Things of the Underground By the Tapajós River, on Itaituba’s waterfront, there is a monument in homage to the garimpeiro (gold panners). The sculpture is slightly taller than a tall human body and has longer legs than one would expect. With distorted proportions, the odd male body has his legs stretched and torso bent. He holds a pan in his hands, and the asymmetrical arms suggest the delicate movement performed to filter the gold. The statue stands on a two-meter pedestal from where it looks down, overseeing those who walk by it. Like a handcrafted bibelot scaled up, it has a lumpy surface and rough edges. The statue was inaugurated in 2019 and built with cement by the itaitubense constructor Gilmar Araujo and covered in golden paint by craftsman Apolinário, the second one made by this team of artisans in the region. In 2016 in Salto do Jacuí, Rio Grande do Sul. Building monuments to gold panners is part of the traditional celebration of the Bandeirantes. From the 16th to early 18th century, these pioneers organized violent settler missions that left from the coast searching for independence from Portuguese imperial power by collecting gold, enslaving indigenous peoples, and snatching lands in the “unknown” west. If between the early 20th-century realistic carved-in-marble monuments and the 1960s modernist tributes, there is a significant change in the accuracy of bodily proportions and textures, the recent versions of these statues acquire yet another mode of estrangement. Or the Bandeirantes monument built in São Paulo in 1954, by Victor Brecheret. If the modernist pieces deconstruct bodies with abstract geometric and simplified representation, the type of simplification that happens today feels way more anarchic. Here, the familiar handmade bibelot you could find on a street market turns into an official municipal monument. The conflation of the amateur with the official aligns with far-right communication strategies that want distance from the curated and technical aesthetics of typical party politics. Alongside Facebook posts with photographs of the new monuments, many influencers on YouTube and TikTok help shape the contemporary aesthetic of mining in Amazonia with amateur videos. Media theorist Hito Steyerl has called out for the political potential of nonconformist and poor images.10. Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.” But its potential to build alliances and circulate beyond the frames of the state or any corporation gets yet another authoritarian format here. What has rebellious aspirations against the state becomes a desperate attempt to create an identity and sense of belonging through mining. If the online far-right communication strategies aim at a broad and placeless public in the chaotic space of social media, the translation into a physical artifact is a guided strategy with a particular and localized audience. The monument represents the ironic opposition from the city’s mayor, deputies, and other public employees to the state environmental regulations and by a broader anti-politics sensibility. Ironically, of course, they do so through the same electoral political process they claim to stand against and by appropriating the traditionally state-curated mechanisms of memorialization. They romanticize the region’s social and environmental exploitation and precarious conditions, claiming to be the natural vocation of both the population and the forest itself. This mentality has a significant impact on electoral politics. Along with the multiplication of statues, many billboards supporting Bolsonaro’s reelection appeared in Pará. After Bolsonaro relaxed environmental controls in the region, Bolsonaro had over 80% of the votes in the region in his attempt at reelection in 2022. Technological advances and sensing devices could potentially make the work of gold prospecting easier and safer, but the endurance of risky and toxic mining practices severely contaminate workers, neighboring communities, and river bodies. Rather than a preference for these labor-saving devices, miners use precarious machines that harshly dig in river’s margins. While many try to couple the word mining with sustainability, illegal mining is among the leading causes that push deforestation forward in Amazonia. Websites and reports that track the recent destructive growth in Amazonia, illegal mining appears in the package of threats alongside unchecked agricultural expansion, illegal logging, and lack of law enforcement. 11. In the Amazon Conservation’s, a non-profit organization, webpage, there is a list of ‘Threats to the Amazon:’ Unchecked Agricultural Expansion, Illegal and Unmitigated Gold Mining, Illegal Logging, Poorly Planned Infrastructure, Fires, Lack of Sufficient Governance, Climate Change, Lack of Law Enforcement. Yet, the new monuments portray the most traditional and small-scale type of gold mining appealing to the traditional modality of the activity. They help forge an amicable and accessible lifestyle by recalling the perception of pride for Brazil’s colonial memories and juxtaposing it with the false image of a harmless activity that can only bring wealth to the region. The amateur aesthetic celebrates arduous work. Although it represents the solitary individualized search, from the colonial entrepreneurs to the ones that fly helicopters today, it was always an organized and hierarchical activity. Having it at the center of the city perhaps