Mining Memories: social and environmental pasts at international industrial heritage sites

Heritage sites tend to fall into two broad categories. On the one hand designations of 'natural' heritage such as the Grand Canyon and Great Barrier Reef serve to celebrate great national environmental endowments. On the other hand designations of cultural heritage, the Great Wall of China or the Giza Pyramids, reflect great human achievement or creative genius

This project is devoted to exploring the emergence of industrial heritage as something that sits uneasily between the conventional 'natural' OR 'cultural' listings taxonomy. Industrial heritage sites grew in number and prominence during the second half of the twentieth century and have reached new prominence in recent years with a number of mines and industrial manufacturing premises being recognised for their significance at the global level.

This project explores the establishment and maintenance of heritage at three prominent sites of large-scale resource extraction: The Big Pit Blaenavon (UK), Malakoff Diggins (USA), and The Big Hole, Kimberley (South Africa). The locations have been chosen because they each make plain the presence of environment change (destruction, restraint, remediation) in places most often interpreted through an exclusively cultural lens. The locations enjoy different kinds of relationships with local, national and international heritage institutions and are at different stages of development in terms of their pursuit of designations of significance.

This project seeks to explore strategies deployed to simultaneously celebrate the industrial past, and associated forms of human endeavor and sacrifice, while also conveying important lessons about the mistreatment of social and ecological environments within the processes of industrialization.

This project will generate its main impact by highlighting the pedagogic value of industrial-led environmental change. Typically, industrial heritage sites become 'heritage' and undergo interpretation as 'heritage' using tropes that flag up human ingenuity, social progress, or in more politically radical examples, labour struggles and human exploitation. Such sites therefore miss a crucial opportunity to generate discussion about environmental costs versus social benefits accrued.

The project will emphasize the possibilities of conceiving of industrial heritage as a repository and resource for thinking through environmental change. Contaminated soil, sterilized ground, waste, spoil, and voids together with evidence of 'reclaiming', 'regenerating', and 'remediating' natures can provide an important record of our concern with, and/or indifference to, the changes brought by resource extraction.

The research will benefit heritage practioners and policy makers in fields of cultural and economic development by reassigning value to the problematic on-site locations they oversee. It will also benefit local residents and visiting members of the public by offering new interpretive opportunities, and new possibilities for learning. This reappraisal of sites of environmental change from ecological problem to pedagogic opportunity will generate benefits that extend nationally and internationally through the private and state sector. National and international regimes of heritage regulation will be better equipped to bring together the social and the natural rather than separating them out a priori. In reference to the private sector, this research will lay foundations for a relationship pathway between contemporary mining operators, heritage practitioners and local residents that are often physically proximate but institutionally estranged.

A second impact of the project will be the cultivation of dialogue between academics, practitioners, policy makers and users of heritage, as well as residents connected to particular sites of resource extraction. Establishing such a conversation using various platforms (an interactive website, reminiscence workshops, and a colloquium event) allows for critiques of heritage taxonomies and the associated purified realms of nature and culture maintained through heritage's governance. In this respect, the perspectives and viewpoints of local residents play a key role, not only in terms of generating interpretive content of site-specific environmental change, but also in terms of formulating that site's very approach to interpretation.

Including local residents in dialogues with academics, practitioners, managers and policy makers generates benefit to all parties. It will foster an ethos of collective effort to understand environmental change, it will acknowledge the value of those local perspectives most immediately and profoundly affected by environmental change, and it will expose heritage practitioners to important lay perspectives.

With its focus on questioning conventional attitudes to nature-culture relations across public and institutional realms, the benefits of the project promise to stretch beyond issues of heritage accreditation, management and interpretation, into issues of environmental remediation, and social and economic development.