On the Central African Copperbelt, ‘the role of mining in transforming regional environments remains underexposed, despite the fact that it has perennially been one of the dirtiest of all industries as well as a cornerstone of empire and global trade.’ (Corey Ross, Ecology and power in the age of empire, 2017, p. 137). Copper mining moves tonnes of earth and produces streams of waste, which are disposed of in the surrounding rivers, landscapes and distributed through the air. Despite widespread pollution, the environmental dynamics of copper mining have received only minimal attention in scholarship on the Copperbelt so far. Mining companies, government officials and even local residents have silenced the environmental impacts of copper mining throughout much of the twentieth century. Towards the end of the 1990s this started to change quite suddenly, as international donors placed pressure on mining companies to draw up Environmental Impact Assessments and popular environmental activism became more prominent. These historical dynamics will be the focus of this paper, which examines environmental knowledge production on the Central African Copperbelt.
Relying on rare archival sources and preliminary oral history with mining officials and Copperbelt residents, this paper provides a cross-border perspective to environmental consciousness on the Copperbelt. Contrasting and comparing the Zambian and Congolese examples can highlight why environmental concerns were or were not expressed in Copperbelt mining towns from the 1950s until the 2000s.