A Decade after the Mount Polley Mine Tailings Disaster

Max Chewinski is an independent researcher with expertise in social movements and the human dimensions of natural resources and renewable energy development. He is a former postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental sociology at the University of Alberta. Prior to this, Max obtained a PhD in sociology from the University of British Columbia. Max’s research has been published in journals that include Environmental Sociology, American Behavioral Scientist, and Social Movement Studies.

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.