more than creating a personal link with those who walk by, helps to normalize the illegal activity and stands for the seemingly independent and subversive economy that maintains the city. The monument gives form to the national myth that celebrates the garimpeiro. And, by getting a shape whether with statues or TikTok videos, they are emptied of meaning and can move around and adapt. Neoliberal anti-indigenous conservatism finds in it the perfect host. It gets all too eerie when understanding the damaging socio-environmental effects it has. This seemingly benevolent Brazilian character can fluctuate from the coast to the hinterland to create a placeless anti-politics and bolsonarist identity. The statue shows how a dominant mentality that sees the forest as a resource is far from an exception of four years of right-wing government but is scattered as a more complex set of violent rebellious sensibilities. The conjunction of two things that don’t belong together in the 21st century (mining and rainforests) is far from obvious for most. This line of thought can only set dangerous environmentalist moral standards that fail to address the situation adequately. So, before assuming that the issue of mining in Amazonia is one of total alienation, I want to track down how this assumption is constructed and start asking how to make sense of it and what senses are required to do so. This low-resolution monument is part of a project to strengthen militia resistance to the nation-state’s sovereignty in reaction to the advance of environmental concerns and regulations. Building from the modern tradition that celebrates settlers as heroes in the southeast regions of Brazil, the statue is an attempt to forge a non-existing sense of belonging and tradition. After the population boom caused by years of state incentives to colonize the rainforest, followed by the recent efforts to ban and criminalize mining, cities in the rainforest witness something like what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes as a “nostalgia without memory.” 12. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 30. It’s a process that tries to create a splendid past that now rejects the modernist “invisible statues” 13. Lispector, “Brasília,” in: Todos os Contos, 595. of Brasília, to handcraft its own memory. The statue transforms the gold panning technique into something more durable: a traditional craft and an identity. If the scales of mining differ throughout different regions of Amazonia, there is a dominant frame for the problem from the point of view of environmentalists that restricts the miner as an enemy and a criminal. Law enforcement and securitization are the first solutions to stick people to their places and avoid any infringing mobility within the rainforest. Yet, framing the problem as one of lack of law enforcement means dealing only with the effect, in a binary dispute that can only spark further reactionary complications. Instead of expanding protection and security, this simplistic opposition triggers a peripheralization process of Western Amazonia’s deeper regions. As in the comparison made by philosopher Paulo Arantes, the approach to suppress informality and illegal extraction in Amazonia is the same failed formula applied in big cities’ peripheries. 14. Arantes, Paulo, Interview with Sombini, Eduardo, Mesmo sem projeto, Lula terá sucesso se frear a extrema Direita, Folha de São Paulo Ilustríssima Conversa. March 11, 2023. When the solution is unified as crime combatting, as in what happens with the war on drugs that takes place in Brazilian favelas, the more complex problems regarding lack of basic infrastructure, severe inequality, and the precarity of life are translated into a moral issue. This bad translation gets even more pronounced with the eagerness for strong solutions that emerge from the threat to indigenous lives and the climatic anxieties around the rainforest. What other sovereignty? “A path to finding the gold mine.” This is how the 1970s propaganda piece described the Transamazônica road. Printed in popular magazines, many campaigns during the military dictatorship glorified the opening of roads and used the gold mine as a metaphor to suggest that unlimited and easy money was being made miraculously available with the construction of new infrastructure. It directly invited the reader to “transfer a big part of this gold to their own pocket.” If the aerial perspective works today to report deforestation and suggest a lack of physical control over the territory, it was then a point of view that implied the triumphing efforts to manage the region. Gold’s meaning can be not only about extraction and abuse but also about a historically built relationship between miners and the forest. Contemporary forms of reckless and precarious mining (and we could expand to other impactful extractive activities) are the result of a half-accomplished state-led urbanization plan that for decades associated gold with progress. Rather than a simple absence of order, the environmental impact we see today is consequence of planned efforts to colonize Amazonia. In March 2022, gold miners blocked the Transamazônica road in the southwest of Pará to oppose recurrent anti-mining police operations. 