TV likes metal but not mining

Feb 04, 2021

Climate technologies require enormous amounts of metal. I’m Ian Morse, and this is Green Rocks, a newsletter that doesn’t want dirty mining to ruin clean energy.

Give a gift subscription

Mining in your TV

Why is it so difficult to construct a gripping narrative around one of the most core activities that enable most lifestyles on the planet? Perhaps, because it requires grappling with the pressures that precipitate mines, the impacts of those mines, and how an urge to moralize may find people on opposite sides. Maybe because it’s rarely a happy story. So our economy’s metal fixation becomes a subject of documentaries, not entertainment.

Mining, in my viewing experience, has rarely gotten holistic, rigorous, insightful treatment on TV. But I was pleasantly blown away last weekend.

[Spoilers]

It wasn’t the Mandalorian, which includes one episode on a mining planet (s2e7). That story was initially built well: Imperialists siphon metals out of a foreign land. The materials are used for war, and they only become dangerous when they are taken from the ground. To process the ore, the Empire has built a dam to generate electricity. As a mining truck passes through a village, it receives scowls from local residents. A familiar story.

We hear these people around the mine are called “mudscuffers.” Without explanation, they attack imperial trucks carrying ore. Although they’re called pirates, they don’t steal anything. Their aim, it seems, is to disrupt business and deny the Empire its commodity. I would assume they’re meant to represent people protecting their land. But the Mandalorian kills every last one of them.

This scene could be understandably traumatic for people who live near mines. Environmentalists — who are often Indigenous and want protect land — are murdered in higher numbers every year. Most are tied to mining projects.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 is rooted in metal scarcity. Travel across vast space is made almost instantaneous by the use of dilithium, a not-so-subtle reference to lithium (although 1960s writers of Star Trek probably got lucky when it turned out to be a key ingredient in batteries). While dilithium has been mentioned throughout the Star Trek enterprise, only in season three of Discovery does it become the focal point. The plot: it’s scarce, all of it has disappeared, and once it’s used in an engine, it’s gone.

Few metals, if any, are similar. Most metals, especially the ones involved in the energy transition, can be recycled. Some of them are the most common elements on earth. Dilithium’s scarcity, then, seems a lazy allegory for the difficulty miners have in finding deposits, collecting investment, designing technology, obtaining natural resource rights, paying its workers well, and keeping the project afloat amid fluctuating prices and potentially problematic local impacts — all fueled by the idea that mysterious metals are required for life. Dilithium scarcity is not real scarcity, and I hope viewers don’t have the same view of real metal.

Both Star Wars and Star Trek imagine worlds impossible without extensive use of metal. Imagine how much metal is in every starship that explodes, or even in the Death Star, and still they can find enough to build a second one.

Consider Prospect, a film that chooses to center its story on mining laborers, rather than consumers. With a bustling market for gems, a father-daughter team have been contracted to find a colossal new deposit. But without any semblance of protections in a remote frontier, they can’t trust anyone who may be contracted by someone else. These far-away investors guide the story, but they are never seen. We never know where these gems go, but we know the business ties down the father and daughter in debt and a violent landscape.

Now, all that is to emphasize the brilliant complexity of Princess Mononoke from Japan’s Studio Ghibli. In just two hours, the film pits your own emotions against each other as you explore how a mining frontier benefits some and harms others. And it’s not always clear whether there are truly two camps, or even three or four. All sides protect their own morality as forests are razed, communities are displaced, rebellions are quashed, all by people who could be called liberators at the same time. Even the environment, embodied in various spirits, fights itself and contemplates how to react to its own destruction. There’s a lot to be said about the ending, but I’ll let you watch it.

Have you come across mining and metals in your pandemic TV binges?

Planet of Mines

Peru, whose exports are 60% mining, is entering lockdown but will allow mining to continue, among other industries.
Workers at a key copper mine in Chile are in difficult wage negotiations with their employer, Antofagasta, owned by one of the wealthiest families in the country.
After a 2015 tailings dam burst, Vale and BHP have been hit with a lawsuit alleging almost $1 billion in damages as investors claim the companies haven’t followed through on paying their debt. In a separate lawsuit, the Brazilian state is still seeking damages far greater.
A study in the Amazon found that mining brings insignificant benefits to local communities.
The day after being sworn in, the Kyrgyzstani president banned foreign companies from developing new mining projects.
Global miner Newmont has set up an 'Indigenous Community Relations' center in Vancouver. It plans to advocate for high standards in interacting with Native groups.
BMW and two other companies have written to Ghanaian NGOs saying they plan to refuse aluminum sourced from a controversial China-backed project if it does not uphold biodiversity protection standards.
Workers at an Indian bauxite (aluminum) mine are demanding to be paid minimum wage.
Pro-independence politicians in New Caledonia resigned, sending the government into free fall, and claiming that the sale of a notorious nickel mine prioritized multinational companies over locals.