)

Section

Articles