15. https://g1.globo.com/pa/para/noticia/2022/03/16/garimpeiros-protestam-na-br-230-no-para-contra-fiscalizacoes-ambientais.ghtml They gathered to demand the suspension of environmental monitoring. The protesters charged the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMbio), both state intelligence agencies, with damaging their work machinery and hampering their subsistence. In order to justify the suspension of monitoring activities, miners put forward an argument related to historical claims to the land. In recordings of the protest, there are posters defending mining’s traditional value, as the practice predates Portuguese colonization. In interviews, protesters questioned in whose interest the environmental organs act since big companies like VALE16. Vale S.A. (former CVRD, Companhia Vale do Rio Doce), is a multinational mining company, one of the largest of the world. It is the largest producer of iron ore, pellets and nickel. It was created in 1940 as part of the “Washington Agreement”, that determined the creation of a state-owned company to explore, commercialize and distribute iron ore, with the aim of supplying the British and American arms industry. are allowed to perform mineral extraction while the small-scale miner is framed for environmental damage. 17. Cidade Pepita, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXrptigB5ZA Miners broadcast the operations led by environmental agencies on multiple YouTube channels. The scenes of panic are shot with an unstable cellphone camera and circulate among content that teaches and celebrates traditional gold panning.18. The YouTube channel “Cidade Pepita” was deleted days after the January 8th invasion of the the Planalto palace, the National Congress and the Federal Supreme Court, in Brasília, during the anti-democratic bolsonarist attacks. In one of its videos, the channel Independent Miners of the High Tapajós shows how a special group inside the IBAMA backed by local military police performs the type of environmental operations they are gathered to oppose in the 2022 protests. After identifying the site of illegal mining, the federal police set fire to all machines, cars, motorcycles, and fuel cargo they could find to impede further operation. While running, the garimpeiro who recorded the video laments the loss of the wooden tents with blue plastic linings and the backhoe excavators. Other people that seem to be working on the site appear running or trying to stop the fire with sand. 19. Cidade Pepita, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1pgXETra_E&t=1s The miner’s demonstration took place 25 miles away from Itaituba, an unofficial node in the gold extraction chain in the rainforest. The city had its peak mining activity in the 1980s during the military dictatorship. At the time, the city had one of the busiest airports in the country, carrying fuel and pieces of equipment for miners when the Tapajós River was still the only way to access the city. 20. Prefeitura Municipal de Itaituba, “História do Município.” https://www.itaituba.pa.gov.br/cidade Despite the golden era and the attention of big companies’ representatives, the profits from extraction do not appear in the landscape and the lives of Itaitubenses. Less than 2% of the population has access to basic sanitation, and in 2014, only 1% had access to piped water. The records of deforestation, violence against indigenous peoples, and death rates for infectious diseases are among the worst in the Northern region. With approximately 100.000 inhabitants, it appears on a business data website as a prominent Metal Ore Mining location. The city hosts more than 80 metal ore companies.21. Dun & Bradstreet, “Metal Ore Mining business information” Itaituba’s mayor, Valmir Climaco (MDB-PA), owns gold extraction sites himself and collects many public statements against IBAMA workers. In 2019, he was sentenced to prison by the Federal Court for environmental crimes related to deforestation in a forest reserve. 22. Castilho, Indriunas, “Acusado de grilagem, desmatamento e tráfico, prefeito é retransmissor da Globo em Itaituba.” The shared interests between politicians and illegal extraction appear inside an apparatus in which state and non-state agents profit from precarious and abusive extraction. Although multinational companies attempt to portray a sustainable version of extraction, the federal administration does not even attempt to maintain the appearance of environmental consciousness. During his mandate, Jair Bolsonaro openly announced his personal involvement with gold mining and his intentions of expanding the frontiers of extraction to indigenous demarcated lands. He triumphed in the north region, getting 62.45% of the valid votes against Lula in the 2022 presidential runoff, compared to 48% when considering the national results. Despite the recent federal government’s efforts to regulate mining, the criminalization of the activity has a long history. While the Mining Codes of 1940 and 1967 considered the scale, purposes, and techniques used to practice extraction in order to classify a miner’s activity as legal, the most recent law of 1989 works in more abstract ways. Mining permits are issued exclusively to individuals because it qualifies as a “rudimentary” and “traditional” activity. Despite being naturalized by the recurrent image of the hero miner, these permits are often issued to industrial-scale mining sites.23. Ministério Público Federal, “Mineiração Ilegal de Ouro na Amazônia.” The definition of a miner does not come from a description of their actual labor but rather from an abstract notion of what a miner