Anna Gowera will deliver a presentation entitled “Tracing the Hidden Ecologies of Informal Chrome Mining: People, Place and Space“ on Thursday 22 October (13:00 to 14:30), Wits Mining Institute (3rd Floor, Wits ARM Building).
Reports of informal chrome mining in rural South Africa have increased since 2016. Its environmental footprint is readily visible in excavated mountainsides, abandoned pits, and the loss of land used for human settlement, grazing and recreation. Unlike formal mining, informal mining is largely unregulated, leaving communities with few avenues for recourse and offering little prospect of rehabilitation. Yet research on the socioecological impacts of mining tends to focus on physical change, with much less known about what that change means to the people who live amidst it. Drawing on a wider doctoral study of the socioecological consequences of informal chrome mining, this presentation examines relational cultural ecosystem services in Atok and Burgersfort, Limpopo Province. Using key informant interviews, environmental observations and reflexive journalling, it explores how landscape change is experienced and felt. Participants spoke of fear and loss: women described feeling unsafe walking to and from work, residents said they felt “no longer free”, and others mourned the scarring of mountains that bear “the names of our forefathers”. Together, these accounts reveal the erosion of identity, heritage, belonging, safety and recreation, a pattern consistent with solastalgia: the distress of feeling homesick while still at home. This presentation argues that informal chrome mining contaminates more than the physical environment; it also produces a “contamination of self” that remains largely absent from impact assessments and policy responses. Situating this case alongside research on solastalgia in mining contexts in Australia, Appalachia, Germany and Zimbabwe, it asks what rehabilitation might mean when the harm extends beyond the visible hole.
Anna Gowera is a PhD candidate in Environmental Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, affiliated with the Wits Mining Institute and the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences. Her doctoral research examines the socioecological consequences of informal chrome mining for land-dependent rural communities in South Africa, combining satellite remote sensing with ethnoecological and community-based methods. Before her PhD, she spent over ten years in environmental and occupational health and safety practice across mining, energy and education. A committed transdisciplinary researcher, Anna was a TRANSECTS 2024 fellow in Canada and a panellist at the 2026 Mining Indaba discussion, “Can you make mining more sustainable?”
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