1. Colonial Legacies of Uranium Extraction
Uranium is a naturally occurring radioactive element that emits α-particles and can be toxic or fatal to human and non-human species if ingested. The Atomic Heritage Foundation1 dates the beginning of uranium mining to the late 19th century in what is today the Czech Republic (Atomic Heritage Foundation 2018). Mining began primarily to supply physicists Marie and Pierre Curie with uranium ore to facilitate their work to identify and isolate radium, which forms naturally when uranium decays (Atomic Heritage Foundation 2018)2. The widescale mining of uranium did not begin, however, until the early 1940s, when physicists discovered that uranium could be used for the production of nuclear technologies, including as a source of fuel to create plutonium. After the inception of the Manhattan Project in 1941, uranium mining spread rapidly and globally, and uranium became what Traci Brynne Voyles called the “most sought-after ore of the twentieth century” (Voyles 2015, p. 2). Much of the uranium that fueled the Manhattan Project came from extant reserves in Africa (and specifically the Belgian Congo), Canada, Kazakhstan, and the United States (Atomic Heritage Foundation 2018; see also Voyles 2015, pp. 2–3)3. In terms of the volume of uranium mined during this time, the environmental intensity of mining operations, and the commodification of the ore on the global market, uranium mining can be understood as one form of what Eduardo Gudynas has defined as “extractivism” (Gudynas 2020, pp. 4–6). Today, the majority of uranium extracted around the world is used as fuel in nuclear power plants for the production of nuclear energy technologies.
In the United States, uranium mining has had a disproportionate impact on Navajo Tribal Lands in the desert Southwest. As Voyles (2015) showed, the Manhattan Project relied on domestic supplies of uranium, much of which came from vanadium mines in the Navajo Nation where uranium was discarded as waste (Voyles 2015). Between the 1940s and 1960s, thousands of Diné men were enlisted to mine uranium that helped to fuel U.S. nuclear weapons development during the Cold War. Judy Pasternak noted that the Navajo took to this task willingly—unaware of the dangers associated with uranium mining and grateful for the financial stability that these jobs offered (Pasternak 2010, p. 6).
The detrimental effects of uranium extraction on the Diné people and their environments have been well documented (see e.g., Endres 2023; Johnston et al. 2010; Malin 2015; Nichols 2025; Pasternak 2010; Powell 2018; Rousmaniere 2015; Voyles 2015)4. In the 2015 documentary Yellow Fever, for instance, Navajo veteran Tina Garnanez illuminated the health impacts on Navajo men, including her own grandfather, who worked in the uranium mines and breathed in the toxic dust (Rousmaniere 2015). She further demonstrated the long-term effects of extraction on the environment in the region, noting the visible scars on the landscape left by abandoned mines and the invisible toxins that remain in the soil and water (Rousmaniere 2015; see also Nichols 2025).
Stephanie Malin and others have aptly referred to these regions as “‘state-sanctioned sacrifice zones’” which “have superimposed ‘invisible nuclear landscapes’ on regions still occupied by Native Americans” today (Malin 2015, p. 18; see also Kuletz 1998; Nichols 2025). Malin showed that Native American communities have been deeply impacted by the development of nuclear technologies and cited this as evidence of what she and others have called “nuclear colonialism” (Malin 2015, p. 18) and “radioactive colonialism” (Churchill and LaDuke 1985, 1992; Endres 2009, 2023)5.
The term “colonialism” is used and applied broadly across academic disciplines today to signal (and generally to critique) historic processes of domination through which white European settlers procured and maintained economic and political power over other nations and their peoples often through violent means, including genocide. These processes include the ongoing systematic creation, maintenance, and renegotiation of historic narratives that reinforce and perpetuate colonial worldviews. Such narratives have not only informed religious beliefs and practices and affected the lived experiences of individuals and groups, but they have also contributed to ongoing forms of violence, surveillance, and political and economic control over historically marginalized and oppressed peoples (see, e.g., Cabral [1977] 2016; Césaire [1972] 2000; Endres 2023; Fanon [1963] 2004; Voyles 2015).
Max Liboiron and others have argued, however, that colonialism is “first, foremost, and always…about Land” (Liboiron 2021, p. 10, emphasis in the original; see also Tuck and Yang 2012). As Macarena Gómez-Barris aptly wrote:
Before the colonial project could prosper, it had to render territories and peoples extractible, and it did so through a matrix of symbolic, physical, and representational violence. Therefore, the extractive view sees territories as commodities, rendering land as for the taking, while also devalorizing the hidden worlds that form the nexus of human and nonhuman multiplicity. This viewpoint, similar to the colonial gaze, facilitates the reorganization of territories, populations, and plant and animal life into extractible data and natural resources for material and immaterial accumulation.