is supposed to be, according to legislative bodies. Regardless of the workers’ tools and consequential impacts (i.e., million-dollar machinery vs. pickaxes and batters), each individual could be considered a small-scale miner. Labor abuse and environmental hazard are outsourced within this arrangement and are considered the responsibility of the subcontracted small entrepreneur. These mining regulations convey conflicting ideas of extractivism. As explained by Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel, extractivism can mean both a colonial action, as in the “ruthless looting of the environment for the benefit of a distant few,” or a postcolonial one, as in “a developmentalist ideology of social welfare premised on the extraction of natural resources.”24. Szeman, Wenzel, “What do we talk about when we talk about extractivism?” 507. Regarding neoextractivism in Latin America, although interconnected to populist agendas in democratic governments that attempt to deliver development, the colonial pattern is repeated in less explicit ways.25. Szeman, Wenzel, “What do we talk about when we talk about extractivism?” This happens because of the overlapping sovereignties that have taken place in Amazonia since the redemocratization. Once indigenous lands are demarcated, miners weirdly embody the logic of the state as it was in the 70s. Rather than para-state agents acting against the grain for independence, they become a reminiscence of the colonial reason of the state themselves. As shown in a report by the National Committee in Defense of Territories Against Mining, implementing an environmentally permissive policy enabling the opening of indigenous lands for business investments is an old dispute that gained momentum during Jair Bolsonaro’s administration. The report points out how large mining companies disregard labor or environmental concerns and keep acting as if they have free and constant access to ministries and other state bodies. 26. Comitê Nacional em Defesa dos Territórios Frente a Mineiração. “Quem é quem no debate sobre mineração em Terras Indígenas?” Despite the terrible work conditions mining workers face and the considerable evidence of mercury contamination and its dangers, the workers demand further deregulation and ask the state to hold back any intervention. Perhaps we could see this simply as a misinterpretation by the workers, a failure to identify that the ‘true enemies’ are the foreign corporations that buy the gold. Or even to associate them with a fascist nationalism that disregards the importance of a standing rainforest. But this becomes more nuanced once we grasp the cultural meaning of gold attached to a notion of independence and self-recognition in the region. When thinking about the garimpeiros’ aspirations, the image of the settler-colonial pioneer is in close contact with the neoliberal subjectivity of the entrepreneur, in a continuation of the modern-colonial mindset. The abusive gold extraction is performed by workers who reject the state after a history of forced migrations, food insecurity, and lack of basic infrastructure in the process of half -accomplished urbanization of Amazonia. Here, there is a disconnection between the labor that happens in the mine and the work that represents a promise of an independent way of living and material wealth. This is a profitable disconnection in which glorifying the garimpeiro as an independent hero justifies poor labor conditions. The precarious situation turns death due to work into something recurrent. And although the techniques that can make the work safe are known, the death of a garimpeiro is a naturalized accident. The neoliberal logic that attaches life to value and individual effort creates a strange situation, such as the worker’s demonstration demanding deregulation. Their demands are not countering the corporations and the state that do not give support or protection but rather demanding the possibility of self-management and free entrepreneurship. View from above Landscapes of gold extraction are an index of the cosmopolitical dispute that takes place in Amazonia today. Images of deforestation circulate as evidence of the impact of mining on the destruction of the forest’s ecosystem. Among these images, the aerial view is a common photographic genre in the media that depicts environmental justice issues, which, in the pages of environmental reports and newspapers, becomes a sort of rhetoric by itself. Like photographs of war, as philosopher Susan Sontag has put it, they reiterate, simplify, agitate, and create an ‘illusion of consensus’ by assuming an ecological-aware viewer. 27. