Browsing by Subject "Mining"
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Item Going green : sustainable mining, water, and the remaking of social protest in post-neoliberal Ecuador(2012-12) Velásquez, Teresa Angélica; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Ghosh, Kaushik; Sawyer, Suzana; Speed, Shannon; Vargas, Joao HThis dissertation examines the reconfiguration of popular environmental politics in the context of so-called sustainable mining development in Ecuador. Progressive governments in Latin America herald sustainable mining initiatives as the lynchpin to development capable of generating revenues to finance social welfare programs and protecting the environment. If this is so, my dissertation asks, then why has a proposed sustainable gold mine provoked such bitter opposition from dairy farmers in the parish of Victoria del Portete? My dissertation follows a group of indigenous and mestizo dairy farmers in the southern Ecuadorian Andes to understand why they oppose gold mining in their watershed and traces the cultural and political transformations that followed from their activism. I make four key arguments in this dissertation. First, I argue that sustainable mining plans place a premium on local water resources and have the effect of rearticulating local water disputes. Whereas owners of small and large dairy farms have historically disputed local access to water resources now they have created a unified movement against the proposed gold mine project. Second, I argue that knowledge practices and political discourses enabled farmers with varying claims to ethnic ancestry and socio-economic standing to establish connections with each other and with national indigenous leaders, Catholic priests, artists, and urban ecologists. Together they have formed a movement in defense of life. My analysis extends common understandings of the nature of human agency and political life by examining the role that non-human entities play in shaping contemporary environmental politics. Third, as a result of the mobilizations, new socio-environmental formations have emerged. The watershed has become a sacred place called Kimsacocha, which is venerated by farmers through new cultural practices as the source of life. Finally, the mobilizations in defense of life have re-centered indigeneity in unexpected ways. Farmers with and without indigenous ancestry as well as their urban allies are now claiming an indigenous identity. Unlike previous understandings of identity in the region, indigeneity does not denote a shared racial, cultural, or class position but refers to a particular way of understanding and relation to the environment.Item “Hacerles creer que hay plomo” (“Convincing them there is lead”) : health, environment, and power in Abra Pampa, Argentina(2011-05) Spangenberg, Emily Jane; Auyero, Javier; Dulitzky, ArielWhen the lead smelting plant Metal Huasi closed in the late 1980s, it left 60,000 tons of heavy metal waste deposited throughout Abra Pampa, Argentina, a town in the Northwestern province of Jujuy. Much of this waste, predominantly composed of lead, remains exposed to the air, over 20 years after the smelter has closed, and Abra Pampa residents await the completion of a polemical environmental remediation plan that was drafted in 2007 but is years behind schedule. The issue of lead contamination has largely been normalized and obscured by management of public information and scientific discourse, as well as through the active discrediting of evidence of human suffering in the town. Ethnographic research conducted in Abra Pampa in 2010 engages with Javier Auyero and Débora Swistun’s sociological work on “environmental suffering” and “toxic uncertainty”, concepts used to analyze how confusion on sources, effects, and solutions to widespread environmental contamination is socially constructed and reflects political power dynamics. In Abra Pampa, much uncertainty about the gravity and extent of lead contamination has been compounded and capitalized upon by officials working in association with the lucrative mining industry in Jujuy. This case study posits that disagreement among Abra Pampa residents on the actual health risks that exposure to lead waste poses is largely a result of contradictory studies and long periods of governmental inaction toward environmental remediation. Additionally, discourse on the dangers of lead contamination among Abra Pampa residents is fragmented, reflecting class bias and discrimination that tends to blame certain residents for exposure to contamination. Despite several published studies indicating dangerously high levels of lead in residents’ blood, concerned residents liken their consistent criticism of governmental inaction on the issue to a process of “convincing” authorities that there is indeed lead, and that it represents a threat to the population. This case study concludes with sketches of some of the possibilities for mobilization toward positive change in Abra Pampa – namely pressuring governmental agencies into providing full environmental and health remediation – which parts from Auyero and Swistun’s notion that widespread toxic uncertainty might preclude such mobilization.Item Hydraulic fracturing sand resource development in the Llano uplift region, central Texas : resource calculation, favorability analysis, and transportation economics(2016-05) Verma, Rahul; Elliott, Brent Alan; Kyle, James Richard; Gutierrez, GenaroUse of naturally occurring sand, one of the most commonly used proppants for hydraulic fracturing, has grown tremendously as a commodity in the past decade as hydraulically wells for petroleum production from unconventional reservoirs increased significantly. USGS estimates that the United States produced more than 94 million metric tons of industrial sand in 2015, almost 52 percent of the global production. About 71 percent the total industrial sand was used for