The colonial emphasis on land, however, is not solely focused on acquiring or utilizing land as property or resource. Rather, the colonial project includes imagining uses for land that further the agendas of colonialism in the present and into the future. This includes envisioned environmental solutions that presume the availability of, and access to, land as a valuable entity for present and future colonial endeavors (Liboiron 2021, p. 11; see also Scott 2024). Amílcar Cabral, for instance, detailed the destructive effects of colonial agricultural practices on environmental conditions in Africa. These practices, he argued, failed to consider the “mesological conditions”—or the “relations of living things to their environments”—that inform people’s ongoing relationships with the land (Cabral [1977] 2016, pp. 56–57). Tuck and Yang have noted that this “disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, [and] cosmological violence” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 5). Moreover, technological interventions, such as those that enable the agriculture practices Cabral critiqued, are directly linked to the ongoing colonization of lands and people. “Technological progress today”, Karsten Schulz wrote, “is still enabled by neocolonial appropriation and extractionism, exemplified by cheap labor and the commodification of the living environment…” (Schulz 2017, p. 133; see also Gómez-Barris 2017).
Scientific discussions about anthropogenic climate change and the need for expansion and development of carbon neutral energy sources increasingly point to nuclear power as the solution to a fossil fuel-dependent future. These visions of technological progress and imagined climate futures are inherently dependent on continued access to uranium, and specifically to the lands in which it is located. Given these definitions, uranium extraction and the nuclear technologies produced from it can be understood in the same way that Liboiron understands pollution: that is, not as a “manifestation or side effect of colonialism, but rather [as] an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to land” (Liboiron 2021, p. 4; see also, e.g., Churchill and LaDuke 1985, 1992; Endres 2023; Runyan 2018). Danielle Endres also defined radioactive colonialism along these lines, noting the ways that “governments and corporations target indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process” (Endres 2009, p. 40; see also Endres 2023, pp. 37–41; Nichols 2025, p. 60).
This brief history raises several important questions about how uranium extraction has been conceived and understood. Among them, questions about how the ongoing legacies of colonialism inform the interplay between disparate worldviews, conceptions of time, religious beliefs and practices, and technological interventions are critical for advancing scholarship about extraction.
Western religious beliefs have informed the ways that time6 is conceptualized and understood. In turn, how we understand time shapes the ways that we make sense of the long-term implications of uranium extraction. Following Karen Barad, I understand uranium as bound up in a dynamic “infinity of possibilities, such as asynchronicity, indeterminacy, superpositions, and entanglements” (Barad 2023, p. 27). Informed by Barad and other scholars working in critical posthumanism, (post/de)colonial studies, and the energy humanities, I argue that a critical examination of the complex relationships between religious ideologies, colonial time, and histories of uranium extraction reframes the discourse in an important way. It shifts thinking about extraction away from colonial notions of time which understand extraction as an “event” that occurs at a particular time and place. Instead, it underscores that “events”, such as extraction, are temporally complex and enmeshed in geological, biological, reproductive, and evolutionary processes. This reframing is imperative to foster an understanding that the radioactive byproducts of uranium created through the nuclear production process are globally dispersed, will persist across generations, and will have transgenerational implications for human and non-human organisms and for the health and viability of ecologic systems (Folkers 2021; Folkers and Gunter 2022; Hamblin and Richards 2023; Nichols and Olson 2024; Nixon 2011; Olson 2019). Moreover, it adds to a growing corpus of literature in the environmental humanities and social sciences focused on illuminating the myriad ways that religious and spiritual worldviews inform and shape environment attitudes and practices.
2. Religion, Colonial Temporality, and Uranium Extraction
Though much work has been done by scholars in the environmental and energy humanities to examine the connections between extraction, energy production and demand, and anthropogenic climate change, few scholars, to date, have critically analyzed the important role that religious worldviews have played in shaping practices of, and discourses about, resource extraction.
Among those who have, Terra Schwerin Rowe (2023) wrote in detail about the historical relationships between energy, extraction, and Western Christianity. “Religious concepts, beliefs, values, and desires”, she argued, “have profoundly informed… technoscientific productions” including resource extraction (Rowe 2023, pp. 13–14). These religious ideologies have contributed to what Rowe calls the “modern extractivist imaginary”, which is “deeply indebted to theological anthropologies and ideals of divine power…. [that] reinforc[e] patterns of oppression and inequality rooted in the colonial project” (Rowe 2023, p. 2). Of the extant work on resource extraction and religion, much of it has focused on fossil fuels including coal and oil (see, e.g., Brunton 2022; Callahan 2009; Dochuk 2019; Rowe 2023; Thompson 2015; Witt 2016). I have written elsewhere about some of the ways that religious rhetorics have informed American nuclear discourses, including debates about uranium extraction, nuclear energy production, and nuclear waste storage (Nichols 2025). Few other scholars have written about the connections between religion and nuclear technologies (see e.g., Endres 2023; Fiege 2007; Sideris 2015; Skrimshire 2018), and no one (that I am aware of) has yet written explicitly about the ways that Western religious ideologies have informed histories of uranium extraction in the United States or abroad. Though such an extensive project is well beyond the scope of a single article, I offer some provisional insights about these interactions herein.
