The Extractive Industries and Society 6 (2019) 807–814

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The Extractive Industries and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/exis

Original article

The ethics of material provisioning: Insiders’ views of work in the extractive T

industries
Jessica M. Smith
Engineering, Design & Society Division, Colorado School of Mines, 1500 Illinois, Golden, CO, 80401, USA

While social science research has vividly studied the extractive industries by documenting and theorizing their
A RT ICLE INFO impacts on communities and the corporate social responsibility teams who manage those relationships, this article
draws on ethnographic research to investigate the ethical and political frameworks of the people who work in
Keywords: technical positions inside of these industries. I argue that they provide one example of a much larger phenomenon of
Ethics an “ethics of material provisioning” that seems to animate industry insiders’ understandings of their work: they view
Mining themselves as providing the material basis for people’s everyday lives around the globe. This ethical framework is
Fracking simultaneously a political one, as foregrounds an imperative to meet rising resource demand rather than questioning
Engineers or reducing that demand. Analyzing these professionals’ point of view as an ethical and political framework rather
Ethnography
than as only the play of ideology draws attention to how debates about resource production are fundamentally about
Corporate social responsibility
our moral commitments and the role of minerals in the kinds of lives we desire for ourselves and our others.

1. Introduction the very beginning of the conference. It was sponsored by PolyMet, a

Each year thousands of mining and minerals industry personnel,
academics, and students convene at the Society for Mining, Metallurgy
and Exploration (SME) conference. The program spans multiple days
and features panels in which industry personnel, consultants, and
academics share projects and research. The greatest emphasis is on
engineering, geology, and metallurgy, though a few panels usually
consider government and stakeholder relations. In addition to the
technical sessions, conference attendees spend time in a large exposi-
tion and trade show full of booths – around 750 in recent years – in
which companies promote their services and products. Universities also
sponsor booths to provide information on their mining engineering
undergraduate and professional programs, and the largest ones host
social events for their alumni to gather together with current students
and professors. Crucial networking happens in those spaces as well as in
happy hours, meals, student competitions, and other social events with
corporate sponsorship. In short, the conference is a space in which
people who work in mining constitute themselves as a profession,
sharing knowledge and nurturing professional and personal relation-
ships.1
In response to public criticism of mining, the SME began hosting a
“Move Mining” competition in which participants proposed strategies
for improving the public perception of mining. During the 2018 con-
ference, held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the competition took place at
company seeking to develop a controversial large-scale copper mine
near the state’s Boundary Waters, a wilderness area beloved by nature
enthusiasts for its unparalleled opportunities for canoeing and camping
(Phadke, 2018). The competition began with an acknowledgement of
PolyMet’s sponsorship and featured one of their promotional videos
extolling the necessity of copper for Americans’ way of life. The lan-
guage mirrored that found on their website: “Found in everything from
wind turbines to diabetes test strips, cancer treatments and car exhaust
catalysts, the metals from our project are essential to our everyday
lives. Imagine life without electricity, cars without pollution controls
and medical care without many of today’s medical devices.”2 The
emcee also underscored the importance of mined materials in general
and PolyMet’s minerals in particular while introducing the judges,
saying, “Judges will be logging their scores on an iPad, which, coin-
cidentally, comes from mining. Everything in an iPad comes from
mining, right? So we’re using the technology that comes from mining
right here.” Each of the teams who competed in the final round stressed
the importance of sharing accurate information with the public in order
to counter negative stereotypes of mining, including a team who pep-
pered their PowerPoint slides with the hashtags #miningforlife and
#mineforprogress. The winning team was a group of Colombian mining
engineering students who proposed to build on their efforts to educate
kids about the importance of mining and minerals in their everyday
lives.

E-mail address: jmsmith@mines.edu.

1
The other major annual mining conference is held by the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada in Toronto and focuses more on finance. In contrast
with the SME – where attendees mill around in business casual clothing or even jeans and flannel shirts, looking as if they were reporting to work at an actual
minesite – PDAC attracts a lot of people in suits, such as mining investors, executives, and national government officials.
2
http://polymetmining.com/northmet-project/importance-of-metals/.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2019.05.014
Received 30 January 2019; Received in revised form 25 May 2019; Accepted 26 May 2019
Available online 13 June 2019
2214-790X/ © 2019 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/).
J.M. Smith
Motivating the founding of the Move Mining competition, the
teams’ proposals, and the emcee and judges’ comments was a particular
view of mining’s place in the world: mining provided the material basis
for people’s everyday lives around the world. It is difficult to under-
estimate the significance of this point of view for people I met who
work in the mining as well as petroleum industries. In this article, I
argue for the importance of recognizing and theorizing this point of
view as an “ethics of material provisioning.” This ethical framework,
which adds a positive moral valence to work inside of industry, is si-
multaneously a political one (High and Smith, 2019), as it justifies the
projects and interests of industry players over those of their detractors.
Recognizing this political narrowing, anthropologists and other social
scientists who have encountered this framework in their research cri-
tique it as an ideology of inevitability that forecloses criticism
(Chapman, 2013; Huber 2013: 309; Hughes, 2017: 90; Nader, 2004).
