New Article on Giant Mine
The abandoned Giant Mine is one of the worst toxic sites in Canada, a landscape that is polluted on the surface and in the underground environment, where 237,000 tonnes of highly toxic arsenic trioxide pose a threat to the adjacent community of Yellowknife. Opened in 1948, Giant Mine began to spew thousand of pounds of arsenic into the atomosphere surrounding Yellowknife a year later (as a byproduct of the gold roasting process), posing a dire threat to the nearby Yellowknives Dene communities who depending on increasingly polluted snowmelt, rivers, and lakes for their drinking water. Over time, the Yellowknives began to see the landscape surrounding their communities as dangerous due to arsenic pollution.
History Professor John Sandlos and his collaborator Arn Keeling have just published a paper on Giant Mine in a special issue of the journal The Northern Review addressing the theme of northern inequalities. The paper adopts Rob Nixon's idea of toxic exposures as a form of "slow violence" that disproportionately affects marginalized groups within society.
The paper, titled "Toxic Legacies, Slow Violence, and Environmental Injustice at Giant Mine, Northwest Territories," can is an open access publication that can be obtained here.