2.1. The Religious Roots of Colonial Temporality
In his well-known critique “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis”, historian Lynn White Jr. (1967) illuminated the important connections between time and the Judeo-Christian worldview. Invented in the 13th century, the mechanical clock had been widely adopted by the Latin church by the early 14th century. White called the mechanical clock the “most monumental achievement in the history of automation” and noted the important role it played in both the scientific and technological revolutions in the West (White 1967, p. 1204; 1973). Not only did it function as a means of telling time, but it also served to “illustrate the orderliness of God’s creation” (White 1973, p. 59). In the Judeo-Christian view, the world was “planned in every detail for [hu]man’s use and edification, and for no other purpose” (White 1973, p. 63). This view established a dualism between humans and the non-human natural world and “insisted that it is God’s will that [hu]man[s] exploit nature for [their] proper ends” (White 1967, p. 1205; see also Nichols 2023). This understanding, White said, has deeply informed and “facilitated our style of technology and thus has been a major force in polluting our globe” (White 1973, p. 63).
The ability to measure time in a more consistent and precise manner improved the accuracy of scientific experimentation and astronomical observation and promoted collaboration that was essential to scientific developments during the 16th and 17th centuries. These developments in scientific knowledge fostered technological advancements in industrialization and mass production that enabled the Industrial and Technological Revolutions of the 17th–21st centuries (and which are still ongoing). Importantly, the scale of industrial and technological advancement during this period required new sources of energy at unprecedented rates, thus triggering the beginning of extractivism (Gudynas 2020).
In The Colonisation of Time, Giordano Nanni demonstrated the important connections between time, religion, and colonization. Reconsidering colonization as a primarily spatial project, Nanni showed that adopting a universal notion of time and erasing alternative temporalities was an important part of the “Christani[z]ing and ‘civili[z]ing’” missions of European colonial expansion (Nanni 2012, p. 3). Colonial time “portrayed non-European temporalities as primitive, irrational and heathen” and was essential in “defining and maintaining nineteenth-century British notions of identity, religion, class and—ultimately—civilization” (Nanni 2012, pp. 7–8; see also Fanon [1963] 2004, pp. 6–7). Informed by Christian religious worldviews, and Enlightenment Era notions of progress and scientific and technological advancement, colonial time is conceptualized as linear, unidirectional, causally conditioned, and unfolding toward a certain end (Nanni 2012; see also Deloria [1973] 2003; Rifkin 2017; Rowe 2023; White 1967).
2.2. Connecting Religion, Colonial Temporality, and Extraction
The history of extraction is deeply entangled with histories of colonization and settler colonialism (see, e.g., Daggett 2019; Endres 2023; Gómez-Barris 2017; Gudynas 2020; Powell 2018; Rowe 2023; Voyles 2015). A few scholars have made important contributions to the efforts to re-think the ways that time has been conceived, and to begin decolonizing temporality. Little attention, however, has been given to the ways that colonial notions of time, and the religious ideologies that have informed them, have shaped discourses about extraction7 more broadly, and about uranium extraction specifically. Reading extraction through these decolonial approaches, I show how uranium extraction has been conceived of as an “event” in colonial temporalities. This understanding helps us to see the important connections between religion and extraction and illuminates some of the problems that arise when uranium is understood in this way.
Processes of technological development, such as mass production, have fundamentally shifted the ways that time is understood and valued in industrialized societies (Shippen 2014). Capitalism politicizes time in terms of labor and production, preventing individuals from pursuing their interests, from developing to their full potential, and ultimately from obtaining the good life (Shippen 2014, pp. 4, 12–13; see also Marx [1972] 1978; Berlant 2011). In its relationship with capitalism and labor, colonial time also reinforces patriarchal worldviews and patterns of inequity (Shippen 2014, pp. 11, 26–27, 156–67)8. Moreover, it inhibits people from understanding the important networks of social relations—including relations with the non-human, natural world—in which they are bound and constructs narratives about “reality” that ultimately obscure the dynamic nature of historical processes (Shippen 2014, pp. 13, 113–38; see also Marx [1972] 1978).
Colonial time also constructed boundaries and a sense of otherness between Euro-Americans and Indigenous peoples (Rifkin 2017). In its relation to colonial time, this sense of otherness “implicitly casts non-Euro-American forms of temporal experience as a form of belief, rendering them less real than dominant accounts of a shared, linear time” (Rifkin 2017, p. 20). Kevin Bruyneel has noted the ways that colonial time establishes a gap between what are perceived to be “an ‘advancing people’ and a ‘static’ people” by “locating the latter out of time” (Bruyneel 1997, p. 2; also quoted in Rifkin 2017, p. 5). These understandings are informed by now outdated anthropological definitions of religion advanced by E. B. Tylor and others which understand religion as evolving over time from primitive forms of superstition and magic to monotheistic forms of belief, and then ultimately to science (see, e.g., Deloria [1973] 2003, p. 64). Understanding non-colonial notions of time in this way situates them within a linear temporal history, in that they “appear as deviations that are [nevertheless] transitioning toward a dominant framework” (Rifkin 2017, p. 12).
