Thinking Like a Copper Mine: An Ecological Approach to Corporate Ethos and Prosōpon

ABSTRACT

This essay uses Aldo Leopold’s essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” as a heuristic for analyzing the rhetorical processes of erasure that have created one of the largest open pit copper mines on the planet: The Bingham Canyon Mine (BCM). Contributing to studies of corporate rhetoric, persona criticism, and nonhuman agencies, I argue that the BCM, and its corporate owner Rio Tinto, is characteristic of Being-in-the-Anthropocene and informs rhetoricians about our extra-human ethos, or manner of dwelling, as an entwinement with corporate actors. Taking Rio Tinto as a synecdoche for corporate personhood and persona (prosōpon), I make the case for an ecological approach to corporate disclosedness that accounts for the earthly resources of corporate rhetorical invention (e.g., copper). Through the later work of Martin Heidegger, I show how the BCM has become a standing reserve within a corporate world picture that is rhetorically apparent in the rhetorical architecture of Salt Lake City, Utah.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• Bingham Canyon Mine
• persona
• Rio Tinto
• standing reserve

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank both of the anonymous reviewers and Emma Bloomfield for their helpful feedback in the development of this essay. The author is also thankful for the support of this project from the University of Louisville’s Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and all of its fellows during the 2020–2021 academic year.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Heidegger’s deep critique of humanism, which posits how “the idea of the humanity of the human” has replaced “the humanity of the human” (Malviya), can also help expand environmental justice beyond the moralistic hammers of the “human justice movement” that have silenced the wildness of wilderness (e.g., mountains; DeLuca, “Manifesto” 27).

² Lark, Utah, is another mining ghost town that vanished a few years later (1977) when juggernaut company Kennecott Copper decided to use it for overburden, or waste rock (Dark).

³ This epoch, however, does not come without its own differences in power and privilege, as we must also consider the different levels of intersectional violences (environmental, racial, sexual, economic) against Black, Indigenous, and persons of color that have been standing reserves for white colonial capitalism, and its different kinds of corporatism, at different rates of extraction (e.g., Apache–Navajo nations, Black Mesa, chattel slavery, the legacy of settler colonialism; Anzaldúa; Smith; Voyles).