• About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
  • About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
  • About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
More Shamans, less intolerance! An Indigenous Manifesto at Berlin Film Festival
February 26, 2018
Tourism and Degrowth: Impossibility Theorem or Path to Post-Capitalism?
March 8, 2018

“Down with the fumes!” The Year of the Shootings and its relevance for mining today

Published by Undisciplined Environments on March 5, 2018

Open-cast mineral calcination in the Rio Tinto mines. Photo credit: TOMÁS ATIENZA/ABC Newspaper.

by Félix Talego and Juan Diego Pérez

On February 4, 1888, a demonstration called by the “League Against Calcinations” to protest against acid rain ended up with a massacre of civilians by the Spanish army. Researchers Félix Talego and Juan Diego Pérez argue that the commemoration of this event is an opportunity to spread the message of social and environmental justice today.

“Down with the fumes,” shouted a crowd of some twelve thousand people who had gathered on the town hall square of Rio Tinto (Huelva, southern Spain), on February 4, 1888. It was a peaceful demonstration called by the “League Against Calcinations”. They were women, men, children, old people, peasants, miners, and local neighbours, accompanied by a music band. They came from all corners of the Huelva mining basin, which several writers called “the country of the Smokes”, and were organized in the “League Against Calcinations” and the incipient union organizations. They demanded improvements in working conditions and, simultaneously, the end of the acid rain (sulphur trioxide) caused by the open air calcination of pyrites on an unprecedented scale. The copper thus obtained nourished the worldwide demand of the expanding industry.

Open air mineral calcination in the Rio Tinto mines. Photo credit: Tomás Atienza/ABC Newspaper.

The peaceful protest, however, was met with harsh repression, and ended up in tragedy. Officially, the violence unleashed by the Spanish army caused thirteen deaths, although the actual numbers exceeded two hundred. The event, which made 1888 known as “The Year of the shootings” stands as the largest massacre of civilians in contemporary Europe during a period of peace.

The seriousness of the events led to an intense debate in the Spanish Parliament and great media coverage in the national and international press. It was the first media campaign on pollution in Spain, and one of the first in the world. And yet, no judicial or political responsibilities were derived. The crimes remained unpunished, falling into neglect.

The issue of fumes in the province of Huelva. Source: El Motín newspaper, October 16, 1887.

130 years after these events, we want to shed light on today’s relevance of the “Year of the Shootings” . The current significance of a past event is not determined chronologically, but whether its reasons and motivations are valid today.

We have previously mentioned that the protest was the result of an alliance of different actors alarmed by the deterioration of their health, their fields and their cattle. It is a grassroots, cross-class citizens’ movement, which explains why twelve thousand people came to Rio Tinto and joined what we now call an environmental justice movements. Therefore the “Year of the Shootings” constitutes an early example of what Joan Martínez Alier has called “popular environmentalism”.

And still, that tragic event has remained almost forgotten for a long century. The message of the 1888 “League Against Calcinations” disseminated through the bloodshed of miners, peasants and neighbours is a decisive historical fact. As it entered the kingdom of oblivion, it cleared the way for the almost uncontested dominance of multinational mining companies in the area, and of the large industry associated with the sulphur and copper that has been key to the Huelva industrial enclave: copper smelting, fertilizers, detergents, dyes, and later on refineries of petroleum, gas, etc.

This cuprous and chemical excess has been legitimized until today thanks to the hegemony of the theory of neoclassical economics — an ideology, which is sold to us as economic science and which José Manuel Naredo has so lucidly helped to challenge. It is the productivist worldview, which extended from the end of the nineteenth century to the left and the right of the political spectrum and made both sides blind and insensitive to the attacks on human health, the environment and the irreversible devastation of the landscape.

As other similar, later protests, the “League Against Calcinations” did not oppose mining but total domination by the mining industry, the complete subordination of a society to their demands without limit. They advocated mining on an appropriate scale to make it compatible with other activities, such as agriculture or livestock. Because today as then, mining continues to be, as Lewis Mumford called it, a “cut and run” activity, leaving a trail of devastated forests and soils.