As Richard Callahan (2024) has detailed in his contribution to this Special Issue, religion as we currently understand it was itself a product of the encounter between European and Indigenous populations (see also Smith 1998). “European Christianity”, Callahan wrote, “was asserted to be the Truth against which to measure other ideas and practices… and to make sense of the differences” (Callahan 2024, p. 10 see also Pratt 1991; Chidester 1996, 2014). The category of religion, then, was made in the “contact zone” and became one mode through which the appropriation of natural resources—and the violence used to obtain them—was condoned and justified. As Callahan aptly noted, “sites of extraction have always also been ‘contact zones’, fraught sites of power and production, where material, cultural, social, and epistemological differences often clash, merge, transform, and create new perspectives and practices” (Callahan 2024, p. 9). As I demonstrate herein, this is especially true of uranium extraction in the United States.
It is also important to note here the ways that Judeo-Christian worldviews have rationalized colonization—and the extractive practices it has engendered—in temporal terms that emphasize the order of creation and the ultimate unfolding of the universe. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) has commented on the “assumed universal applicability” of colonial notions of time (see also Whyte 2018). This temporal framing produces a global timeline on which every event can be named and organized (Chakrabarty 2000, pp. 73–74). Moreover, it manufactures a version of history which “we are all supposed to have shared, consciously or not” (Chakrabarty 2000, pp. 73–74; also quoted in Rifkin 2017, p. 19). Speaking about the revelation of a “divine plan”, Vine Deloria, Jr. noted that temporal constructions, conceived in a colonial fashion, posit “a truth” which is mistakenly perceived as “applicable to all times and places” (Deloria [1973] 2003, p. 65). This truth, he continued, is “so powerful that it must be impressed upon [all] peoples” regardless of whether they have any “connection to the event or to the cultural complex in which it originally made sense” (Deloria [1973] 2003, p. 65). Anna Tsing (2005) has argued similarly that such perspectives operate as a form of “universal reason” articulated by colonizers, which actively reinforces their control of the production of knowledge and power. This universal understanding “opens the way to constantly improving truths and…to a [presumed] better life for all humanity… [that] continues to structure global asymmetries” (Tsing 2005, p. 9).
2.3. Colonial Temporalities and The Rise of the Nuclear Age
One important example of this type of temporal framing is apparent in the long-standing debate in the geologic sciences about the Anthropocene. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer first proposed the term “Anthropocene” in 2000 in the International Geosphere—Biosphere Programme newsletter (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, pp. 17–18). The term, they argued, would aptly demarcate a new geological epoch—one in which human activities (such as the “exploitation of Earth’s resources” and the burning of coal and oil) have had a significant and measurable impact, “including at global scales”, on the earth and its geochemical and biologic systems (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, p. 17). Since the term was first introduced, geologists and other scholars working across the environmental humanities and social sciences have attempted to temporally demarcate when the Anthropocene epoch began, generally positioning it along the Earth’s unfolding geologic history somewhere between the agricultural revolution (e.g., Ellis 2011; Gowdy and Krall 2013) and the industrial revolution (e.g., Crutzen 2002; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Morton 2013; Steffen et al. 2011).
In 2015, however, geologist Jan Zalasiewicz and colleagues9 argued that the boundary for the beginning of the Anthropocene should be set at 1945. This date would “mark a historic turning point of global significance” (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015, p. 201; see also Skrimshire 2018) that precipitated a period of “Great Acceleration” (Steffen et al. 2007) in human technological advancement, population growth, and international relations.
This date is significant because it clearly demarcated the beginning of the nuclear age. Stratigraphic evidence of radionuclides could be mapped to “geologically simultaneous” events around the world, including the first nuclear test (Trinity) in New Mexico on 16 July 1945, and the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015, p. 201; see also Waters et al. 2015). We can see how the extractive legacies of uranium, such as the nuclear atrocities described here, are imagined and mapped as key defining “events” through our colonized temporal histories. Resource extraction unfolds along this geologic timeline as disconnected, singular occurrences, plottable as a series of points that can be mapped, or connected to, particular times and places. Conceived of in this way, extraction becomes an inevitable result of human evolution and scientific progress—as do the technologies that resource extraction has enabled us to produce, whether it be the steam engine, automobiles, or nuclear weapons.
Given its roots in Judeo-Christian religious worldviews, this colonial temporal construction underscores how extraction, then, might also be understood from a teleological perspective as part of a “divine plan” or of the inevitable unfolding of the universe. When we think about uranium extraction along these lines, following that reasoning to its logical conclusion, we can also see the associated scientific and technological developments, social and environmental impacts, and historic events that uranium extraction enabled and precipitated as part of this inevitable and unfolding history.
This is especially true, as I have detailed elsewhere, in terms of the development of nuclear weapons during the Manhattan project and of the ongoing production of nuclear weapons and energy technologies (Nichols 2025). Scientists and politicians believed that the development of nuclear weapons would bring an end to global conflicts (because of their feared catastrophic potential) and usher in a new era of global peace. The development of nuclear weapons, however, functioned not only as a means of protecting American borders. Framed in terms of its “miraculous” and “salvific” potential, nuclear energy, they believed, was also going to lead to a new age of scientific advancement and technological development (Eisenhower 1953; see also Nichols 2025).