While acknowledging this critique, I argue that dismissing this point of
view as simply ideology hinders our ability to collectively chart more
sustainable energy and resource futures, as doing so loses sight of how
people who work in controversial industries themselves understand the
“good” of their work.
This article draws from long-term research with people who work
inside the mining and petroleum industries. The most recent material
includes in-depth interviews with about 75 people. Three-quarters were
engineers or applied scientists from a variety of disciplines, and the rest
were personnel who worked in external and community affairs.3 These
interviews took place both on- and off-worksites, primarily in person
and but a few over Skype. All of the interviewees had lived or studied in
the United States, and almost all were white. Many of these connections
were facilitated by my status as a professor at the Colorado School of
Mines an engineering and applied science university with longstanding
and unique ties to both mining and petroleum. Since 2012 I have been
working among engineers and applied scientists; teaching engineering
and applied science students and supervising their research; collabor-
ating with mining, petroleum, environmental and geophysical pro-
fessors in teaching their courses; conversing with alumni and recruiters
at campus events, including a biannual career fair; attending and or-
ganizing campus lectures by engineers from industry as well as aca-
demia; and attending and presenting at the major conferences of the
professional associations primarily associated with mining and oil and
gas activity. Over the course of the research I have also toured mines
and wellpads and accompanied engineers on their public engagement
activities. This immersion into the fields of engineering and applied
science builds on the research I have been actively conducting since
2006 in relationship to mining, which originally focused on miners
themselves (Rolston, 2014).
The article begins by reviewing the place of “industry insiders” in
the social science literature on the extractive industries. The following
section examines key public places and institutions that through which
the ethics of material provisioning circulates. Next, I analyze ethno-
graphic interviews to show how this ethical framework animates the
ways in which people who work in industry understand their vocation
and respond to public criticism. I conclude by outlining how attention
to this ethical framework can help advance both research and public
debate about the mining and oil and gas industries.
2. Research inside of industry
In the ongoing boom of social science research on mining, oil and
gas, the dominant analytic strategy to understand these industries has
been to document and critique the social and environmental harms
development projects generate, often from the perspective of the people
3
About half of the interviews were conducted by the author, and the other
half were conducted by Nicole Smith, who worked as a postdoctoral scholar on
the research project.
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The Extractive Industries and Society 6 (2019) 807–814
who experience these harms first-hand or who organize in order to
address them (e.g. Jacka, 2015; Jalbert et al., 2017; Kirsch, 2006;
Kirsch, 2014; Kirsch (2018); Sawyer, 2004; Willow, 2018; Wylie, 2018;
see Jacka, 2018 for a recent summary in anthropology). This research
strategy is well represented in The Extractive Industries & Society (EXIS),
the key journal for bringing together social science research on these
industries.
The relative dearth of “inside the fence” studies of the extractive
industries is partially due to the power of corporations to control access
to production sites and headquarters (Müftüoglu et al., 2018). The so-
cial scientists who have been able to conduct research inside of mining
corporations have generated rich research on the plight of personnel
dedicated to corporate social responsibility (CSR) functions. Rajak
(2011)’s pioneering study of CSR at the mining multinational Anglo
American persuasively shows how CSR extends the moral authority of
corporations. She found that CSR practitioners brought deeply-held
personal passions of “doing good” to their work of “empowering” the
subjects of their programs, but ultimately reinscribed coercive gift re-
lationships with them that inspired “deference and dependence rather
than autonomy and empowerment” (2011: 236). Welker’s (2014) study
of Newmont CSR personnel proposes a provocative – and productive –
retheorization of corporations as multiply enacted entities. Her ethno-
graphy shows that these personnel enacted the company to different
ends – as a “pot of money” versus a “set of skills” – as they attempted to
ameliorate the harms created by mining activities (65). Rogers (2015)
argues that the practice of CSR during the postsocialist oil boom in
Russia’s Perm region produced an “interpenetration of corporation and
state” (176) and remade the region through widespread cultural pro-
jects that played upon the materiality of oil and gas and their attendant
infrastructure. Owen and Kemp have conducted perhaps the most ex-
tensive research inside of mining companies from their positions as
researchers at the University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals In-
stitute. Working inside of companies allows them to show how
grounding calls for social responsibility inside of the business case for
the social license to operate can undermine efforts at sustainable
community development; to document how CSR practitioners experi-
ence marginalization inside of corporate structures that leave them out
of major decision-making; and to identify voices for change inside of
companies that are “holding ground against the narrow business case
view of the world” (2017: 223).
Far fewer scholars have taken up the experiences of industry per-
sonnel outside of CSR teams. Those that consider technical personnel
such as engineers point to the politics, exclusions, and harms embedded
in infrastructure that is otherwise cloaked in the banners of neutrality
or progress. Li (2015) examines the role of engineering knowledge in
mining-related controversies in Peru, including how the structural
conditions of engineers’ employment shape their ability to bring social
and environmental concerns into their professional practice. She also
shows that engineers and campesinos differently understand phenomena
such as water quality. Espig and de Rijke (2016) call attention to the
differences between how engineers and the people who live closest to
coal seam gas production understand risk and uncertainty. Kneas
(2016) shows how personnel working for a junior mining company
constructed geological assessments of copper mineralization in Ecuador
to sell the “potential and possibility” of a copper resource to be mined
(73), forming part of a much longer history of the contested creation of
geological knowledge about the subsoil (Kneas, 2018). Hughes (2017)
ethnographically demonstrates how petroleum scientists and engineers
in Trinidad and Tobago construct oil reserves, resources, and reserves
that become resources through graphical representational techniques
(79–81).