hydraulic fracturing and well packing in 2015. With the recent decline in oil and gas price and exploration drilling, it becomes all the more relevant to develop low cost, locally extracted sand for hydraulic fracturing. The Hickory sandstone unit of the Riley formation in central Texas is one such resource. The region is already one of the largest sand producers in the US and is conveniently located within 200–300 miles of major shale basins in Texas. Barnes and Schofield (1964), and Kyle and McBride (2014) present geological studies of the region and its potential for hydraulic fracturing sand. This study builds on this experience, to calculate for the first time, the total resource volume in the region. Benson et al. (2015) considers high friability, near surface access and proximity to transportation facilities as the three most important qualities of sand resource. As the sand in the Llano uplift region was never buried more than 1,500 feet, it remains friable (Kyle and McBride, 2014). This study estimates the sand resource in the Llano Uplift region to be more than 24 billion metric tons, of which, 20 billion metric tons is characterized by near surface access and proximity to transportation facilities. Several favorable sites for extraction are identified in Mason County, McCulloch County, San Saba County, Barnet County, and Llano County. Several hydraulic fracturing sites in the Barnett, Eagle Ford, and Permian basin, with fracture closure stress less than 6,000 psi, are identified as potential markets for the sand extracted in the Llano Uplift. A transportation cost optimization between using railways and highways, to transport sand from favorable extraction sites to hydraulic fracturing sites, finds that using highways is most cost effective means for transporting to all the sites in the Permian basin, most sites in the Barnett basin, and a few in the Eagle Ford basin. A combination of railways and highways is found to be more cost effective on a few routes to the Barnett and Eagle Ford basin.Item Mining memory: contention and social memory in a Oaxacan territorial defense struggle(2014-05) Macias, Anthony William; Hale, Charles R., 1957-Faced with the profound social and ecological threats posed by extractivist projects such as large hydroelectric dams, wind farms, and mining operations, many indigenous communities and their allies in Mexico have articulated new forms of contentious politics into a broad territorial defense movement. This project explores the strategies of contention practiced by an anti-mining movement based in the Municipality of San José del Progreso in the southern state of Oaxaca. As a deeply-divided community that has suffered increased violence and conflict directly related to a Canadian-owned gold and silver mine operating in its vicinity, it presents a valuable case study in how strong social movements can still develop under conditions of disunity. This study combines ethnographic and archival research methods to uncover the deep historical roots of community division, and to develop a close analysis of the contentious strategies employed by the anti-mining movement. The historical record and local narratives show the central role that hacienda colonialism played in creating a salient geography of ethnic discrimination and division in the municipality whose effects can still be seen today. In response to the ongoing processes of colonization and dispossession in San José del Progreso, a legacy of contention has defined and defended both campesino (peasant farmer) and indigenous claims to local territory. More than a series of instrumental strategies designed to expel the hacienda and later mine project, this politics of contention operates as a form of social memory to produce a hybrid form of indigenous/campesino identity linked to healthy land stewardship, an interconnectedness between the earth and human subjects, and a shared history of struggle. As a result, the anti-mining movement in San José del Progreso has shown success in converting its troubled past and checkered present into the foundations of a healthy social and ecological commons, independent of its failure to fully-unite the municipality or close down the mine project in the short-run.Item On improving performance and conserving power in cluster-based web servers(Texas A&M University, 2007-04-25) Vageesan, GopinathEfficiency and power conservation are critical issues in the design of cluster systems because these two parameters have direct implications on the user experience and the global need to conserve power. Widely adopted, distributor-based systems forward client requests to a balanced set of waiting servers in complete transparency to the clients. The policy employed in forwarding requests from the front-end distributor to the backend servers plays an important role in the overall system performance. Existing research separately addresses server performance and power conservation. The locality-aware request distribution (LARD) scheme improves the system response time by having the requests served by web servers which have the data in their cache. The power-aware request distribution aims at reducing the power consumption by turning the web servers OFF and ON according to the load. This research tries to achieve power conservation while preserving the performance of the system. First, we prove that using both power-aware and locality-aware request distribution together provides optimum power conservation, while still maintaining the required QoS of the system. We apply the usage of pinned memory in the backend servers to boost performance along with a request distributor design based on power and locality considerations. Secondly, we employ an intelligent-proactive-distribution policy at the front-end to improve the distribution scheme and complementary pre-fetching at the backend server nodes. The proactive distribution depends on