But the development of nuclear technologies also reinforced and furthered the colonial project at home and abroad. This is evident in terms of both the production and control of scientific knowledge about nuclear technologies and the continuation of geographic colonial expansion to obtain resources and to test nuclear weapons. It does not consider the egregious harms enacted to human and non-human organisms or environments during extraction, testing, and storage, or the compounded impacts of development and colonization on already marginalized populations. Rather, the success of the Manhattan Project implied a sense of “Truth” (Callahan 2024) about the power and promise of U.S. nuclear weapons development and justified nuclear proliferation as part of a divine plan. Moreover, it reaffirmed the moral superiority of the United States over the Germans during WWII and contributed to nuclear weapons development during the Cold War as one means to prevent the expansion of atheistic communism (Nichols 2025; see also Gunn 2009).
This colonized temporal lens underscores the important connections between religion and extraction and helps to illuminate what I have elsewhere referred to as the “religious implications of our nuclear legacies” (Nichols 2025). Understood in this way, colonial time becomes one mode through which Judeo-Christian religious worldviews and the social, economic, and political ideologies they inform have been used not only to condone the development of nuclear technologies, but also to justify nuclear related injustices around the world—from uranium extraction in the Navajo nation, to nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific, nuclear disasters in Ukraine and Japan, and the yet unknown implications of nuclear waste on future generations of human and non-human organisms and the environment (see Nichols 2025).
3. Rethinking Temporal Legacies of Uranium Extraction
In October 2023, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) made a formal recommendation that the Anthropocene be officially added to the International Chronostratigraphic Chart (ICC) as a new series/epoch, which would directly follow the most recent geologic epoch, the Holocene (Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy 2024). However, instead of 1945, the Working Group suggested that the beginning of the Anthropocene be set at 1952, because it “mark[ed] a sharp upturn in plutonium levels” apparent in the stratigraphic record (Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy 2024). This shift in the date is critical, in my opinion, because it both illuminates and elides the important role that extraction has in colonized temporal histories.
On the one hand, this shift reveals uranium extraction as a necessary and geologically prior event on the historical timeline, in that it is required for the appearance of plutonium in the stratigraphic record. The element plutonium is rarely found in nature and, when it is, only appears in trace amounts. It was first created in a laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley in 1940 and was widely developed during and after the Manhattan project for use in nuclear weapons. Plutonium can only be created from uranium (U-238) through a nuclear fission reaction.
On the other hand, this geologic history, which marks the creation of plutonium as a key event in the evolution of human ingenuity and scientific and technological advancement, masks the role of extraction in this process10. Uranium extraction hence becomes an invisible, though necessary, part of this temporal rendering of human and planetary history. Here again, we observe the implications of religious worldviews and narratives of scientific progress played out through these colonial temporal histories. The environmental and social injustices associated with resources extraction and nuclear colonialism are absent here, overwritten by stories of human advancement, scientific and technological progress, and mastery of the Earth and its resources.
Critically, on 4 March 2024, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) voted to reject the AWG’s proposal, citing several concerns about the dating of the proposed Anthropocene epoch (International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) 2024, p. 1; see also Gibbard et al. 2021, p. 350). Among them, the SQS noted an “alternative narrative”, which was first proposed in 2021, that the Anthropocene should be considered an “event” rather than an epoch (see Gibbard et al. 2021; see also Gibbard et al. 2022). Such a distinction, they argued, would “characterize heterogeneous, multi-scaler, and socially differentiated processes” that took place across vast time scales, while also being “more inclusive of a broad suite of diverse human practices that contribute to earth systems processes” (Gibbard et al. 2021, p. 350).
Defined in this way, the Anthropocene “event” transforms from a thing that happened at an easily identifiable and singular temporal moment (i.e., 1952) into something “markedly time-transgressive” which has “far reaching impacts on global environmental systems” (Gibbard et al. 2022, p. 395). In its complexity, the “event” shatters notions of linear, causally connected, and unfolding temporality, revealing instead a vast web of interconnected, enmeshed, and temporally distributed moments that, taken together, form what we now refer to as the Anthropocene.
This reframing points to an important shift in the way that many scholars, working across the environmental humanities and social sciences, have begun to re-think the human species and its role in biological and geological evolutionary processes. This shift encourages us to ask questions about how certain worldviews, and the ideologies they produce, have informed the ways we think about ourselves and our effects on the world. It advocates multi-scaler and multi-species approaches to re-storying the human that take seriously alternative conceptions of temporality, affective forms of engagement (Schaefer 2015), and the lived experiences of non-human organisms. Much important work has been done in fields including (and beyond) post-human, decolonial, and queer studies to critically rethink human interrelationships with other species and our diverse environments along these lines (see, e.g., Bauman 2018; Bonneuil 2015; Haraway 2016; Liboiron 2021; Rifkin 2017; Schaefer 2015; Tsing 2015).