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 7. Yet, interpretations from these pictures are a conflicted field. Adopted to portray the scar left in the thick green coverage, the view from above shows the gold mines as isolated clearings within the forest. Usually deep inside protected lands, multiple bare patches like the one we see in the photograph by Lucas Landau in 2020 keep multiplying. Although the image doesn’t gather the Western symbols of war-like iconography—that is, they don’t depict shred-off flesh and the bodily horrors of battle—the photograph reports the reality of an endangered landscape and population. As photographs of war, the circulation and multiplication of these photos make environmental degradation real to those who watch the news. More than a representation, this is how reality is experienced by most people who engage in ecological agendas and has a similar eerie effect to that of seeing it right in front of your eyes. Although mining is illegal in these territories, miners find ways to escape environmental protection squads and intrude on protected lands. As they are at constant risk of being caught, workers don’t settle for long—yet their impact is permanent. After a first assessment to identify the presence of gold, a group comes from the city and puts together wooden tents to accommodate their hammocks, a kitchen, and a covered place to work the gold. With a jet of high-pressured water, they dissolve the first layer of soil into sludge and open the pits we see from a distance. A hose sucks the sludge and directs it to a carpeted box that filters the gold from the soil. Only then do the garimpeiros start to look for the yellow powder. They use the batéia, a pan with a small cavity in the middle, to separate the gold from the clay. This delicate activity that requires skill and patience is also an extremely toxic one. To accelerate the process, they put a few drops of mercury in the pan to coagulate the minerals and finish the separation process. The liquid metal ends up contaminating the Tapajós River. There, bacteria transform it into methylmercury, its organic form that will be consumed by microalgae, larvae, and insects and then bigger fish to then, finally, intrude human bodies. The damage to their neurological system caused by mercury contamination is only one of the invisible consequences of mining. As the loud noise from the machines scares away the fauna and the smell that impregnates the water, the damages of gold extraction go far beyond the immediate impression one can have from visual evidence. Environmentalist sensitivities find it difficult to make sense of the scars on the rainforest beyond the quantitative and violent effects it has. While these clearings are portrayed as a sign of environmental destruction, criminalization, and law enforcement show up as straightforward solutions. And the problem is condensed as a lack of state presence and to a toxic and abusive activity. Or perhaps moral assumptions, such as the advance of populist politics, the embedded racism against indigenous populations, or even to climate denialism. But, to a foreign investor, they might indicate the presence of gold. And, to a miner, a sign of progress and resistance. As a spatial marker, the mines map the disagreements and different world views that collapse in Amazonia. The view from above, as undeniable proof of the environmental harm of illegal mining, occupies the pages of newspapers and reports that associate the meaning of gold with greed, irrational accumulation, and demand for more state regulation. From this privileged point of view, these clearings seem like a parasite. Despite making illegal mining an undeniable, observable fact, the view from above still works as limited evidence. They simplify and create a sense of clarity in the organization of miners as invaders and protagonists in this event. Undeniably a sign of ecological harm, other ways of seeing them can complicate such consensus by looking at it through other senses that don’t make it an issue of identity or ideology. Instead, mining culture and the opening of these clearings work through a persuasive apparatus that involve more distant agents than the miners themselves. Such apparatus establishes a type of colonialism and extractivism that doesn’t work through the typical appeal to care, conquest, and land tenure. Although the activity itself relies on preserving a glorified colonial memory, the quality of the territorial expansion that takes place in indigenous reserves is, of course, illegal but also violent and unwary. It works as an imagined resistance to politicians but with no traces of political insurgency. Visual evidence of deforestation, high mercury concentration levels detected in the water,28. Rede Amazônica de Informação Socioambiental Georreferenciada, Amazônia Sob Pressão, 30. and contamination of entire Mundukuru communities 29. Fiocruz, “Estudo Analisa a contaminação por mercúrio entre o povo indígena Mundukuru.” prove the continuous physical impacts of gold mining. The data collection exposes harmful and invasive activity within demarcated indigenous lands and has active political work. For instance, photographs and environmental reports can pressure federal monitoring organs to act upon specific illegal mines. Facing the dismantling of such federal organs, photographers work independently to monitor and call attention to the criminalized activity.30. After calls from Greenpeace activists Brunno Kelly wrote a piece in Reuters with images of illegal mining in the Madeira river that pressured for federal organs response after months of indifference. See Neto, “PF faz operação no rio Madeira para destruir balsas de garimpo illegal.” They have a key role in the struggle to contain the current expansion of illegal extraction that happens in Amazonia, especially in Brazilian territory. Besides growing violence against indigenous peoples in the dispute for land, the activity has damaging impacts on the health of those who live by and depend on the contaminated rivers. Illegal mineral extraction, especially of gold, reaches 17.3% of the Natural Protected Areas and 10% of the Indigenous Territories of the Amazon region.31. Rede Amazônica de