both online and offline analysis of the website log files, which capture user navigation patterns on the website. The prefetching scheme pre-fetches the web pages into the memory based on a confidence value of the web page predicted by backend using the log file analysis. Designed to work with the prevailing web technologies, such as HTTP 1.1, our scheme provides reduced response time to the clients and improved power conservation at the backend server cluster. Simulations carried out with traces derived from the log files of real web servers witness performance boost of 15-45% and 10-40% power conservation in comparison to the existing distribution policies.Item Recovery of Carbon and Nitrogen Cycling and Microbial Community Functionality in a Post-Lignite Mining Rehabilitation Chronosequence in East Texas(2012-10-19) Ng, JustinSurface mining for coal alters the original soil profile characteristics and the associated physical, chemical, and biological conditions. Our objectives were to compare soil characteristics and the distribution of nutrients to 1 m depth over a chronosequence of 40 years to determine when a reclaimed mine soil (RMS) returned to premined conditions. We sampled 5 sites aged 0 to 20 years reclaimed by the crosspit spreader technique (CP) and 3 sites aged 20 to 40 years reclaimed by the mixed overburden technique (MO). An unmined site (UM) served as a control. Changes in soil texture (sand to clay loam) after mining corresponded with increased macroaggregation (>2 mm) and enhanced C sequestration up to ~250 Mg C ha-1 at the MO20 site. Soil chemical [pH, electrical conductivity (EC), and sodium adsorption ratio (SAR)] and physical properties [bulk density (BD) and texture] met or exceeded reclamation and revegetation standards. Most soil C was associated with organic matter, but a small amount of lignitic C was detected in some samples. Soil organic C and N reached or exceeded premined concentrations after 0 and 10 years, respectively. Soil NO3--N and P did not reach premined conditions, but soil K, Ca, Mg and S exceeded premined conditions and stratified after 10-15 years. Micronutrients exceeded premined concentrations. Soil microbial biomass and mineralization rates recovered after 16 years of reclamation. Bacteria and fungi recovered to premined levels after 20 years. The CP20 site was most closely related to the UM site, but sites 10 years and older were comparable. Dominant phyla (Actinobacteria, Acidobacteria and Proteobacteria; 70% of all sequences) returned to premined levels after 10 years, which correlated with soil quality indicators, suggesting the importance of these phyla in soil health. Community-level physiological profiles did not differ between sites and metabolic diversity peaked at CP15 and CP20. GeoChip showed separation between the UM sites and reclamation sites. Soil microbial functionality appeared to recover faster than taxonomic composition of the soil microbial community. Further analysis of functional genes will expand upon this research so that we may better quantify soil quality in RMS.Item The San José project : mining, repression and resistance in Oaxaca(2010-12) Williams, Edward Sansom; De Uriarte, Mercedes Lynn; Torres, Rebecca M.This report chronicles a conflict over a Canadian-owned silver and gold mine in San José del Progreso, Oaxaca, as told by the author’s first-hand experience, eyewitness interviews, and research. Beginning with the Mexican Federal Government’s concession of ejidal land for use by the mining company, without the consent or consultation of the surrounding population, elaboration of the Trinidad mine in San José del Progreso has resulted in division in the community and intense activism, sometimes resulting in violent conflict.Item Understanding Kabwe's lead pollution(2014-12) Chilongo, Owen Chasoba; Spence, David B.To understand why Kabwe, Zambia is one of the most lead polluted towns, one has to look at the source of this pollution and its extent. With a history of poor environmental regulation, policies, and public information, the lead pollution caused by mining activities in Kabwe went unmitigated for decades. The natural blood-lead level in humans is about 0.0016 µg/dl, in developed countries like the United States, strict enforcement has resulted into lead levels averaging figures below 10 µg/dl, but in Kabwe, averages lie between 60 µg/dl and 120 µg/dl. Levels over 10 µg/dl are unhealthy, while levels above 20 µg/dl can cause acute poisoning whereas levels over 120 µg/dl often result into death. New environmental and rehabilitation laws were only enacted after a new administration came into office in 1991; however, additional mitigation measures such as obtaining a reclamation bond prior to being issued a mining permit need to be considered.Item Water dispossession at the Llano en Llamas : a research study by a daughter of Mexican farmworkers in the land of her consciousness(2013-08) Preciado Rodríguez, Nancy Aurelia; Torres, Rebecca MariaIn 1953, Juan Rulfo, one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century presents, El Llano en Llamas (Burning Plain), a collection of realistic short stories about rural life in the land of his childhood in Jalisco, Mexico. About 60 years after El Llano en Llamas, this daughter of Mexican campesinos, has also decided to write about the land of her childhood: the same El Llano en Llamas. This thesis examines the water dispossession experienced by agricultural laborers living in the municipalities of Tonaya, and San Gabriel, which are symbolically part of the Llano en Llamas. By focusing on a corporate socially responsible agricultural company and a mining company in the state of Jalisco, Mexico I argue that both projects of development are dispossessing the communities of their water sources. I also intend to illustrate that currently, the processes of dispossession use modes and logics of power rooted in colonialism.