EXIS has also published a few key articles that substantively engage
industry insiders beyond those who work in CSR functions. Carrasco
(2015) provides a poignant portrait of an early 20th century US en-
gineer who whose humanitarian actions, she argues, are largely re-
sponsible for the positive and nostalgic feelings in the social memory of
J.M. Smith
indigenous Chileans concerning the Anaconda copper company. Del
Palacio (2016) examines the tenure of an oil engineer who served as
superintendent of one branch of the Mexican state-owned oil company
in the 1950s. Vikström (2016) analyzes a Swedish engineering journal
to document the historical origins and social construction of metals
scarcity around World War I. Baeten et al (2016) demonstrates how
engineering decisions in the Mesabi Range of northern Minnesota
contributed to mine waste throughout the Lake Superior Iron District.
Gonzalez (2018) shows that engineers contributed to Petroperu’s de-
plorable treatment of indigenous people in the wake of pollution in-
cidents, which made it difficult for citizens to report environmental
contamination. Finally, Veiga et al (2015) share creative techniques for
teaching mining engineering students the concepts of sustainable de-
velopment and poverty alleviation in developing countries. Veiga
himself is a metallurgical engineer and environmental geochemist who
publishes frequently in EXIS, especially on artisanal and small-scale
mining.
The focus on CSR and community relations personnel in these “in-
side the fence” studies of mining and petroleum reveals something
deeper about these literatures. The CSR and community relations per-
sonnel can be interpreted as “reformers” trying to ameliorate the en-
vironmental and social effects of these industries (Owen and Kemp,
2017; Welker, 2014: 35). This perceived quality may make them more
appealing research subjects for social scientists, especially ethno-
graphers. Ethnographic research methods invite empathy (Gilbert and
Sklair, 2018: 4–5), and anthropologists often conduct research with
people with whom they share political and other sensibilities. This may
be especially true for polarizing topics such as mining and oil and gas
production, though Jacka (2018) notes that research in this area is
taking a “more nuanced approach as to whether mining is ‘good’ or
‘bad’” (68). The structural position of many employees of major cor-
porations and government agencies can make them, in the eyes of
others, unsympathetic ethnographic subjects at best and evil wrong-
doers at worst. This may be especially true for engineers, who form the
backbone of most mining and oil and gas corporations. “In most the-
orists' conceptions, engineers were the embodiment of the military-in-
dustrial complex: conformist organization men in the system that stood
to be torn down” (Wisnioski, 2012: 4). Indeed, engineers’ centrality to
highly problematic development schemes, from high modernist state-
led projects (Mitchell, 2002; Scott, 1998) to those seeking local com-
munity development (Lucena et al., 2010), has led to their character-
ization as “villains” in the critical social sciences (Harvey and Knox,
2015: 9).
While the existing social science research on the extractive in-
dustries is valuable for better understanding the harms and conflicts
associated with natural resource production, it is limited in its ability to
document and theorize how those harms come to be through the ev-
eryday practices and politics of employees and others who work in the
corporation’s name. Instead, works in this vein tend to attribute blame
to corporations as a whole and ascribe them to an “unceasing and
voracious desire for profit” (Welker, 2009: 166). This turns the “con-
crete specificity of the industry” into a “thin portrayal of a revenue-
producing machine – a black box with predictable effects” (Appel,
2012: 693). Yet as Welker (2009) argues, “Understanding the emer-
gence and coherence of the moral commitments of ‘political Others’
who violently defend capital is critical for anthropological accounts of
how, in the face of significant social and environmental challenges,
global capitalism is constituted and sustained” (143).
This article builds on this trajectory of research by exploring how
industry insiders, especially engineers, understand their work. This
approach calls attention to how people themselves judge the rightness
and wrongness of the thoughts, activities, and relationships that make
up their lives, opening up “analytical space where we can attend to,
take seriously, and seek to understand people’s own experiences and
evaluations without uncritically imposing our views of how we would
like the world to be” (High and Smith, 2019:4). This approach does not
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The Extractive Industries and Society 6 (2019) 807–814
entail a justification of our interlocutors’ activities, nor an evacuation of
our own moral commitments as researchers, but does invite us to “re-
think what we take for granted about the distinction between the bright
side and the dark side of our moral world and about the separation of
the ethical from the political” (Fassin, 2013: 249). It is in this grey
territory that the everyday work of industry insiders set mining and oil
and gas development into motion.