Among those contributions to this literature which are important to note here, Kyle Whyte (2018) has discussed how rethinking the Anthropocene through Indigenous perspectives can help us better understand the ongoing implications of colonial violence and reimagine climate change. “Indigenous peoples”, Whyte said, “challenge linear narratives of dreadful futures of climate destabilization with their own accounts of history that highlight the reality of constant change and emphasize colonialism’s role in environmental change” (Whyte 2018, p. 225). As Whyte and others have shown, Indigenous peoples “already inhabit what [their] ancestors would have understood as dystopian futures” and have “already endured harmful and rapid environmental transformations due to colonialism and other forms of domination” (Whyte 2018, p. 227; see also Davis and Todd 2017; Fanon [1963] 2004; Whyte 2017; Yusoff 2018). Reframing the Anthropocene as an “event” grounded in a multi-scaler and multi-species understanding takes seriously the forms of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011; Ahmann 2018) and “slow death” (Berlant 2011) that colonial temporalities engender. Moreover, as Berlant has shown, it helps us rethink the ways that particular events are imagined, and to understand the future as not “foreclose29 the possibility of the event taking shape otherwise” (Berlant 2011, p. 6). Rethinking uranium extraction along these lines, I argue, may help to illuminate the complex network of interrelationships in which uranium is bound.
While doing research for my dissertation (Nichols 2021), I was struck by the number of discussions I had with interlocuters about the connections between nuclear technologies and temporality. From conversations about “deep” or geologic time, to musings about “legacies”, “afterlives”, “hauntings”, and “future visions”, those whom I interviewed—individuals who have spent much of their lives working as anti-nuclear activists—were all concerned about the ways that modern scientific and academic discourses conceive of the relationships between nuclear technologies and time. These concerns were primarily framed within conversations about how and where to store radioactive nuclear waste and about the long-term effects of ionizing radiation on human and ecosystem health and viability. Joanna Macy, for instance, said that when it came to nuclear technologies “we were dismissing the implications of our own creativity”11. She emphasized how little we currently know about nuclear waste or about safe methods for interim and long-term storage. She also spoke to the responsibility that we have now to protect future generations—both human and non-human—from the dangers of radioactive waste. This is a responsibility, she impressed, that does not assume nor preclude the possibility that future generations might find alternative or better ways of dealing with nuclear waste. Below, I offer some provisional thoughts about how we might begin to rethink uranium extraction through decolonial temporality and underscore some of the important implications of such a reframing.
4. Uranium Extraction and the American Nuclear Agenda
A decolonial exploration of extraction requires a clear understanding of the legacies of uranium mining in the United States, and how it has been temporally linked to American histories of colonialism and military expansion. In Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation, Dana Powell lists uranium, mined from Navajo lands, among the material and extractable commodities that were “desirable and necessary to fuel the United States’ burgeoning military and economic power” in the 20th century (Powell 2018, p. 36). Uranium became essential in the colonial narrative of American progress not only for fueling scientific advancement during and after WWII, but in reinforcing a national identity of technological and moral superiority. These imagined visions of American identity were predicated on a colonial temporal logic in which Indigenous populations were, and always would be, “vanishing” or “disappearing”. This conceptualization of Indigenous populations understands them “as providing the raw materials of white ‘civilization’… and then succumbing, tragically, to civilization’s advance” (Voyles 2015, p. 97). “Tribal sovereignty”, then, could be understood as posing a “threat to contemporary American political life and political space” (Bruyneel 1997, p. 171; see also Johnson 1994; Newcomb 2008). This was especially true, given that the Navajo were “able to provide [the] raw materials for regional, national, and international capitalist growth” (Powell 2018, p. 36).
The ongoing quest for recoverable domestic uranium reserves during this period also expanded colonial temporal sovereignty well into the geologic past. Voyles, for example, highlighted the way that the Atomic Energy Commission framed a newly discovered uranium reserve (located on Navajo tribal lands) in New Mexico along these lines. Quoting from a speech given by Phillip Merrit of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1950, Voyles noted that the discovery, “deriv[ing] from the ‘Jurassic Age’, …reveals new ‘stratigraphic horizons’ for the pursuit of a new atomic future” (Voyles 2015, p. 72). She went on to say that:
This kind of rhetoric…makes the ‘Jurassic Age’ and other geologic histories the property of the settler’s peculiar sovereignty, brought under the rubric of settler colonial space and time by virtue of what Mel Chen calls the ‘sovereign fantasy’: ‘the national or imperial project of absolute rule and authority’ over land, history, and narrative.
Today, the World Nuclear Association goes even further, setting the beginning of the nuclear fuel cycle back to the “cosmic origins of uranium” approximately 6 billion years ago when it was “formed in the merger of neutron stars” (“World Nuclear Association 2024a). In its ability to reach back through the Jurassic Age and into the cosmological origins of the Earth, the extractive endeavor lays claim not only to the present and future of uranium, but also to its geologic and cosmic past. Laid in the Earth’s crust for eventual discovery and recovery by humans in “pursuit of a new atomic future”, uranium deposits are cast as part of the “divine plan”. This view underscores the connections between religious worldviews, narratives of scientific progress and technological advancement, and colonial histories that understand the human as a trans-temporal, geologic, and cosmic force (see e.g., Bonneuil 2015). Here, the American nuclear agenda becomes inextricably linked to colonial notions of progress, advancement, and human ingenuity, and extends the reach of temporal colonization well beyond the history of human and planetary evolution.
