My research combines attention to resource management, environmental change, and questions of inequality in global resource development practices. As the son of a coal miner’s daughter and a state Conservation Officer, I am very interested in how extractive industries impact the environment, while increasing inequalities. At the same time, my father’s work instilled in me the importance of protecting our relationships with the environment. In my work, I follow these pursuits in Papua New Guinea where I have conducted research since 1998 alongside Biangai communities around the historical gold mining town of Wau. This work has been supported by a variety of national (NSF DDIG), international (Wenner-Gren Doctoral Fieldwork and Post-PhD Research grants, Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies Post-Doctoral Fellowship) and local sources (University of Minnesota and University of Texas at San Antonio). Based upon this research I have published a number of articles on mining, conservation, agriculture, history, photographic methodology, illicit drugs and national media, tourism, taste, music, and climate change, in addition to the broader issues of resource management.
My recent book, Gardens of Gold: Place Making in Papua New Guinea (2020), reflects multiple years of this research, using mixed methods including GIS and detailed agricultural surveys alongside conventional ethnographic techniques. In this, I examined local conceptualization of place in mining and conservation projects.
Mining & Agriculture
Migration & Ecological change
Anthopocene & Climate Change
Place-based Relations
In this research project, I continue to explore the relationship between mining and local agriculture. I’m interested in understanding how mining and mining labor opportunities shape local resource practices, especially with respect to cash crops and subsistence gardens. In addition to interviews, participant observation and garden surveys, I am trying to get a sense for land use through GIS mapping techniques. With funding from the Wenner Gren Foundation, three academics summers (2014-2016) were spent examining the impact that mining labor and training opportunities are having on community agriculture and sociality. These suplmented collected in 2001 and 2011.
The project takes place in two Biangai communities: Winima, adjacent to a large-scale gold mine that started production in 2009, and Elauru, which is outside the ambit of mining development. After many years of exploration, Harmony (South Africa) and Newcrest (Australia) built the Hidden Valley Gold mine on land controlled partially by Winima landowners, who gain income from royalties and are given priority access to employment and community education programs in business, health, etc.. Neighboring Elauru villagers, however, are largely excluded from these benefits and receive only limited opportunities to work for the mine. For both communities, swidden agriculture is of central importance: yam (Dioscorea spp.) gardens are critical for depicting enduring social relations between ancestors and their descendants; sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) gardens are the subsistence base produced throughout the year; while coffee, grown as a cash crop, provides money for purchasing store-bought items, paying school fees, etc.
Slide image above between 2011 and 2016 garden surveys. Images illustrate some important changes over time, noting the impact of the 2015-2016 El Nino event on garden selection. In 2016, household moved their gardens further away to avoid dry conditions and fires at lower altitudes. Illustrations made using ARC GIS, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop
However, at its core, Biangai agriculture centers on the yam garden. Planting a yam is a process of claiming land in the present and for one’s descendants. These gardens are managed by cognatic kinship groups which ensure that both men and women inherit land and resource rights from male and female parents and grandparents. Preferred marriages reunite parcels of land (and families) giving the couple rights in conjoined garden areas. The practices associated with yam gardens can likewise be seen in the practices of tending to other crops, where an emphasis on sociocentric subjectivities is expressed through a continued reliance on kin groups. Thus, the intersection of neoliberal economics and garden practices has significant implications for community identity, gender, and social relations. Combining geospatial and ethnographic approaches, this project develops our understanding of experiences and processes of agricultural change by comparing villages with different levels of participation in the mining economy.
This proposed research agenda will focus on the interrelationships of urban migration, inequality, climate change, and the transformations of land and biodiversity in urban communities of the Pacific. Toward this end, I will examine how resource extraction and climate change act as a double exposure, compounding negative impacts on communities. Furthermore, the project will trace the differential impact of mining and migration in rural and urban settings, examining both ecological and cultural changes. By moving through these spaces ethnographically, and mapping inequalities of exposure to different risks the research will examine differential experiences of power and inequity among rural, urban, and peri-urban migrants. Combing the ethnographic with ecological surveys and remote sensing, I will also be also to attend to the coupled impact of environmental change and migration on relations to land, biodiversity, and community. It will contribute to our understanding of resiliency to environmental pressures under extractive capital. The argument is that it is much more nuanced across scales, as the limited focus of existing research has not attended spatial and temporal differences in the experiences of communities that live with mining. The research will examine spatial and scalar relationships among rural and urban communities, interrogating the ways that urban migration and extractive capital shape ecologies and lives in both urban and rural localities.
While continuing to value place-based relationship, Biangai migration from their rural communities have accelerated in recent years because of work, increased incomes, and educational opportunities for their children. From Winima alone, more than two thirds of the community have migrated to the coastal city of Lae (157km). They are part of a larger movement from other mines that increases land pressures along PNG’s coasts and exaggerates the impacts of climatic events. These processes are happening globally as extractive industries ironically expand to meet the demands of technologies that are responsive to climate change (e.g. silver for solar panels, lithium in electric vehicle batteries, etc.). At the same time, the reduced rural population is changing the human impact on forest regrowth, reducing the threats of fire and the conversion of land to subsistence and cash crops. Coupled with climate change, the rural and urban have become dynamic and changing systems. The project will be seeking collaborators in environmental science and geography.
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This research project couples infrastructure and climate change in Papua New Guinea. Here, I’m interested in the ways that climate events, such as the 2015-16 El Niño, articulate with the infrastructures of subsistence and development. For example, the heavy rains that troubled the Bulolo Valley after the El Niño resulted in massive flooding of coffee groves, a matter only made worse by newly shaped roads that drove the rain into Biangai gardens. Toward this end, I am tracing the loss of coffee cash crops and food gardens in relationship to state and local development aspiration, capitalist market forces, geological layers, erosions, and human caused climate change. Biangai are witness to one of the many culminations of planetary changes associated with the Anthropocene.
A coffee garden covered by debris eroded down from the roadNewly graded road above Biangai coffee groves and subsistence gardens
Thinking alongside Western conceptualization, my research focuses on indigenous ideas of space and place. I take my inspiration from both the tā-vā theory of reality developed by Moanan/ Oceanian scholars, and Indigenous/First Nation scholarship of place. Such work encourages us to decolonize our approaches and take seriously indigenous philosophies. In my work with Biangai friends and colleagues, I don’t just translate their ideas into Western theoretics, but begin with how they know the world. This, I hope, allows us to value the contributions that Biangai can make to the human condition.
Future research will focus on how the relationship between mining employees and their sense of belonging is transformed at different scales. Previous research has documented the intimate connections that Biangai have with places, and the ways that labor in the community is reflects mining and conservation efforts. Expanding upon this, I ask how place-based relationships are co-produced as a result of migration to urban and peri-urban communities. While becoming ‘middle class’ is clearly part of the project, I am especially interested in the formation of neoliberal subjectivities as it relates to the environment and material relations through objects and housing architecture. How do Biangai mine workers, who use their new wealth to buy land and build homes away from ‘home’, remain committed to place? How do they negotiate these new subjectivities and new material realities?
