Tom Nurmi
Montana State University
Tom Nurmi is Assistant Professor of English at Montana State University in Billings, MT, where he teaches American literature and courses for the Environmental Studies and Native American Studies programs.
The keyword “mineral” condenses a diverse array of materials, technologies, and histories that have organized America’s relation to its environments from the early nineteenth century onward. Emphasizing the human... [ view full abstract ]
The keyword “mineral” condenses a diverse array of materials, technologies, and histories that have organized America’s relation to its environments from the early nineteenth century onward. Emphasizing the human species’ complex entanglement with inorganic spheres of existence (from bone chemistry to iPads), mineral criticism uncovers new trajectories in the histories of economics, technology and medicine, the philosophy of science, literary history, and art theory to develop more incisive contexts for contemporary conversations about environmental ethics in the Anthropocene. Minerals – defined strictly (gold, granite) or loosely (coal, oil) – signal what Latour calls the “folded heterogeneous temporalities” of all objects; minerals contain the elemental residues of the planet’s antiquity and perhaps prophecies for its future, as exclusively human-generated minerals from mining, dumping, and nuclear testing represent “marker lithologies” of our current geological epoch. So minerals direct our attention forward and backward simultaneously: not only to an imagined future of ecological degradation or to prehistoric eras of mineral-formation but also, and specifically, to the origin of environmental consciousness in nineteenth-century America. At this critical moment in world history, revolutions in energy production and consumption created new “landscapes of intensification” – the shift, to quote Christopher Jones, from organic to “mineral energy regimes” – and America became the literal proving ground for the transformative potential and environmental limit of a modern, mineral democracy. Defining the aims, methods, and implications of C19 EH therefore requires a careful examination of the mineral across scientific, historical, and artistic disciplines, illuminating the centrality of the non-human for our species’ future.