Informação Socioambiental Georreferenciada, Amazônia Sob Pressão, 30. These data render a useful binary but, at the same time, one that creates a simplistic figure-ground reading of the landscape. The division between protected land and invasive mine translates to the personification of local agents of protection and agents of threat. In other words, the figure-ground reading of space that appears in environmental reports and bird’s eye photographs work with the construction of identities of guardians and invaders. Personifying environmentalism is part of an approach that focuses on moral conduct while masking structures of power. In her discussion about the visual politics of environmental justice, political theorist Teena Gabrielson calls attention to the risks in the visual culture of environmentalism that contribute to universal narratives and emphasize individual responsibility while obscuring systemic inequality.32. Gabrielson, “The Visual Politics of Environmental Justice,” 30. Dealing specifically with photography, she argues that “a more inclusive socio-ecological politics requires visual strategies that resist racialized ways of seeing while making visible the injustice of disproportionate environmental impact on low-income communities and people of color.” 33. Gabrielson, “The Visual Politics of Environmental Justice,” 28. Resisting ‘racialized ways of seeing’ requires the perception of a non-standardized indigenous alterity without dismissing the severe impacts indigenous peoples suffer from the proliferation of mines. Mappings of environmental threats should be concerned with the naturalist mindset intrinsic to modernity and the production of evidence. More than envisioning an ethical ecological dweller of the rainforest, such vocabulary must challenge the very viability of an exploitative extractive economy. 34. Demos, Against the Anthropocene, 55. Art historian T.J. Demos claims that one aspect of the decolonization of environmentalism is the connection between the exploitation of the environment to the exploitation of the disenfranchised, impoverished, and brutalized segments of the population.35. Demos, Against the Anthropocene, 55. If the photographs document the dangers of human-driven alteration of the Earth, they also suggest that “‘we have indeed mastered nature, just as we have mastered its imaging.”36. Demos, Against the Anthropocene, 27. Following Demos, it is precisely this illusion of control, that we can hold nature and look at it, that places technocrats and scientists in the role of fixing the problem. However, such ‘fixing’ relies on the same structures of power that sustain extractive industries. Opposing the harms of extraction, environmentalists and politicians deposit hope in the capacity of local knowledge or indigenous ontologies to decolonize thought and counter this idea of control over the landscape. But how to avoid colonizing differences by trying to decolonize environmental media?37. See Lucas Bessire and David Bond, “Ontological anthropology and the deferral of critique.” Contrary to what a figure-ground reading might suggest, such landscapes are not static scenarios upon which humans act but rather an agent with their own representational capacities. 38. See Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think, 2013. British anthropologist Tim Ingold defines Landscape as a sort of embodiment in itself: embodiment not as an inscription but as a movement of incorporation. 39. Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” 156. With his definition, body, and landscape must be thought of as complementary and mutually formed without any linear causality. Ingold’s definition pushes us to rethink the essentialist association of certain bodies with a specific place. That is, it makes us question any ‘natural’ relation between a body and its surroundings. It requires thinking that the landscape “is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view on our surroundings.” 40. Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” 171. Considering the interaction between humans and the environment as an unfixed ‘movement of incorporation’ in which forms are generated—rather than transcribed onto material41. Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” 157.—we must avoid the personalization of the problem of the mine as a problem of the miner. Now part of the ecology of images that make deforestation an object to look at and reinforce the reality of climate change, the photographs become images of a war we witness from a distance. Instead of creating thought, they tend to mesmerize and flatten the event as part of an apocalyptic (as recently right-wing) expansion. If these are landscapes of destruction and invasion to some, depictions of mining can also mean resistance to others. Paying attention to the contrasting values and meanings of gold that overlap in the space of the mine may point out to an anti-naturalist understanding of it. That is because the landscapes we see in these pictures as simply stark degradation to be stopped might need to be read through different representations to render legible the relations of events that are present within it. This mine is not a violent exception within preserved lands but an event with broader spatial and timely relations. When we attempt to see the thickness of this event and position it alongside others, we can think about the network of relations that explain the narrowness of visual proof to explain the problem of mining. It’s important to note that rather than an issue of lack of state presence, mining today is also an issue of corporate action, for instance. And if today’s miners perform an abusive and careless extraction, there is an issue of memory and fidelity to mining as resistance and tradition. We can start delineating the impulses and desires that foster it through two axes. First, through an expanded spatial frame, which comprehends the relationship between the site of extraction and site of consumption. And second, through a broader temporal frame that addresses the history and traditions that formulate subjective meanings of mining. Following Whitehead’s heterogenous thinking of Nature, what occupies space is not substance, but its attributes.42. