The 2014 Mount Polley Mine Disaster: Environmental Injustice, Antirelationality, and Dreams of Unconstrained Futures

Abstract

On August 4, 2014, within Secwépemc territory in the interior of British Columbia, a failing retainment wall of an over-burdened tailings storage facility released ~25,000,000 m3 of industrial waste into adjacent ecosystems culminating in what is now known as the Mount Polley Mine Disaster (MPMD). This dissertation takes the MPMD as a stepping off point to analyze how the disaster is relationally connected to larger patterns of socio-ecological disruption in the context of British Columbia’s colonial history. Drawing from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s idea of antirelationality, I raise questions about the underlying logics that enabled the disaster and how this disaster fits within broader historical patterns of violent disruption. My research employs qualitative research methods that include historical archival research, interviews, participant observation, as well as document and media analyses to support a central overarching argument. Here I argue that, while the MPMD is commonly viewed as a representation of state or industry failure, looking instead to the history of British Columbia reveals that mass socio-ecological disruption from industrial mining have not been failures at all. Instead, mass socio-ecological destruction has been an inherent part of the entirety British Columbia’s complex and evolving project of modern settler colonial state-building.