The afterlife of the Mt. Taylor "zombie mine" and the continuance of life around the Snowcapped Mountain

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.On May 7th and 8th of 2018, the New Mexico Mining Commission held a public hearing regarding a permit revision, which would allow the Mt. Taylor Uranium Mine to change its status from “standby” to “operating.” New Mexico Environmental Law Center contested the decision on behalf of two regional environmental organizations: Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment and Amigos Bravos. The mine would operate under the auspices of a company called Rio Grande Resources a subsidiary of General Atomics, on a section of private property adjacent to a state designated Traditional Cultural Property for five nominating Native American Tribes. Because the mine did not appear economically viable, the petitioners characterized it as “a classic zombie mine scenario,” indicating that the mine was not quite dead and not quite alive. My ethnographic description of the hearing focuses on the different forms of vitalizing discourse associated with both the economic lifecycle of the mine and the vital relations of the mountain. Taking an anthropologically emic approach to the competing logics of life represented at the hearing, and by foregrounding the vital relations of the mountain, this article contributes to a tradition of research on mining in environmental anthropology, and builds on recent trends in political ecology on the relationship between resilience and resistance in grassroots activism and social-environmental movements.