Geography

In the early morning of January 24, 1978, the nuclear-powered Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 crashed on the barrens of the Northwest Territories, Canada. The crash dispersed radioactive debris across the region, including over multiple communities. A close reading of the archival record of the military-led clean up operation that followed, known as Operation Morning Light, shows how the debris recovery effort was shaped by government understandings of the northern environment as mediated through authoritative science and technology.

In recent decades, however, the role played by sport hunters and fishers, including fly fishers, in advancing conservation ideas and practices has come under increasing scrutiny. Scholars concerned with the unequal effects of game conservation practices on various resource users have critically re-examined the conservation achievements of sportsmen (along with those of the North American conservation movement generally). In general terms, this diverse literature suggests (as environmental historian Tina Loo writes) that, “to the extent that wildlife conservation marginalized, dispossessed, and displaced rural people by imposing and legitimating one kind of relationship with nature over others, it was an instrument of colonization.”  In this view, conservation, traditionally thought of as a positive realignment of human-nature relations, was implicated in social injustices that imperiled the livelihoods and cultures of rural resource users in North America, including farmers, the rural poor and Aboriginal people.  As the foundation for conservation ideas, the sportsman’s code favored tourism, leisure and urbanite recreation over local subsistence harvesting practices, which were regarded as wasteful, crude and “uncivilized.” Drawing in part from studies of the imposition of colonial game laws in Africa and other colonized countries, historians, geographers, anthropologists and others have suggested fish and game conservation in North America represented an ideology of nature that tended to discriminate against marginalized groups.  In contrast with John Reiger’s view, that “sportsmen urged restrictions upon themselves” for the protection of game resources, these new perspectives suggest game laws disproportionately targeted disenfranchised “others” in order to preserve more or less exclusive access to fish and game, a process that might be thought of as “dispossession by conservation.”
As a leading exponent of both conservation and a variant of the English sporting ethic, to what extent did Roderick Haig-Brown’s ideas and actions reproduce this process of dispossession by conservation? To what extent was he aware of these issues in his writing and activism? In exploring these questions, this essay seeks to engage readers interested in both fly fishing and conservation history in an examination of the connections between fly fishing, conservation, and environmental justice. The goal is not to lecture fly fishers on their elitism or the sins of their forebears, nor is it to impugn the ideas and actions of individual fisher-conservationists like Haig-Brown. Rather, it is to cast across this recent stream of literature for what it can tell us about the motivations and impacts of past generations of sportsmen-conservationists, and to examine the extent to which these issues are reflected in the life and ideas of one of its foremost figures in North America.

Historical experience and trends in Canada suggest that the
mining industry remains fundamentally unsustainable for two reasons.
First, it has generally been a profoundly unstable base for economic development in peripheral regions of Canada, oft en leaving abandoned
communities and severe environmental damage in its wake. Second, the
long-term downward trend in the quality of ore bodies in Canada (and
globally) has meant that industry must apply more energy and produce more waste rock and tailings in pursuit of ever-shrinking percentages of
valuable minerals. Attempts to rebrand the industry as a sustainable enterprise largely ignore the historical, environmental, and socioeconomic consequences of mining, as well as the fundamental ecological contradictions of our mineral and energy-intensive society.

Highlights: • Mine closure plans do not clearly explain methods or outcomes of community engagement • Indigenous Knowledge is inconsistently used in closure planning • The socioeconomic impacts of mine closure are not well acknowledged • Few concrete strategies are proposed to mitigate the socioeconomic aspects of closure Abstract: The inevitable closure and remediation phase of a mine's lifecycle routinely causes negative socioeconomic and environmental impacts for nearby communities. While closure planning is meant to ensure post-closure human and environmental safety, it tends to favour short-term technical fixes over longer-term socioeconomic , cultural, and ecological considerations. For mines operating on Indigenous territories, where communities have complex and nuanced connections to land and varying levels of jurisdiction, these issues are further exacerbated by the exclusion of Indigenous voices from planning and decision-making. This research employed a qualitative document analysis of ten mine closure plans for mines in Northern Canada that are still operational to understand how the industry is actively planning for the closure and remediation of their sites. In particular, this work asks whether or not mine companies are incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into their mine closure plans, and how they are addressing the complex socioeconomic aspects of closure. This analysis showed that mine closure plans across Northern Canada inconsistently apply Indigenous Knowledge and expertise, and the methods used for community consultation in mine closure planning are left vague. While differences in policy between Northern territories and regions account for some of these inconsistencies, a company's willingness to work beyond baseline requirements imposed by governments is also an important factor. Additionally, these closure plans further demonstrate that the industry prioritizes technical aspects of mine closure over the social, cultural, economic, and ecological. For mine closure to be successful in a Northern context it must incorporate community expertise, emerge from the values and priorities of the Indigenous peoples whose lands mines are operating on, and account for a wider scope of social, economic, and cultural impacts.

Based on ethnographic and oral history research, this article investigates community experiences of historical and contemporary mineral development in the Arctic through an analysis of the cultural landscape of Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. The town was established in the 1950s around the North Rankin Nickel Mine—Arctic Canada’s first industrial mining operation. The mine’s rapid closure in 1962 dealt a devastating blow to the local economy, with about half the community staying in Rankin Inlet and struggling to make a living. In spite of the long period since closure, the mine’s influence is still present in the town’s built environment and cultural landscapes. Our research seeks to reveal the symbolic attachments both Inuit and long-term Qallunaat residents have formed with the post-industrial landscape. We argue that Rankin Inlet, as a community, is coming to terms with and (re)staking its claims to its industrial past, as part of contemporary efforts to manage the costs and benefits of...