Fields of Exploration, Limits of Exploitation

In 2010, Norwegian extraction policy became manifest through a new mineral law, and the preparations for the Norwegian mineral strategy were frequently referred to in the popular press. The implementation of the new mineral legislation in Norway immediately resulted in financial speculation, and the acquisition of mineral prospecting licences in Norway increased from 1,112 square kilometres in 2010 to 18,663 in 2011, and the resulting prospecting licence grid defines a possible new landscape of mineral exploi-tation. The Master Landscape Architecture course, Fields of Exploration, Limits of Exploitation, conducted a landscape architectural inquiry into the renewed interests in mineral extraction in North Norway. In 2011, we had seen the preparation for a Norwegian Strategy for the Mineral Industry as an important subject of architectural investigation of changing landscapes in the

39 Minutes from Parliament Meeting Tuesday 15th June 2010, Agenda (no. 96): Case

# 6 (1:04:29 p.m.) Frank Bakke Jensen (H) (13:16:36): My translation of: ‘Forslaget om en egen bergverksstrategi er motivert av våre møter med bergverksnæringen og av våre opplevelser av debatten om mineralutvinning i flere deler av landet, bl.a. fra mitt fylke Finnmark. I tillegg er situasjonen på verdensmarkedet slik at behovet for mineraler øker og øker. Klimautfordringen og nyutviklet teknologi for å takle dette, økonomisk vekst i store, folkerike land i Asia og Afrika og de vestlige lands kamp for å beholde sine ledende posisjoner vil skape enorme behov for

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Fig 4.2: Mineral stakes in Finnmark surged when Norway in 2010 got a new Mineral Act. Map: Student work by Hanne Johnsrud at the master studio Fields of Exploration Limits of Exploitation, AHO 2011. Repro-duced with consent.

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political pursuit of expanded mineral resource extraction. Knut Eirik Dahl coined the concept of “the perforated landscape” during the preparations for the studio when we learned that that the Norwegian Geologic Survey had extracted 2500 earth samples from Finnmark in a mineral mapping campaign.

A report put forward by the Norwegian Geological Survey, the GEONOR report, combined possibilities of mineral industry development to a vision of a new industrial era in Finnmark in line with the government’s High North policy.

Inviting more than 20 guest lecturers, experts and stakeholders, the group of teachers and students explored how a new version of the territory was being mapped, described and conceived in the light of global mining (Dahl et al., 2012). ABC nyheter was present at the final critique and reported: ‘The perfo-rated landscape impacts nature, places, and our lives’ (Vermes, 2012). Find-ings from Fields of Exploration, Limits of Exploitation were later included, when Dahl was interviewed by Sámi film director, Roger Manndal, in the TV documentary Gollegiisá/The Treasure Shrine (Manndal, 2013). The title al-luded to the Norwegian Minister of Commerce, Trond Giske, who, on several occasions where he was presenting the government strategy for the mineral industry, called Finnmark County a “treasure shrine”.

Gollegiisá/The Treasure Shrine focuses on the Biedjovaggi case, a particu-larly interesting case where the municipality stopped an impact assessment before it was realised in Guovdigeadnu municipality. Sámi reindeer pastoral-ist, Mathis Isak Triumf, whose reindeer have winter pastures in the mining prospect, stated: ‘They say that Finnmark is a treasure shrine, but I think it’s already a treasure shrine, there are reindeer here, and Sámi people–all kinds of Sámi people’ (Manndal, 2013). Thus, our studio mappings were charted in the discourse of mineral and landscape values in the meahcci, the Sámi out-fields (Fig 4.2). The documentary brings this introductory text back in time to where I prepared this study.

4 . 2 M I N I N G W A S T E

The most acute environmental and economic challenge in mining is the management of mine tailings. ‘Traditionally, tailings have been stored in land dams, but the lack of land availability, potential risk of dam failure and to-pography in coastal areas in certain countries results in increasing disposal of tailings into marine systems’ (Ramirez-Lodra et al., 2015, 1). ‘Mine tailings are known to contain heavy metals, chemical reagents used in the separation

process (e.g., cyanide from gold processing), and sulfide-bearing materi-als’ (Vogt, 2014, 7). When the ore has been mined, it is ground in water and crushed into finely grained particles. Added chemicals bind with the target material and make it float, so that it can be separated from the ore through a flotation process. The remaining mud, which can be more than 99 per cent of the ore, is called mine tailings. As a part of waste management, a mix of chemicals called flocculates is added to cause the particles to lump together in order to sink to the bottom of a water body.

There are about 2,500 industrial-sized mines operating around the world. Except for a very few, these mines dispose of their mine tail-ings on-land, usually under water in impoundments or behind dams.

