Mining has been entangled with the development of communities in all continents since the beginning of large-scale resource extraction. It has brought great wealth and prosperity, as well as great misery and environmental destruction. Today, there is a greater awareness of the urgent need for engineers to meet the challenge of extracting declining mineral resources more efficiently, with positive and equitable social impact and minimal environmental impact. Many engineering disciplines--from software to civil engineering--play a role in the life of a mine, from its inception and planning to its operation and final closure. The companies that employ these engineers are expected to uphold human rights, address community needs, and be socially responsible. While many believe it is possible for mines to make a profit and achieve these goals simultaneously, others believe that these are contradictory aims. This book narrates the social experience of mining in two very different settings--Papua New Guinea and Western Australia--to illustrate how political, economic, and cultural contexts can complicate the simple idea of community engagement.
About the Author: Rita Armstrong is an anthropologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, based on two year's fieldwork in a longhouse community in Central Borneo. With an undergraduate major in History, she combines historical research with anthropological methodologies and interests to analyze a variety of issues: Indigenous perceptions of social change, political economy of the interaction between shifting cultivators and the state, subjective understanding of "development" and how all these influence and shape local identity. She has worked with Caroline Baillie, an engineer and social activist, for a number of years in developing interdisciplinary teaching material for first-year engineers at the University of Western Australia, and, most recently, on research projects funded by the International Mining for Development Centre. She continues to teach in Anthropology and Engineering and this experience has underlined the importance of developing collaborative research projects across these disciplines to better understand how we can resolve the increasing inequity in peoples' capacity to deal with issues such as climate change, resource extraction, and diminishing water supply.