3. “If it can’t be grown, it has to be mined”
When people who work in mining or oil and gas argue that their
work provides the material foundation for the everyday lives of people
around the world, they invoke but do not simplistically reproduce a
longer history of these industries’ public outreach efforts.4 This section
offers a brief historical overview of those efforts on the part of com-
panies and trade associations. In the 1920s the Anaconda copper
company adopted the slogan “From Mine to Consumer.” In the 1940s
their advertisements positioned copper as necessary for the rapid sub-
urbanization of the U.S., arguing that “There’s copper in your radio…
copper and copper alloys in your refrigerator, plumbing, and heating
equipment” (Lecain, 2009: 191–193). The basic message of those mid-
20th century advertisements is strikingly similar to the more recent ones
shown by Polymet at the SME, though the technologies that they cite
are different: without copper, people could not enjoy the things to
which they are accustomed. A “green” variation on the theme also
animated Rio Tinto’s display at the 2018 Resources for Future Gen-
erations conference in Vancouver. The company – one of the world’s
largest producers of copper – displayed a car built almost entirely out of
copper (Fig. 1). It was painted with pictures of solar panels and wind
energy along with statistics showing the reliance of renewable energy
on mined minerals, ostensibly seeking to carve out a place for the ne-
cessity of mining in even renewable energy generation.
Oil and gas companies and trade groups have also long invoked the
ethics of material provisioning in their outreach materials. Huber
(2013: 71) argues that after the boom in oil consumption by the U.S.
military in World War II, “the concerns of the industry shifted to the
social construction of a ‘postwar’ American landscape that also was
fundamentally dependent upon petroleum.” During the 1950s, for ex-
ample, petroleum products “effectively saturated the whole of living, a
set of practices linked to particular visions of freedom, domesticity, and
health” (72). Huber quotes at length a 1957 television special cele-
brating the 75th anniversary of Standard Oil in which the host told the
audience:
We Americans take so many things for granted. Especially this thing
called progress… [M]ost of the rubber we use in this country does
not come from trees, it’s made from oil, manmade fibers are derived
from oil, asphalt roads, medicines, all made from that incredible
chemical wonderbox petroleum. But most important, oil is energy –
energy to lighten man’s toil and to increase his time for leisure and
study. [Huber, 2013: 72]
Similar rhetorical techniques continue in use six decades later. The
American Petroleum Institute, the largest US trade group for oil and
gas, hosts a website that expresses the groups’ public stance on con-
tentious policy issues.5 The ethical framework of providing the neces-
sary material basis for consumers’ lifestyles weaves through most of
them. On energy infrastructure: “Oil and natural gas provide the ma-
jority of the energy American consumers’ need, and our nation’s energy
infrastructure –including pipelines, railroads, highways, waterways and
ports—make sure this energy is available when they need it.” On
4
Another contender would be the industry’s provision of jobs, which was
prominent in corporate and trade group outreach material but did play as large
of a role in how my interlocutors thought about their work.
5
https://www.api.org/news-policy-and-issues/top-industry-policy-issues.
J.M. Smith
Fig. 1. "This car is fuelled by mining." Photo by author.
American Jobs: “The oil and natural gas industry not only provides
most of the energy that heats our homes, powers our factories and of-
fices, and gets Americans to school and work…” The page concludes
with the strongest statement:
Powering past impossible – that’s what natural gas and oil help
Americans do every day. They are the leading fuels for our modern
economy, and they furnish the molecular building blocks for pro-
ducts that Americans use throughout their day – from smartphones
to fabrics to lifesaving pharmaceuticals. They’re also essential to
technologies and innovations that help solve some of society’s
greatest challenges. They make us safer and healthier. They provide
pathways to a brighter future. Today’s natural gas and oil industry is
smart, high-tech and is essential to an advancing society.
The sense of service to consumers’ demands is evident as well, for
example, in a recent news release entitled “Industry sets multiple re-
cords to meet historic consumer demand for U.S. natural gas and oil.”6
Individual companies also invoke this ethical framework in their own
advertisements. For example, ExxonMobil’s “Enabling Everyday Pro-
gress” commercial showed the vast infrastructure and its attendant
workers necessary for a woman in a middle-class kitchen to produce,
package, ship and boil an egg using a natural gas-fired stove. The im-
plication is that without ExxonMobil and its infrastructure, Americans
would not be able to engage in even the simplest of cooking activities.
The main source of the ethics of material provisioning for the
mining industry is the Minerals Education Coalition (MEC), head-
quartered in Denver. According to its website, the group is the SME’s
“designated program to develop and deliver accurate and timely K-12
education materials and activities and conduct public awareness out-
reach about mining and minerals” and endeavors to generate “an en-
lightened and supportive public that appreciates the importance of
mining and minerals to their lives and to their lifestyles.”7 One key
output of the group is a series of posters and classroom lessons that
explore the mineral basis of things that they believe many people use on
an everyday basis, such as bicycles and cell phones (Fig. 2). Each year
the group also produces a graphic of a smiling, diaper-clad baby jux-
taposed with statistics they generate on how many pounds of minerals,
metals and fuels that an “average American” will consume in their
lifetime.8 Other groups have taken up the ethics of material provi-
sioning and created their own, cheekier material designed for industry
boosters, such as the “If It Can’t Be Grown It’s Gotta Be Mined,” “What’s
Yours is Mined,” and the less subtle “Ban Mining: Let the Bastards
Freeze in the Dark” bumper stickers handed out annually at booths at
the SME trade show.
