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Show 76 computers, smartphones, and tablets, to railways, automobiles, and telephone lines. Since copper is such an efficient conduit for electricity, it is a staple for almost all technologies that involve electric currents of energy. It is the life-blood of our communication networks. In an article titled "The New Bronze Age," Tim Heffernan (2013) makes a compelling point: natural resource mineral metals, especially copper, are oftentimes overlooked as essential but finite commodities that sustain 21st-century communication technologies. As he puts it, Worries about oil and gas hog all the airwaves. But copper is also essential to keep the world running: It threads through your house, your computer, your ecocorrect hybrid car. And it's getting just as difficult, expensive, and environmentally menacing as oil to extract. We have entered the era of tough ore. (p. 60) As a commodity, copper has always been inextricably tied with profound networks and assemblages. Copper has created cities. For instance, Salt Lake City, UT, went from small pioneer village to western metropolis in less than a century because it has harbored prized deposits of porphyry copper in its Bingham Canyon Copper Mine. To Heffernan, "Brigham Young founded Salt Lake City, but Bingham Canyon helped transform it from an isolated religious enclave into a bustling capital" (p. 63). Copper attracted alliances with military personnel, financial investors, railroads, smelters, consumers, new media, and local ecological metabolisms. These networks have created corporate empires that have eclipsed entire nation-states. Moreover, natural resource corporations invested in metals such as copper use their networks as a means for drawing in investors, consumers, and publics. In other words, they have "turn[ed] themselves into vehicles for transferring wealth, infrastructure, and technology directly to citizens" in exchange for privatizing land and extracting copper (Heffernan, 2013, p. 63). |