5. Toward a Decolonial Temporality of Extraction
During her keynote presentation at the 2023 Nuclear Ghosts Workshop in Heidelberg, Germany, Karan Barad said that “the very existence of nuclear decay undermines eventfulness, writing a temporality of indefinite ongoingness into the core of radioactive material existence” (Barad 2023, p. 30). The isotope of uranium used in the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, uranium-235 (U-235), has a half-life of approximately 700 million years. Dispersed around the world during American nuclear weapons tests conducted between 1945 and 1992, U-235 lingers in our environments, and will pose potential radiological threats to human and non-human organisms well beyond the foreseeable future. The transgenerational radioactive afterlives of uranium, including the intergenerational implications of resource extraction, nuclear weapons production, and nuclear waste storage, situate uranium within a complex web of relations that extend beyond colonial temporalities.
Re-reading uranium extraction through a decolonial temporal framework helps us understand its entanglements, multiplicity, and complexity. I undertake this work, mindful of Tuck and Yang’s (2012) insistence that decolonization should not be used as a metaphor and of Fanon’s warning that efforts to decolonize are also always inherently violent (Fanon [1963] 2004). As Fanon told us, decolonial endeavors, in whatever forms they may take, demand a change in the consciousness of the colonizers on the basis of knowledge and experiences that have always been present, always been known by certain people, and always been repressed by certain others (Fanon [1963] 2004, p. 1). Efforts to decolonize “never [go] unnoticed, for [decolonization] focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state [the colonized] into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History” (Fanon [1963] 2004, p. 2). Influenced by Whyte (2018), I am also mindful of the ways that Indigenous groups around the world have been caught up in and impacted by colonial histories that have already brought apocalyptic social transformations and dramatic environmental change. Following Endres, I undertake this work aware of the stakes (Endres 2023, p. 2) which, as I see them, are social, political, economic, environmental, multi-scaler, and trans-temporal. I offer this reading in an effort to support and elevate the important work of nuclear decolonization and ongoing resistance to nuclear colonialism being done by Indigenous activists and their allies to “enact sovereignty and self-determination toward protecting relationships with Lands, lifeways, and sacred practices from nuclear technologies” (Endres 2023, pp. 2, 29–30).
Unlike colonial temporality, which advances the idea of a single, shared, linear history of the human, decolonial temporality recognizes that “there is no homogenous sense of time shared by all societies” (Deloria [1973] 2003, p. 64). Rather, “there [have] always been a great number of different, interlocking ‘epochs’… at any given moment: multiple modes of production, diversities of belief, contending memories, and competing future visions” (Lyons 2010, p. 13; cited in Rifkin 2017, p. 15). Whyte (2018) has spoken to the ways that Indigenous experience of “spiraling time” help to disrupt linear notions of temporality. Spiraling time includes the “varied experiences of time that we [Indigenous people] have as participants within living narratives involving our ancestors and descendants” (Whyte 2018, p. 229). These experiences include and “may be lived through narratives of cyclicality, reversal, dream-like scenarios, simultaneity, counter-factuality, irregular rhythms, ironic un-cyclicality, slipstream, parodies of linear pragmatism, [and] eternality, among many others” (Whyte 2018, p. 229).
In indigenous communities, one form of illuminating and evidencing such multiplicity is through the use of storytelling (Rifkin 2017; see also Whyte 2018). Stories not only work to “orient perception” about “ongoing process[es] of becoming” and about how one understands the present as contextualized, but they also “register relations between persons and places as well as forms of collective belonging” (Rifkin 2017, pp. 36–37). Diverse relationalities with people, other-than-human-beings, and land produce “affective legacies” that shape how individuals understand and story the world (Rifkin 2017, p. 35). These affective legacies include the feelings, sensations, and emotions that individuals might have—including things like awe, reverence, wonder, and fear—that inform their worldview and the ways that they make sense of the world they experience (Rifkin 2017, p. 35)12. These stories “move through the world” and create important forms of connection that inform relationships and experiences between land, people, and non-human organisms (Rifkin 2017, p. 36; see also Endres 2023; Cabral [1977] 2016). Moreover, affective legacies inform the ways that we understand time, not simply by reframing events outside of a colonial temporal framework, but because they inform connections and experiences that are not acknowledged and cannot be easily understood through colonial temporalities (Rifkin 2017; see also Endres 2023).
Understood through such a decolonial temporal lens, uranium does not have a single, identifiable history, nor does it yield any certain interaction, affective experience, or potential future. Rather, its embeddedness within the world and its interactions with human and non-human beings and our environments, in our deep pasts, presents, and futures, may be understood as myriad and complex.
6. Re-Storying Uranium Extraction
The ways that we story uranium matters. Understood through a colonial temporal lens, uranium is a reflection of human (and specifically white American) ingenuity, mastery of science and technology, and control over the Earth and its natural resources. This rendering, however, obscures the very real, tangible, and detrimental effects of uranium—of the extractive processes used to mine and refine it, and of the technologies that uranium is used to manufacture (especially nuclear weapons and nuclear power)—on humans, land, non-human organisms, and environmental systems. How we story uranium here and now will inform the ways that we interact with it and, in turn, will shape the inextricably connected lives that we share with it.