6
https://www.api.org/news-policy-and-issues/news/2019/01/25/industry-
sets-multiple-records-meet-historic-demand-us-natural-gas-oil
7 9
https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/outreach-awareness/about-mec/
8
This average number obscures differential consumption of resources by
economically privileged and disadvantaged people.
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The Extractive Industries and Society 6 (2019) 807–814
The MEC provides content for multiple public exhibits, including
the US National Mining Museum and Hall of Fame in Leadville,
Colorado. It hosts an entire exhibit that seeks to educate visitors about
the mineral foundation of their everyday lives. It displays items that
associated with middle-class American households, from cosmetics to
computers (Fig. 3). It also recreates entire rooms inside those homes,
such as a kitchen and bathroom. Each item on display includes a small
sign explaining what materials are necessary to produce it, such as the
salt used to produce chlorine chemicals that bleach and dye fabrics and
the barite and calcium carbonate used to weave carpeting.
The influence of the MEC also extends to perhaps unexpected
places. Most of the displays and presentations in the Cheyenne
Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs, Colorado, for example, revolve
around conservation of the world’s ecosystems and those of the
American West in particular. One sign addresses the region’s mining
history. Divided into two section, the left details the social and en-
vironmental costs of mining in the West. The right reminds visitors that
“Mining helps maintain our modern lives” before explaining:
Today’s mining industry provides us with the minerals that we need
for our everyday lives. Although we know some things come from
mining, there are many others that we might not think about.
Everyone knows gold must be mined, but did you know that the
ingredients of toothpaste come from mining? Or the mirror that
hangs above your bathroom sink? The coins you carry in your
pocket also come from mining.
The sign argues that mining is highly regulated and encourages
visitors to do what they can to reduce, reuse and recycle to reduce
resource use: “If it can’t be grown, it must be mined. The truth of our
future is that mining has been and will always be a part of our daily
lives.”
The strength and ubiquity of this linking of mineral production and
consumer lifestyles call out for analytic attention. First, the ethics of material
provisioning expresses the “low cost, mass use” metric of progress that
Downey (2007) argues has animated US industry since the late 19th century.
While engineers who work in mining and petroleum production do not
directly create low cost, mass produced consumer products, these outreach
campaigns center precisely on making visible the minerals necessary for
those consumer products. Second, like other claims of technological in-
evitability, this framing can be deployed to preserve the status quo and
deflect broader questions of social and environmental responsibility
(LeCain, 2009: 186; Wisnioski, 2012: 11–12). Anthropologists who en-
counter this reasoning in the oil industry critique it as a defensive “ideology
of inevitability” that forecloses broader questions of energy conservation
and potential changes in infrastructure and consumer behavior (Chapman,
2013; Huber 2013: 309; Hughes, 2017: 90).9 Hughes (2017) in particular
These scholars build on Laura Nader’s pioneering work on energy through
her observations on her service during the 1970s on the US National Academy
of Science’s Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems. She
J.M. Smith
Fig. 2. Materials from the Minerals Education Coalition.
Fig. 3. Coffee display at the National Mining Museum in Leadville, Colo.
“Coffee requires mineral fertilizers to grow and a host of industrial minerals to
process. When it gets to your kitchen, you use copper wiring, plastics, and
ceramics just to drink a single cup.”.
vociferously argues that the unprecedented global threat of climate change
merits judging his interlocutors as “in the wrong” (152). Because of their
complicity in climate change, he desires, they and their industry should be
consigned “to an ash heap, worthy of condescension and worse”, and
“should go extinct” (2017: 4).
The ethics of material provisioning, as elaborated by the companies
and trade groups profiled here, does justify current extractive activities
by foregrounding the necessity of meeting current energy and material
demand. And debates about extractive activity should include
(footnote continued)
identified the implicit cultural assumptions animating such policy making, in-
cluding an “inevitability syndrome” (2004) that excluded energy models that
did not rest on ever-expanding resource use from consideration.
811
The Extractive Industries and Society 6 (2019) 807–814
questioning its environmental and social costs and finding ways to curb
rising demand rather than expanding industrial production to meet it.
But analyzing how people themselves understand their work in these
industries reveals another dimension to this framework that should be
integrated into critical debates about the extractive industries. My in-
terlocutors used this framework to position themselves as ethical actors,
turning notions of material provisioning into a “deep story”
(Hochschild, 2016) for how they understood their place in the world.
4. Narratives of reform
4.1. Networks of culpability
My first exposure to the ethics of material provisioning was during
my time growing up in a coal mining community where miners and
their families felt insulted that the rest of the country did not recognize
that their labor provided the electricity on which their everyday lives
depended (Rolston, 2014). This understanding of their role as energy
providers framed how they understood the US coal downturn as the end
of long-standing but under-appreciated relationships in which miners
had kept the lights on and electricity running in consumers’ homes
across the country (Smith, 2019). High (2019) encountered similar
frustrations in her research with people who worked in the oil industry
in Colorado, including one person who fantasized about making a
commercial in which a couple on their way to a hospital to give birth to
a child is suddenly left alone, stranded on the highway, to show that
there is “nothing without oil! Nothing!” Dahlgren (2019) describes an
Australian mining engineer who enjoyed showing a pro-mining film
that invited viewers to imagine life without mining: “Buildings col-
lapsed in an apocalyptic scene, and people held onto each other in fear
as metals dissolved and the structures of the city collapsed around
them” (188).