In a very few countries, mines are allowed to dispose of mine tailings into rivers and into marine waters. (Vogt, 2014, 7)

For further contingency and as required in the mineral strategy, the Nor-wegian Research Council initiated projects to explore the potential for and environmental impacts of mine tailings disposal in fjord systems. In one of these projects, a published state-of-the-art review on results from environ-mental research in Norwegian submarine tailings disposal sites concludes that ‘In most cases, submarine tailings disposal (STD) and deep sea mine tailings placement (DSTP) activities are taking place before sound scien-tific baseline information is available.’ The researchers recommend ‘the use of the precautionary approach when knowledge is too scarce to assess impacts’ (Ramirez-Lodra et al., 2015, 18). The main environmental impacts from STDs and DSTPs include: hyper-sedimentation, toxicity, turbidity and changes in sediment grain morphology. ‘Understanding these impacts on the habitat and biota is essential to assess potential ecosystem changes and to develop best available techniques and robust management plans’ (Ramirez-Lodra et al., 2015, 13). During 2015, the Norwegian mineral industry devel-oped guidelines for submarine tailings disposals (2015). In parallel, even as Bergverksindustrien lobbies in Brussels, it blithely advocates that disposal of tailings in Norwegian fjords should be regarded as “best available practice”

and included in the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) Best Available Techniques Reference Documents.

Norway holds the whole stretch of the ice-free coast of Fennoscandia.

Throughout history, the forgiving ocean surface has hidden all kinds of garbage and industrial waste. When environmental legislation and regulations came into force during the 20th century, the mining industry was allowed to continue to discharge mine tailings in the fjords. While environmentalists

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hoped that this practice would be put to an end with the new mineral act and strategy, the Norwegian mineral industry lobbied to keep the privilege of cheap and easy waste management. The mineral industry succeeded, and Norway is now one of five states that allow submarine mine tailings deposits.

From a material and ecological view, chemically reactive geologic material is moved from its underground containment in order to extract the target mineral. Thereafter, it is redefined as waste and placed in a biologically active submarine location, upon which it is spread, with life-exterminating effect.

The mineral industry insists on calling such placement of tailings in the ocean

“sea deposits”, while opponents prefer to call it “dumping”.

The Norwegian mining prospects that received most attention at conferences and in the media were: first, Nordic Mining’s plan to extract the mineral, rutile (titanium dioxide TiO2), a white pigment from the Engebø Mountain in the village of Vevring in Sogn and Fjordane County. The prospect in-cludes removal of the mountain and a fjord deposit of gigantic proportions in the Førdefjorden fjord: 300 million tonnes of mine tailings would elevate the fjord bed 150 metres over a stretch of four kilometres. Artists and local farmers, fishermen and the Young Friends of the Earth resist the plans, and 60 local companies within fisheries, aquaculture, wild salmon, and tourism signed a petition against it. Second is Kvalsund, on the coast of Finnmark County, where Nussir ASA’s plan, in keeping with the Norwegian practice of disposing of mine tailings in the local fjords, conflicts with coastal fisheries, tourism and aquaculture. Here, multiple stakeholders, among them Sea Sámi fishermen, are involved, and communities must act in several different politi-cal arenas, in order to protect their own interests.

Scientists from the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research warn that the ma-rine ecosystem of the fjords used for mine tailings will be destroyed, and that the very fine waste particles will spread to larger areas, with severe risk of polluting the food chain. Third is the Biedjovagge prospect in Guovdageaid-nu/Kautokeino in the inland of Finnmark County, where conflict was exag-gerated between people in favour of and against the mine. In Sweden, the broad acceptance of the moving of the city of Kiruna serves as an example of how dependent on continued mining a mining town becomes, while the Kal-lak/Gállok case reveals strong and growing local resistance to mining plans.

The resistance is gaining momentum across North Sweden. Rönnbäcken, Kallak, Norra Kärr, Vindfall and Laver are examples of local communities that resist mining prospects. In Finland, the Talvivaara scandal hit the press in 2012.

4.2.1 Cartographies

The maps from the geological surveys are meant to appear power-neutral representations of facts, and this is what gives them their persuasive power (Wood, 2010). If the analysis is power-blind, thematic maps are easily taken for granted, as displaying expert knowledge. Cartography is one of the arts that cannot be completely de-colonised, because of the powerful ways it proj-ects the mapmaker’s intention onto the territory that is mapped.

