This chapter argues that ecopoetry is too easily absorbed back into the logics of capitalism and colonialism. Aware of the delimiting forces surrounding its own context, the chapter argues to be taken not as an essay but as an action. It argues that for a poem to bring about environmental change, it must be part of connected interventions. The chapter outlines the poetic yarning between John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk Green, a member of the Wajarri, Badimaya, and Nhanagardi people of the Yamaji Nation, as a means of generative protest. It also provides an example of poems written in medias res in the collective resistance to a proposal to build bike trails on Walwalinj, a mountain sacred to the Ballardong Noongar people. This example demonstrates a poem is shaped by the particular situation and how the poem is one part of a network of actions that formed a campaign that was led by Aboriginal elders. The chapter also includes collaborative poetry written during the Roe 8 Highway protests in 2016 and poetry protesting the proposed destruction of the Julimar Forest by mining companies.

Chapter 24 offers an overview of Goethe’s geological output, a vast but somewhat understudied area of his work. It focuses in particular on Ilmenau, where between 1776 and 1796 Goethe supervised a mining project, and it argues that, despite the ultimate failure of the enterprise, the Ilmenau period was crucial in developing Goethe’s understanding of geological issues. The chapter also charts the course of Goethe’s geological work after the Ilmenau period, and it brings to light the geological references which pervade his literary work – including Faust and some of his best-loved poems.

The 1860s marked a key moment in the history of extraction and the rise of extraction-based life, a social order premised on the removal of subsurface resources and, especially, on the coal economy. This decade saw the explosion of an economic discourse around coal exhaustion in Britain, thanks to the publication of William Stanley Jevons’s The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines[GK21] (1865), and the expansion of overseas imperial extraction projects following, for example, the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1869) in South Africa. In this chapter, I explore the role of extraction in the 1860s’ most characteristic genre: sensation fiction. After an overview of the chronotope of exhaustion and how it manifests in fiction, I turn to two sensation novels premised on extractive plots: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [GK22](1862) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone [GK23](1868). Together they suggest the extent to which British national life was, by the 1860s, already imagined to be fully dependent on extraterritorial mineral inputs.

Minerals, notably metals and construction materials, have been used for millennia, but the extent and diversity has enormously increased with industrialization. They occur as deposits of chemically bonded elements, accumulated over geological time and non-renewable on a human scale. Unlike energy, materials accumulate in stocks of goods, buildings, machinery, etc., and waste. Material flow analysis (MFA) covers the entire chain of extraction, processing, manufacturing, (re-)using and dissipation. Problems arise with depletion of high-grade deposits and with pollution of the environment (mining, waste, etc.) and its impacts for human and ecosystem health. In particular, the production and use of existing and new persistent chemicals -- with plastics as the most visible example -- are a great and only partly understood threat. Parts of the flows are unrecoverably dissipated; this should be minimized by increasing efficiency, reducing losses and collecting and processing waste along the chain. Redesign, reuse and recycling and developing substitutes are other approaches to mitigate geopolitical tensions and environmental destruction. How successful this can and will be depends on worldviews and their relative dominance, for instance in continuing growth with corporate tech versus local--regional regulation and behavioural change.

This chapter provides an overview of the history, habits, and musico-dramatic conventions of German comic opera in German courtly theaters, the Burgtheater and Kärtnertortheater, and the three suburban theaters: the Theater in der Leopoldstadt, Theater auf der Wieden, and the Theater in der Josephstadt. Arguing for a transnational development of German opera, it delves deeply into paradigmatic examples of key moments in courtly and suburban theatrical life: Ignaz Umlauf’s Die Bergknappen (1778) and its relationship to resource extraction and mining in late eighteenth-century Vienna; Wranitzky’s Oberon (1789) and elements of magic opera in dialogue and in song; and finally, comic antics in Wenzel Müller’s Kaspar der Fagottist (1791).

This chapter takes the earth to be its archive. It imagines the journey of a piece of coal from the mines of the Karatsu coalfield, in north-western Kyushu, to the Yamashiro-maru’s furnace. It asks how such a history brings into play new timelines, new spatial frameworks and above all new actors in nineteenth-century Japan’s engagement with the outside world. Narrating a range of timescales, from millions of years to the daily diary of a Yamashiro-maru passenger in March 1900, the chapter juxtaposes maps, memoirs, paintings, photographs, geological reports, diplomatic missives and a crew list partly to offer a new reading of the ‘opening’ of Japan in the 1850s. This account emphasizes as much the ‘geo-’ as the ‘-politics’ of Japan’s international relations, thereby reimagining Japanese agency in matters of coal – both in the Tokugawa shogunate’s mid-century encounter with Commodore Perry and in the Meiji state’s late-century relations with East Asia.