Similar frustrations ran through my research. The majority of my
J.M. Smith
interlocutors came from a variety of engineering disciplines, though the
others had business or liberal arts training. There are important dif-
ferences even among engineers related to their disciplinary practices
and identities, but here I focus on one of the common themes that
emerged across the disciplinary diversity. Every person who worked for
industry invoked the ethics of material provisioning in some way, with
some voicing it relatively uncritically while others explicitly identified
and struggled against it. Laura, a petroleum engineer, described truly
investing herself in her work after she realized how much oil was ne-
cessary to the quality of life she expected. She explained:
In countries that don’t have oil and gas… their hospitals, the power
shuts on and off, and they run on a generator. We’re [in the United
States] able to have babies in incubators 24 hours a day and people
on respiratory devices and all this stuff because we have a consistent
power source. Solar can’t provide that. Wind can’t provide that. We
have a better society because of oil and gas and coal. They are the
moral, responsible thing.
Like the commercial imagined by High’s interlocutor, the focus on
sick newborns positions “hydrocarbon-based fossil fuels [as] the in-
dispensable energy of social reproduction… Without oil or coal – and
by extension the people who produce them – birth itself, let alone
transport, clothing, meals, electrical light, the entire American home,
would be radically altered if not impossible as we know them” (Appel
2019:181). By invoking this ethical framework, people who worked
inside of industry positioned themselves providing the “conditions of
possibility” (Appel, 2019) for others’ everyday lives.
Invoking this ethical framework also had the effect – often explicitly
expressed – of distributing blame for the harms of mining and petro-
leum production throughout the entire network of people who con-
sumed their products. Kim, a petroleum engineer, believed that the
negative effects of oil production should not only be blamed on oil
companies. She argued that those negative effects were “just our pro-
blem as humans, because we just wanted more petroleum.” She con-
tinued, “What I say to people is, ‘Well, do you like to drive a car? Fly in
an airplane? Drink milk? Coffee? Do you use Amazon?’” River, another
petroleum engineer, also critiqued privileged Americans who consume
without understanding the material basis of that consumption. He had
thought about the ethical dimensions of his work deeply, as it had
generated criticism from his family based on their environmental
commitments. He imagined himself having a conversation with an oil
industry critic with environmentalist sensibilities by saying:
Do you know the resources, the things that come out of the ex-
traction process? It's your smart little socks. It's your Patagonia
jacket. It's your skis… It's your contact lenses. It's so integrated with
society. It's not just the gas in your car, stuff like that… It's not as
evil as movies would portray. Another petroleum engineer refused
to buy clothing and outdoor gear from Patagonia because he viewed
the company as taking a hypocritical stance publicly opposing oil
while depending on it (and its investors) for its business. These
engineers each critiqued consumers who benefit from the products
of the industries on which they depend, such as a lifelong mining
engineer who bluntly advised that critics of mining should be left to
“live naked in the woods.”
By invoking the ethics of material provisioning, these industry
personnel sought to expand the “community of complicity” (Dahlgren,
2019 drawing on Steinmüller, 2013) responsible for the harms of
mining and oil production to encompass the consumers, not just the
producers of these materials. This can be viewed as a direct response to
their feeling personally attacked and deemed culpable for the harms of
their industries as a whole. A mining engineer I interviewed said, “I
think a big thing is that when you work for a mining company, a lot of
people already think you're the enemy.” A petroleum engineer was
more blunt: “I tell people I'm a petroleum engineer and they just give
me the stink eye, right? They think I'm evil. [They think] ‘Oh, earth
812
The Extractive Industries and Society 6 (2019) 807–814
raper,’ right?” Dahlgren (2019) insightfully argues that coal lobbyists
viewed criticisms of coal as “an indictment of their own morality and
thus their defense of themselves also required a defense of the industry
for which they worked” (192). Whereas critiques of mining and pet-
roleum can explicitly involve or implicitly imply a moral critique of
particular individuals, invoking the ethics of material provisioning
highlights the broad networks of people who depend on mineral ex-
traction and distributes blame throughout networks of consumers as
well as producers. This is the first way in which the ethics of material
provisioning helps industry personnel position themselves as moral
actors: they position themselves as providing necessary material re-
sources for a wide network that shares in the responsibility for the
harms generated by this kind of industrial production
4.2. “Steering the ship”
Some of the people I met recognized this ethics of material provi-
sioning as a justification for their work and industries and spent con-
siderable effort wrestling with it. A geological engineer named Scott
exemplified their experiences. His specialty was roads, specifically
making recommendations to mining, oil and gas companies as well as
municipalities about where to place them to minimize financial costs of
construction along with exposure to geotechnical, hydrotechnical and
geohazard risks. He recognized his infrastructural work as always em-
bedded in social structures and relationships of power, or, in the words
of Harvey and Knox, he saw roads as “intrinsically political” (Harvey
and Knox, 2015: 10). For mining and petroleum projects, the re-
commendations that he and his team made about where to place access
roads and where to cite major infrastructural elements such as tailings
dams made possible large-scale industrial development where there
previously had been none – a conundrum that he said sparked lengthy
soul-searching conversations among his coworkers at the office as well
as at their fieldsites. He described his coworkers at the consulting firm
as “people who are excited about the outdoors, like me,” only to find
themselves directly contributing to the transformation, if not destruc-
tion of the environments they value.