6.1. Entangled Landscapes, Integrative Legacies
Rethinking uranium’s connection to land, environmental systems, humans, and other-than-human organisms is one mode through which we might begin to re-story the imbricated relationships in which uranium is entrenched. As Rifkin argued, “such emplaced and emplacing stories…generate a frame of reference for relation across time” and can “provide orientation with respect to [a] place’s relation to other places, its ongoing participation in a shared history and futurity, and the ethics that guide how one connects to the land and to other people” (Rifkin 2017, p. 45). Moreover, such stories may help us better understand how affective experiences with land, people, and other-than-human species inform “collective processes of becoming” (Rifkin 2017, p. 45).
Uranium connects communities (human and non-human) and landscapes in vast geospatial and temporal networks. Indigenous and Native American communities, for instance, are bound up with Australia Aborigines and various African populations in shared histories of colonial violence and resource extraction. Their individual and communal experiences, contextually dependent, varied, and diverse though they are, entangle in dynamic ways when we think about land as a resource and bodies as expendable. Rowe, for example, has spoken to the ways that “the historical constitutive entanglements of extraction and race account for the continuing ways Black and brown bodies are employed as sacrifice or buffer zones, sheltering white bodies from the immediate and localized environmental harms of extractive endeavors” (Rowe 2023, pp. 62–63). Furthermore, uranium used in nuclear weapons detonated around the world complicates these entanglements, connecting victims and survivors from the American bombings in Japan to the dislocated inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, integrating them into this dynamic web of violence stemming from extraction. The production of nuclear technologies (weapons and power) and nuclear waste storage also inform and shape these entanglements, connecting peoples and landscapes from Rocky Flats, Colorado, Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and Olkiluoto Island, Finland13. They link bodies and places across generations from the first encounters with uranium deposits in the environment, to irradiated landscapes like Chernobyl, and to the yet unknown impacts of ionizing radiation in the environment on future beings and biologic processes14.
These entanglements produce a sense of shared experience despite difference, and work to remind us of the important ways that collective experience and storying can inform our understanding of uranium. Re-imagined and storied in this way, extraction zones become important sites where synergistic connections are created between individuals, especially around shared affective experiences with uranium (which might include experiences of grief, trauma, and loss, but also those of hope and resilience) (see e.g., Nichols 2021). Moreover, these sites foster integrative forms of resistance against ongoing legacies of extractive violence and nuclear colonization.
6.2. Transgenerational Implications
Another important point of consideration when re-storying uranium focuses on the transgenerational and social justice implications of ionizing radiation from nuclear technologies. In 2006, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council published an updated study on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII) (NAS-NRC 2006). This study, which tracked the health consequences of human exposure to ionizing radiation over time, contained data that showed disproportionate impacts of harm linked to biological sex and age at time of exposure15. The BEIR VII report was based primarily on data derived from the Life Span Study, an ongoing study that began in 1950 that has tracked the human health consequences of radiation exposure on the survivors of the American atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. Subsequent independent research by Makhijani et al. (2006, 2007) and Olson (2011, 2019) analyzed the BEIR VII report and evidenced the disproportionate harm from radiation exposure to females, especially in childhood. Olson and I have shown that there is now a consensus in the scientific research about the human health consequences of radiation exposure that biological sex and age at time of exposure are contributing and compounding factors in radiation harm (Nichols and Olson 2024). We have also noted, however, that there is a glaring absence in extant scholarly research about how the human lifecycle impacts radiation exposure outcomes, including and especially when thinking about the biological effects of radiation on future generations (Nichols and Olson 2024).
Despite these important findings, international standards for radiological protection have failed, in general, to consider those most harmed by radiation exposure and to set global standards for protection accordingly (Nichols and Olson 2024). Many of the global regulatory bodies maintain that there are “safe” levels of radiation exposure, despite robust scientific evidence that shows that any exposure can (but does not always) lead to adverse health outcomes over the course of the lifetime and that compounding exposures amplify that possibility. These standards also often fail to acknowledge that exposure to children is much more harmful than it is to adults. None of the commissions, agencies, or departments tasked with setting radiological protection standards, to date, include regulatory limits or protection models that are focused on children, specifically girls, which has been demonstrated to be the post-birth life phase that is the most harmed when exposed to radiation (Olson 2019; Nichols and Olson 2024). Moreover, none of these regulatory bodies have openly acknowledged that there is a transgenerational risk of harm from radiation exposure.
The past and continued failures to base radiological protection standards on those most harmed make regulatory bodies complicit in ongoing legacies of injustice and colonial violence linked to uranium extraction and the production of nuclear technologies. Moreover, the continued assertion by regulatory bodies that there is some level of radiation exposure that is “safe” and admissible presumes a future replete with nuclear technologies. Such stories about uranium, nuclear weapons, and radiological protections perpetuate logics of temporal colonization and religious ideologies that not only justify the creation and use of nuclear technologies but that also promote and enable their continued existence. Re-storying uranium in a way that illuminates the colonial legacies, issues of social and environmental justice, and transgenerational violence that it continues to enact is imperative for envisioning a future not foreclosed to nuclear technologies and radiological violence.
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Amanda M. Nichols www.mdpi.com
