Ivan Emilio Emilio Montenegro Perini

IVAN MONTENEGRO PERINI, then a graduate student at University of California, Davis, California, was approved funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Mining Corporations and Geoengineering Practices: Terraforming Landscapes Destroyed by Coal Extraction,” supervised by Dr. Marisol de la Cadena. Retitled “Fractured Restoration,” this is an ethnographic study of how Cerrejón — one of the largest coal mining companies worldwide — attempts to restore the landscapes it devastates through four decades of extraction. Coal mining generates massive quantities of broken rock, blasted from the earth and deposited in designated zones, creating what engineers call botaderos. The word literally means dumps. Botaderos are huge mine-made mountains with unpredictable behaviors, always “adjusting” internally and responding to water, air and other elements. Impacted by various environmental regulations, the company made botaderos the center of its land rehabilitation efforts. Towards that goal, it hires a team of geoengineers, hydrologists, ecologists, biologists and field technicians. The effort also includes diverse local populations, some of whom have worked for the mine, while others have been affected by it. Following these actors as they transform botaderos into post-mining landscapes, the grantee argues that, far from simply undoing environmental damage, the rehabilitation effort is also a site of heterogeneous political and ethical experimentations, where multiple presents and possible futures emerge. Critically engaging with the binary grammar of “either destruction or restoration”, this study offers an ethnographic intervention that interrupts celebratory narratives of “ecological restoration” to understand the aftermath of “post-extraction” corporate initiatives in Colombia.