So then, we all arrived at [a fieldsite] and we sit around and we say,
“Well…but now, here I am, going to this pristine wilderness. I get to
fly over in a helicopter, it’s amazing. But we’re here to… I mean,
destroy it.” We think that. Like, “You know, it looks so amazing
now, but 10 years down the road, this is all gonna be a tailings pond
and you won’t recognize it.” And we’re all sad about that. And so,
yeah, we sit at these camps in the evenings and lament about the
fact that this beautiful valley’s gonna be destroyed. And then, we
talk about, “Well, how do we justify doing this?”
Scott and his coworkers’ love of the outdoors provided them with
other frameworks to understand their work. For example, they seemed
to view the “environment” as being more than “resources” and held
strong conservation ethics that prompted them to self-reflexively criti-
cize the ethics of material provisioning. The way that Scott justified it
was through the metaphor of “steering the ship,” the ship being a mi-
nerals industry that increasing levels of consumption around the world
made necessary.
It comes back to the argument… I flew here in an airplane, I drove
my car across town. I have a standard of living that I’ve grown used
to that I’m not gonna walk away from. And so, if I’m gonna have
those things, then I need to be part of the…we say, “steering the
ship.” We got this big ship. And either you can be the Greenpeace
who jumps in front of the ship and tries to stop it – and I’m fully
supportive of those people – but I could choose to be that person
who is jumping up and down in front of the giant ship and gets
pushed out of the way, or I could help steer the ship. So we say,
“Well, all of us at [our firm], we’re helping to steer the ship. And
maybe we’re steering the ship off the edge of a cliff, but we’re
J.M. Smith The Extractive Industries and Society 6 (2019) 807–814

steering the ship.” And that’s how we justify it, rightly or wrongly. Yet within a few months of beginning her career at one of the
world’s largest mining companies, she realized that its executives were
To help “steer the ship,” to make the industry as responsible as he
resistant to considering alternative mining solutions around waste and
could from his position, Scott paid attention to “really consequential stuff”
recycling. As she took part in the company’s environmental and social
that appears deceptively “mundane.” One of his projects at the time of our
outreach activities, such as river cleanups and elementary school visits,
interview, for example, was assisting a South American mining company
she began to feel a powerful disconnect between her environmental
in decommissioning the access roads and drill platforms they had been
commitments and the rest of the company’s. “I could see that what I
using to explore a mine expansion that never materialized. The original
was doing in theory was good,” she said, “but it was really hard for me
inhabitants, many of them campesinos, had returned to the exploration
to feel that those engagements were actually authentic because I was
sites to find new flat pads, in the midst of an otherwise mountainous
basically just telling people, ‘Keep buying things that have all of these
Andean landscape. They took advantage of the newly flattened terrain to
goods in them because I'll go to the river and pick them up when you've
construct homes and small businesses, but those pads were flanked by
dumped them there.’” She quit after three years to pursue an in-
steep and potentially unstable cut slopes designed for short-term use by
dependent career in social impact consulting. Addie acknowledged the
the mine’s subcontractors wearing personal protective equipment, not for
importance of mining and oil and gas for people’s way of life, but left
long-term inhabitation by people without formal trianing in landslide
industry because she did not feel she had the space to ask other ques-
management. When Scott and his team from the firm arrived on site, the
tions about restructuring society’s consumptive practices that called
risks to the returning landowners were not included in the original pro-
into doubt this ethics of material provisioning.
posed scope of work. He and his coworkers convinced the people in
charge of the project to broaden that scope to include a risk assessment to
5. Conclusion
investigate the possibility for people to live long-term in those areas.
When we spoke, his team was studying the dozens of drill paths and roads
In this article, I advocated for analyzing industry insiders’ under-
to prioritize those that posed the greatest risks, so that they could re-
standing of their work as an ethics of material provisioning. This ethical
commend plans and best practices for how to close those areas or lower
and political framework has a long history over the past century in the
the risk to an acceptable level for long-term human habitation.