Environmental governance relies on scientific, environmental research to make sound policy. A growing body of literature addresses case-to-case assessments, with step-by-step decisions by governance agencies in favour of extractive prospects, leading to a bit-by-bit disappearance of coherent landscapes (Sara, 2011a; Winge, 2013; Eira et al., 2018). Scientific findings are pitted against each other in the decision-making process. Scientific rep-resentations of geological wealth, on one hand, and scientific reprep-resentations of animal behaviour, which is biosphere wealth, on the other hand, support different political choices. Exclusion processes are also at work as regards scientific and environmental matters. Mapping and counter-mapping of the currents in Repparfjorden drew scientific controversy, represented in maps, into the centre of discourse (Bjørgo and Bay-Larsen, 2017). In the Nussir case, this was evident in the exclusion of advice regarding marine currents, marine biodiversity and the cumulative effects on reindeer husbandry.

Society does not appear to have tools to handle such complex entanglements of dynamic systems. The highly entangled and relational issues that are enacted in environmental controversies cannot be reduced to numbers alone.

Governance agencies do not have the tools to examine complex issues. Gen-erally, maps can be built as an argument when the question is posed in a way that it can be answered with geo-positioning.

This example shows that, with some effort, thematic layers can be superim-posed to make effective analytical map-images. Different sector authorities govern scientific domains in knowledge production regarding the same areas and produce different maps (Wood, 2010). The maps support different devel-opment trajectories that cannot coexist.

For years, the reindeer pastoral communities in Norway have addressed the lack of a synthetic map of landscape encroachments and articulated the impli-cations of the case-to-case assessments of landscape encroachments, leading to a piece-by-piece disappearance of coherent landscapes. The knowledge layers of thematic maps are kept apart in Norwegian environmental

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nance, regardless of a growing acknowledgement of the aggregate impact that individual encroachments have on the biosphere.

The NIBIO maps might sometimes be taken by developers to give exhaustive information of the land-use of reindeer husbandry. The traditional ecologi-cal knowledge of the areas is thus effectively excluded from the initial steps of development plans. Recent examples from the wind-power industry are illustrative of why this is a problem. In 2018, Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) produced a scoping plan for potential wind turbine industrial development. This scoping plan refers to the NIBIO maps as a knowledge base for reindeer husbandry. However, it is not easy for actors with no knowledge of reindeer husbandry to read this map. The second prob-lem is that it is complicated for non-cartographers to combine the knowledge layers with other land-use thematics.

In Sweden, there is another mapping solution. More research has been done on the cumulative effects of various nature interventions in reindeer hus-bandry areas in Sweden than in Norway. The Swedish map tool RenGIS is based on reindeer herding’s needs, experience and perspective. RenGIS superimposes known plans and existing situations, to show a map image that indicates the consequences for the Sámi reindeer husbandry communities [Samebyar]. RenGIS is owned and maintained by GIS experts in the pasto-ral communities. Graphic representation of evasion zones is included as an element in the analysis of the externalities described in the literature on the field and local experience gained from reindeer husbandry practitioners. The pastoral communities own and manage RenGIS.

According to the pastoral communities, the impacts from the mining industry must be seen together with other impacts, as the aggregated impacts pose stressors on outfield landscapes and Indigenous livelihoods. Furthermore, the so-called viewshed analyses on terrain models may show where the interven-tions are visible, from the perspective of the reindeer.⁴⁰ Lassila explains:

Mapping calls for a response, a return to what is real, enduring and vital within a specific context. If maps make a reality, it is people who can further influence what follows by interacting with the maps through their world-making and knowledge practices.

40 The report 6722 from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, ‘Cumulative effects of exploitation on reindeer husbandry - What needs to be done within permit processes?’

gives a good overview: http://www.naturvardsverket.se/978-91-620-6722-9

(Lassila, 2018, 8)

In 2012, the NGO, Protect Sápmi, wanted to introduce the RenGIS model in Norway, but the Norwegian Department of Agriculture chose instead to learn from RenGIS how to improve Kilden and keep the ownership of the maps.

The avoidance zones for different encroachments in RenGIS have a paral-lel in the non-encroachment zones in the INON registry in Norway which defines nature areas as being without encroachments, based on how far an area is from infrastructure. The INON registry has produced an entire series of maps every fourth year since 1912. This registry has strong legitimacy in environmental governance in Norway, but, in 2014, the government decided to stop the systematic INON mapping, to make it easier for municipalities to develop the outfield landscapes. The decision was justified with an outspoken intent to deplete the environmental management of agency.

GLOBIO is another anticipatory mapping methodology that is informed by planning, climate research and traditional ecological knowledge. GLOBIO extrapolates current development trends, to map future loss of pastureland.

In the UN report for the International Polar Year, the group anticipated the possible consequences of future landscape encroachments would be that, by 2030, 30 per cent of today’s pastureland would be lost.