That is why we have to keep asking ourselves today: How much mining? For what purpose? What will happen with the sulphur, arsenic, mercury, etc., which is extracted from the bottom of the earth? Because thanks to the intellectuals cited, we know that when it comes to mining, the less the telluric materials brought to the surface, the better.

The demand for environmental justice needs symbolic occasions, which spread this message, milestones that fix it in our memory. The celebration of 130th anniversary of the “Year of the Shootings” is a great occasion for it.

The Rio Tinto Mines. Source: Hispanic Digital Library.

We are teachers and researchers, in contact with students who look out at the world full of curiosity, which encourages us to ask them, humbly, to study the appropriate scale of things, with the hope that they understand, as we understood one day, that the big is ugly and the small is beautiful.

Félix Talego and Juan Diego Pérez are professors of Social Anthropology and Economic History. This text is a slightly modified version of the text they read at the IV Jornadas Conmemorativas del Año de los Tiros, 4-6 febrero 2018, Huelva.

Share
Undisciplined Environments
Undisciplined Environments

Related posts

April 21, 2022

Transition into a “Green” World? Necro-Industry, Climate Trauma, and Radical Healing


Read more
April 12, 2022

Environmental Inequalities in Cairo’s Urban Housing Sector


Read more
March 29, 2022

Madrid’s Cañada Real: cold and darkness for the urban irregulars


Read more

0 Comments

  1. katharinehowell says:
    March 5, 2018 at 2:07 pm

    Reblogged this on Political Ecology Network.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search this site

✕

Subscribe to our Newsfeed

We keep your data private and share your data only with third parties that make this service possible. See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Tags

Agriculture Alternatives Anthropocene Art Brazil Capitalism Cities Climate change Climate crisis Climate justice Colonialism, Post-colonialism & Decolonization Commoning Commons Conflicts Conservation & Biodiversity COVID-19 Culture Decolonial Political Ecologies Degrowth Democracy Development Disaster Energy Environmental Change Environmental History Environmental Justice Environmental movements Extractivism Food Forests Green inequalities Indigenous Peoples Land Methodologies Mining & Extractivism Movements & Resistance Neoliberalism Post-colonialism Post-colonialism & Decolonization Social Movements & Resistance Urban Violence Waste Water water governance

Visit WEGO

wegoint.org
This website is co-funded by WEGO

Popular Posts

  • Indigenous Science 397 views
  • A comprehensive political ecology reading list 153 views
  • Keeping the world alive and healthy: The radical realism of the “forces of reproduction” – An interview with Stefania Barca 153 views
  • Environmental Humanities 2021-2022 Lecture Series at NKUA 119 views
  • Transition into a “Green” World? Necro-Industry, Climate Trauma, and Radical Healing 111 views
  • How new is the Green New Deal for the Global South? 105 views

Recent Comments

  • April 22, 2022

    Europe: Our Wounds Are Bridges – Global Dialogue for Systemic Change commented on Post-Extractive Futures (Workshop-Conversation-Festival)

  • April 21, 2022

    Podcast: The threads that bind us from Syria to Ukraine commented on Post-Extractive Futures (Workshop-Conversation-Festival)

  • April 10, 2022

    Undisciplined Environments commented on Colonial Climates, Decolonial Futures: Reflections from Puerto Rico

  • April 10, 2022

    Constanza V commented on Colonial Climates, Decolonial Futures: Reflections from Puerto Rico

  • April 6, 2022

    Colonial Ecologies of the Half Earth - Resilience commented on Political ecology gone wrong

  • April 6, 2022

    Colonial Ecologies of the Half Earth - Resilience commented on A conversation with Rob Nixon

Follow us

facebook       twitter
E-Mail Us : undisciplinedenvironments@gmail.com

Contribute

If you want to contribute send us your text at undisciplinedenvironments@gmail.com
Find our posting guide here

About Us

We are a collective of scholars and activists oriented towards a common horizon of emancipatory social and ecological transformation. With this platform, we aim to animate a space to share, debate and critically reflect on research and activist experiences, observations, methodologies, news, events, publications, art, music and other themes and objects related to political ecology.
powered by andromedia
  • About Us
  • Essays
  • Series
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
go