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 21. In the case of the mine, as we’ve seen, the spatial qualities and that which is experienced when looking at it can vary among interpretants. Such contrasting values can be unpacked through what Alfred North Whitehead called sense-awareness: an attention beyond that which is captured by the photograph and its perception. When looking at the event of the opening of the clearing, instead of only visual facts, what other senses can complicate common discernments? It’s important to highlight that this is not an attempt to disavow the material reality of the impact of deforestation and not to put any doubt on visual evidence. But to return to that which is presupposed to look at the event itself and what other representations and images inform mining beyond the edges of the mine. Because, as Whitehead claims, “there is no holding Nature still and looking at it.” 43. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 15. But this might be a way of expanding common grounds, a step towards an investigation of how to deal with differences in the common agenda for social-environmental solidarity. The point is not to reveal or expose the naïve belief of miners, businesspeople or scientists that lack knowledge but to question the type of evidence that reduces itself to a matter of seeing the obvious when the question is not just about knowing but a necessary change in perception. In the path to understanding who should be held accountable and how to start negotiating, it’s key to understand an operation of power that is not manipulative and totalizing but dispersed and affective. And to complicate what evidence means, it is crucial to look at other types of events that are harder to render visible and can’t be apprehended with a Canon. They too are important in the work of imagining plural political arrangements in the Amazon that goes beyond reductionist divisions between autochthonous guardians and foreign intruders. Abstract fascinations While miners reject the rules of the nation-state sovereignty by reclaiming old mystical meanings of gold, big-tech corporate alchemists have new financial fascinations with the metal. Gold atoms are older than our solar system and have their origins in the collision of neutron stars that hit an early-formed Earth’s crust billions of years ago.44. Phillips, “Mining and the Nature of Gold Deposits,” in Formation of Gold Deposits, 10. In a way, the metal is the cry of the sky, as the Incas would describe it. Its forever well-known appeal has a key symbolic role in the histories of colonization. Besides its malleability, electrical conductivity, and resistance to chemical change—which makes it suitable for making jewelry, circuit boards, and PVC—gold’s symbolic capital keeps luring miners towards a violent and precarious chase inside the Amazon Basin. What represents a few parts per billion (0. 0000001%)45. Phillips, “Mining and the Nature of Gold Deposits,” in Formation of Gold Deposits, 22. in the Earth’s crust mobilizes a $100 billion per year industry that looks to the unwatched hinterlands of the globe for tax-free exploitation of land and labor. Italian engagement rings and MacBook circuit boards are peculiar precipitates of illegal gold extraction in the Amazon. In 2021, a police investigation revealed a network that fed Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon circuit boards with illegal mining in Yanomami, Mundukuru, and Kaiapó protected lands.46. Camargos, “Apple, Google, Microsoft e Amazon usaram ouro ilegal e terras indígenas brasileiras.” While buying illegal gold extracted in Pará, refining companies create self-congratulating sustainability certificates to render the possibility of reasonable gold extraction. 47. Chimet, “Sustainability” https://www.chimet.com/en/company/sustainability The Italian Chimet, for instance, uploaded on its website a sustainability policy that has as principles: “minimizing the impact of our activities on the environment; conducting our business in a socially responsible and ethical manner; and consolidating and increasing the company’s assets in order to ensure re-investment of capital and the introduction of innovative technologies for continuous improvement.”48. Chimet “Sustaintability Policy.” The typical corporate hypocrisies put on environmentalist masks in the 21st century. While it crafts an ecologically responsible discourse, the company refines the gold extracted illegally in Brazil before selling to US big-tech companies on the west coast. Although the use by big-tech companies corresponds to 37% of gold demand in the US, the global demand has a more abstract destiny. Instead of being directly sold as a component of other products, in 2021, 47% of gold demand was towards investors that keep reservoirs of the metal waiting for its further appreciation. In ten years, the market value of gold increased by 256,73% in Brazilian markets, and investment websites describe it as the investment of the decade. 