US, and it gains discursive power through significant institutional
Scott was not alone. Peter, for example, was an environmental en-
presence. Mining and oil and gas corporations, along with the groups
gineer who spent most of his career working for a state government
that support them, invoke this framework in their published material
environmental agency responsible for overseeing mining and other
and presentations. People who work in these industries voice – but also
natural resource development, before he moved into consulting. He said
critique – the ethics of material provisioning while making sense of
he did not originally desire a career in mining but eventually came to
their own careers. While almost every single one of my interlocutors
love the joint research projects he did with mining companies to better
referenced the ethics of material provisioning in our interviews and
understand and mitigate pollution. Peter was critical of the industry’s
conversations, they did not do so simply as corporate mouthpieces,
motto that “if you can’t grow it, it has to be mined,” calling it a
trained to repeat the company line. Rather, this ethical framework
“standard line” and “defensive posture.” Citing the cradle-to-cradle
captured their unique sense of vocation, their contribution to the world
movement, he wanted to rethink consumption more broadly. “People
they live in, and their self-understanding as moral actors. While their
need mining and people want their stuff,” he said, “But those of us who
senses of their profession and its place in the world were formed in the
are tree-huggers say, ‘Yeah, but we have too much stuff, and we’re not
context of the wider messages disseminated by corporate employers
using our stuff wisely, and we’re throwing all of our stuff away.’” He felt
and trade groups, their uptake of this ethical framework exceeded the
stymied, seeing the need for a “paradigm shift” that would allow escape
official discourses propagated by companies and trade groups.
from a “cycle in which we’re going to have to continually mine” but no
Social scientists have drawn attention to the political dimensions of
concrete path to get there. He therefore came to view mining as what he
this ethical framework, interpreting it as an “ideology of inevitability”
called a “necessary evil” and enjoyed working to make mining projects
(Chapman, 2013; Huber 2013: 309; Hughes, 2017: 90). Such an analytic
as environmentally sound as possible.
move importantly reveals what this framework marginalizes: broader
For Scott, Peter, and others, this narrative of reform for a necessary
questions about alternative ways to manage our current dependence on
industry was a primary vehicle through which they reconciled their
minerals. Yet what Welker (2014) cautions about the limitations of
personal convictions with the corporate contexts of their work.10
treating corporations as a black box of profit maximization also holds
Through it, they positioned themselves as moral actors. It is telling that
true for using the “ideology of inevitability” to understand people who
each of the professionals I interviewed who left industry took even
work in the extractive industries: “The political satisfaction afforded by
more critical stances on both the ethics of material provisioning and
the performance [of criticality] comes at an ethnographic and episte-
narrative of reform. For example, Addie, a metallurgical engineer in her
mological cost, severing corporations from the ordinary materials,
20 s, left her corporate job after encountering resistance to the idea that
human practices, ethics, and sentiments (such as desire, fear, shame,
natural resource production could not continue exponentially in-
pride, jealousy, and hope) that sustain them” (16). Dismissing industry
creasing. She was originally inspired to work in mining because it
professionals’ understandings of their work as the play of ideology may
provided the material foundation for everyone’s lives, invoking the
provide a space in which academics themselves can enact their own
ethics of material provisioning. She remembered:
criticality in relation to mining and oil and gas corporations, while
I could really get behind this idea that every day I made a product missing how senses of profession and provisioning animate the everyday
that went directly into a stream of more products. So literally, ev- work of the professionals people who set extractive activity into motion.
eryone was impacted by the work that I did. Anyone who goes to a My research suggests that the ethics of material provisioning played a
hospital, anyone who picks up the phone, like any anyone who has a central role in how people positioned themselves as moral actors in the
roof over their head or copper pipes in their home. I could really like context of work for controversial industries. This framework provided a
deeply feel that the work that I was doing was going to have an positive ethical valence for their work as providing necessary resources
impact. I could literally see where it was. for a world that seemed to increasingly demand them. It also provided a
sense of belonging and common cause inside of companies and wider
industries, even in the face of internal critique of corporate practice and
representational strategies. Considering these professionals’ point of view
10
Most consultants sought out the work in a quest for professional autonomy, as an ethical and political framework draws attention to how debates
but were still dependent on corporations for contracts (Dougherty, 2019). about resource production are fundamentally debates about our moral

813
J.M. Smith
commitments and the kinds of lives we desire for ourselves and our
others. People who work inside of industry do critique corporate
rhetoric, entrenched widespread practices, and specific activities, but
external criticisms that villainize individuals who comprise one small
part of much wider networks prompt defensive responses that amplify
differences between industry personnel and their critics (Dahlgren, 2019:
192). This precludes meaningful dialogue. Integrating this perspective
into wider debates about resource production – and its unequal dis-
tribution of benefits and harms – could facilitate more constructive dis-
cussions about more sustainable material futures.11
Acknowledgement
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No. 1540298. I am also grateful for a visiting
international fellowship from the British Academy (VF1101988), which
allowed me to spend a semester at the Department of Social
Anthropology at the University of St Andrews while on sabbatical from
the Colorado School of Mines. I thank Mette High for our continued
collaboration and warm welcome in Scotland, Nicole Smith for the
interviews she contributed to the project, and Juan Lucena and Gustavo
Aristizábal for early comments on the framework. I am appreciative for
the feedback I received from colleagues at the Energy Humanities
Workshop hosted by Doug Rogers and Paul Sabin at Yale University’s
Whitney Humanities Center. The article also benefitted from discussion
at seminars at the London School of Economics Department of
Anthropology, the University of St Andrews Department of Social
Anthropology, and the Drexel University Center for Science,
Technology & Society. Thank you to the journal’s editors and anon-
ymous peer reviewers for the generative feedback. Finally, I express my
deep gratitude to all of the people who contributed to the research by
being interviewed, sharing conversations, and opening doors. All
shortcomings are my own. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and
do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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