This Essay -though book length in all– isn't intended to intimidate, far less employ the current Corona Virus pandemic as a means of galvanising even more trepidation along a global trajectory that's already cowed so many of us. Instead, it attempts to instrumentalise (rather than merely conceptualise) future communally-shared life on earth. And to do so, by re-invigorating modes of social intercourse and survival (modus vivendi) that have served existence (if not always shared values) in the pre-endemic era. These must surely now, as swiftly as possible, inform and regulate construction of all our futures.

Much of the information, discussion and methodology for this essay is based on the work of our shortly-to-be 20 years old Mines and Communities group (MAC). As a transnational collective, comprising Indigenous activists, civil society organisations acting in solidarity with them, academic researchers, trustworthy analysts, industry observers, journalists and others, MAC evolved in 2001 from several other UK NGOs, and then proceeded to link with other global alliances.

Rio Tinto has continued trying to refashion its “Old Normal” perspectives of the early new millennium, using the advent of a pandemic to bolster acceptance of a fresh era of conformism. However, this “new” social vision - immersed in a presdigitation of the densest digital data and least-fathomable detail – owes little to real change. Instead, it derives from the company‟s century-and-a-quarter old compulsion to win, at almost any cost, an imperialist “New Great Game”.

Now that this afflicted initial period has apparently ended, we should collectively acknowledge the legacy of damage, ill-health, and dissolution, borne by many communities in the earlier months of the Covid-19 encroachment which still replicates and re-invents itself in some locations, such as South Africa. A particularly compelling reflection of this is the passionately-worded Declaration by ReSisters, from Burma, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand issued in November last year, condemning the “militarist misogyny and deep connivance with corporations... for plunder” that had taken hold in previous months.

Access PDF file (1,19MB) in the following link: All the world's at C - Part Two

See also:

PDF file (1MB): All_the_worlds_at_C_Part_One_2020

New section looking at mining and Covid-19.