49. “Com maior rentabilidade, ouro é considerado o maior investimento da década.” In times of crisis and global pandemics, gold is neatly presented as a safe choice to protect one’s investment portfolio. If the gold rush of the 18th century pushed settlers from the coast to the hinterlands looking for independence from Portuguese imperial power, the contemporary neoliberal version of this hunt requires exceptional support of the state. A 2022 investigation by Forensic Architecture tracks how during Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, “vast tracts of the Amazonia rainforest, and the indigenous communities who live within and care for it, have been subjected to increasing violence and a rapid rise in illegal gold mining.”50. Forensic Architecture, “Gold Mining and Violence in the Amazon Rainforest.” In this process, the federal government weakened and defunded environmental protection agencies, reduced fines for environmental crimes, and made public attempts to legalize mining on Indigenous land. Bolsonaro signaled to the populations that experience an acute identity crisis with the criminalization of their work, especially after decades of incentives to occupy Amazonian lands. It is important, however, to understand the military formation of these ‘wildcat’ miners not because of Bolsonaro’s administration but through an intimate relationship between state and non-state agents. The recent financialization of the rainforest expands the abstract meaning of gold even further. In this context, the spatial delimitation of the mine and the quantification of deforestation loses, even more, its ability to represent the current situation. Considering the work of political geographer Martin Arboleda on circuits of extraction in Latin America, for instance, the limited space where the soil is carved or the infrastructural networks required for commodity circulation doesn’t correspond to where the value of minerals is created. Instead, they work through a relational network of production, circulation, exchange, and distribution of natural resources.51. Arboleda, Planetary Mine, 10. But more than the material expansion Arboleda describes, there is what lies beneath the carved soil. If we see that the fetishism that creates value without labor, through pure financial abstraction, stands with the belief in inanimate creatures, the agency of gold, the earth, and the sky perhaps seem less distant and the binary that organizes miners as invaders against the natural forest starts to get more complicated. Beyond the less perceivable worlds of financial capital, there are the hard-to-sense meanings of the rainforest itself. The point here is to turn the mine into a contentious site. While it scars the forest and transforms geophysical processes that have unseen impacts far beyond its boundaries, it also signals other mappings of the crisis in Amazonia. Professor of inhuman geography Kathryn Yusoff explains how the mine establishes a paradigm through which colonial psychic emerges and racist hetero-reproductive violence is maintained, governed, and regulated. But, as she also points out, while “mining unearths the exoskeleton of geologic life to produce the nowness (or the now, now, temporality) of contemporary life (its energy and communication networks, its highways and pathways), it also creates an opening and the passageways of unintended fractures—fissures—that lead into other undergrounds.”52. Yusoff, “Mine as Paradigm.” This consideration alerts us to what distanced evidence misses. Not just the more profound political and reactionary dangers that a war against miners can provoke. But also what could be a space to map a fracture that situates a people as “geophysical beings.” Of things that threaten Amazonia, its representations are hardly considered something that deserves attention. Adding them to the list, however, stretches the limits of the problem. If too often they are regarded as neutral evidence of harm with all its good intentions, a closer look can show how they condition the reactions. Instead of playing within the lines of allies and enemies, a visual analysis—or perhaps a counter-visual one – can help blur the line that has become suspiciously clear. That is to build alliances within differences by critiquing what goes without saying and a careful closeness with what is considered absurd. These images are not simply consequences of a mindset. They, too, constitute a mentality and a worldview. There is no unmediated framing of evident or pure evidence, “there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active partial way of organizing worlds.” 53. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” So, what I’ve tried to portray here are the limits in framing environmental degradation as an issue of illegality. Simplifying criminalization fails to see the specificity and difference within these events. Despite not being an argument for the lack of state presence, it is an attempt to map the fog that covers the current Amazonian condition and limits the ways to interpret it.