What does mine closure mean for mine-adjacent communities? How are mine reclamation and environmental restoration entangled with colonial histories and injuries at extractive sites? How can community engagement at such sites lead to both environmental and cultural reparation and healing? The current issue of the Journal of Political Ecology (32:1, 2025) features a Special Section tackling these and other questions related to the complex challenges posed by mine closure and post-mining transitions and prominently features the perspectives and experiences of mine-affected Indigenous communities themselves.
The articles in this journal issue were produced as a collaboration between researchers Sarah Holcombe, Rebecca Hall, and Arn Keeling, alongside Indigenous co-authors and collaborators in Australia and Canada. They emerged from an online forum held in 2021, which brought together researchers and Indigenous community representatives from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, aimed at fostering dialogue and knowledge exchange around mine closure and remediation at both abandoned and active mine sites. From this event, several participating groups committed to documenting these experiences for wider audiences, first through a publicly available forum report and through jointly authored articles.
Taken together, the resulting articles (as well as the thematic introduction) explore wide-ranging themes and perspectives on mine closure and transitions. Among them, the importance of time, history, and temporality in mine closure; the links between environmental repair, (cultural) reclamation, and reconciliation; the practical importance of negotiated agreements and consent processes; and the challenge of socio-economic transitions for safeguarding Indigenous futures. As our introduction notes, “contributors approach closure – both in their writing and community practice – as a process of learning from the teachings of generations past and reckoning with past settler harms, on the one hand, while envisioning closure through the lens of community aspirations and commitments to future generations on the other.”
On behalf of the researchers, we acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of co-authors and collaborators involved in these articles, and we hope readers find these perspectives valuable.
Feature Image: “Tailing pond near Faro mine” by unk’s dump truck is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
