Beneficial Use: The Political Economy of Surface Mined Land Reclamation in North America

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how energy extraction since the 1970s enabled the birth of market-based policies for environmental protection. Through an investigation of surface mined land reclamation programs in Canada and the United States, I draw a connection between coal and oil extraction and larger shifts in environmental-economic thought. Scholars in critical geography have increasingly critiqued the capitalist motivations behind market-based environmental protection measures, however they have not addressed in detail the processes through which these measures emerged. My work contends that post-extractive land reclamation programs created a new political understanding of nature fundamental to the implementation of market-based environmental policy practiced today. This dissertation uses mined land reclamation programs in North America as a historical practice through which to explore long term changes in the capitalist construction of nature over the latter half of the twentieth-century. As the only form of regulation for surface mining today, land reclamation is the act of restoring and rehabilitating environments destroyed by mining to a state equal to or better than their pre-mined state of productivity. These programs transformed the political conception of nature from an assemblage of natural resources to one consisting of “natural capital,” in which qualities like aesthetics, ecosystems, and biodiversity imbue the environment with value. This process rendered landscapes amenable to new forms of market-based policies and regulatory instruments. My research necessarily emphasizes interdisciplinary connections, requiring investigations of economic theory, ecological techniques, and landscape design. I analyze the methods employed by reclamation professionals as political instruments used to enact legislative changes, develop new land uses, and undermine unionized labor practices. While this work is important to histories of environmental policy, my investigation also reveals how spatial and material histories are essential to understanding the politics of the environment.