The national epic takes very different forms across different cultural and historical contexts. At the beginning of twentieth-century Australian literary history stands the tragic narrative of a failed individual, in Henry Handel Richardson’s trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917, 1925, 1929). In the mid-twentieth century, large-scale fictional narratives, also in the form of trilogies, were used by some realist writers to write epics of settlement. In the case of Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land trilogy (1941–53) the narrative is about the catastrophic contact between Aboriginal people and the invading white settlers, and the subsequent beginning of expansion across the continent. Written at the same period, however, are two trilogies of nation-founding that, like Richardson’s, are centred on later mining history: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s goldfields trilogy (The Roaring Nineties, 1946; Golden Miles, 1948; Winged Seeds, 1950) and Vance Palmer’s overlapping Golconda trilogy, begun at the same time as his national mythography, The Legend of the Nineties (Golconda, 1948; Seedtime, 1957; The Big Fellow, 1959). These trilogies are shaped by the history of mineral extraction in Australian-settler political, environmental and economic history. This chapter analyses the under-recognised meaning of mining in narratives of settlement and nation.

Chapter 2, Figures of Extraction: Representations of Mining in Ghana and Zambia, examines how postcolonial masculinity is reconfigured according to Africa–China relations. I home in on what I call “figures of extraction” by examining representations of mining – literal mineral alluvium – in two pieces of genre fiction. One main stake is to unpack the sensationalist discourse surrounding Africa–China relations that depicts the dynamic as a Manichean struggle between an African hero and Chinese villain. Another is to show how Chinese investment triggers the colonial trauma of European colonialism, even as the Chinese presence is configured in critically different ways. I demonstrate that when the dynamic is oversimplified, jingoistic nationalisms easily instrumentalize it to incite an “anti-Chinese populism” (Hess and Aidoo). This simplification often ignores the complicit role that corrupt African elites play in facilitating resource exploitation.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Writing in 1916, shortly after his appointment as ‘Geologist in Charge of Explorations’, the celebrated Canadian geologist and explorer Charles Camsell reflected on the prospects for development in Canada’s ‘unexplored’ Arctic: ‘It is to the mining industry more than any other that we must look for co-operation and assistance in the exploration of our northern regions.’1 Camsell hailed the prospects for mining to launch the transformation of remote, sparsely populated Arctic and Northern regions into prosperous, modern Euro-Canadian settlement frontiers. Nearly forty years later, reflecting on his geological career and the surge in mineral development activity in Canada’s north in the decades around World War II, Camsell confidently concluded, ‘To my mind the whole future of the North country depends primarily upon its mineral wealth.’2 Camsell’s visions of mining’s capacity for transforming the Arctic both echoes and anticipates the ideology of ‘frontierism’ characteristic of industry boosters and state agencies around the circumpolar Arctic.

The conservation status of the taxa in this book is measured using the criteria of the Red List of Threatened Species™. The Red List is overseen by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and categorises species according to extinction risk. This chapter summarises the history of the Red List and explains the criteria used to assess species’ extinction risk, as well as the quality control procedures in place today. This chapter also introduces a new part of the Red List, formalised in 2021: The Green Status of Species, a set of metrics which assess species’ progress towards functional recovery across its range and the impact of conservation actions.

Chapter 2. A “gold standard” means a monetary system in which a defined mass of gold coin or bullion is the unit of account in which prices are posted and accounts kept, and gold coin or bullion is the medium of redemption that ordinary currency and bank accounts promise to pay. Once modern banking developed, the vast majority of money was held and spent in the form of banknotes and deposit transfers, not coins. A monometallic gold standard with bank-issued money avoids problems created by legally imposing bimetallism. A series of supply-and-demand diagrams explains how a gold standard works to determine the quantity and purchasing power of money. The diagrams show how market forces stabilize the purchasing power of gold in response to various shifts in money demand and supply. A major gold discovery can change the purchasing power of gold by altering the supply from mining, but large discoveries were historically rare. The resource costs of a gold standard, the expenditure of labor and capital to extract and coin gold, have been over-estimated by economists who assume away the role of the banking system in economizing on the amount of gold used for transactions.

The chapter provides a comparative perspective on resource extraction with an empirical basis in Svalbard. Is the Arctic comparable to tendencies seen elsewhere, or is it unique? Many regions dependent on extraction face pressures to shift away from unsustainable economies. Social tensions are refracted through this lens, resulting in political conflicts affecting extraction policies. How does resource extraction in the Arctic fit into this pattern? The case analysed is Longyearbyen, Svalbard, which is irreducibly linked to a century of coal mining. The history and possible future of Svalbard relies on taking something out from the environment. In the 1990s, tourism was chosen as the new economic backbone. Research and education were boosted to ensure a continued Norwegian presence. Extraction continues, now directed towards “mining” knowledge (research), experience and memories (tourism), accompanied by insufficient added value locally, growing social inequalities and exploitation of international workforce. Like other communities based on extraction, Longyearbyen is volatile and dependent on forces beyond local control, but it also reflects the fragility of the Arctic.