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Article ID: CBB544660599

Environmental Alchemy: Mercury-Gold Amalgamation Mining and the Transformation of the Earth (2023)

Bilak, Donna (Author)
George Vrtis (Author)

Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Volume: 70
Issue: 1
Pages: 31-53
Publication date: 2023
Language: English

URI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2023.2192131

DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2023.2192131

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Wherever mercury-gold amalgamation mining unfolds, alchemical processes abound. They are there as catalytic agents forming amalgams at atomic levels. They are there as cultural agents transforming rocks into cell phones and all kinds of consumer goods. And they are there as ideological agents mutually translating human understandings across whole worlds we describe as the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. These processes, we argue, are made more legible – more readily perceived and conceptualised – by peering through the lens of environmental alchemy, a new critical framework in which we apply the historical use of alchemical terms to investigations of environmental change, and to understand the extraordinary complexity that gold and mercury set in motion when mining entangles nature and culture.

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