How did you come to choose your research topic?

I have travelled and done research in Latin America for over 20 years. Amazonia fascinates me particularly: this biome spreads over 9 countries, it has an immense biodiversity and is so important in terms of biodiversity, hydrology and as a carbon stock. I first visited Amazonia over 10 years ago, when I was a master student at the Institute. Even though my background was in history, I redirected my master to focus on themes related to environment and nature conservation – I didn’t know yet about “environmental history” as a field of research.

After obtaining my master’s degree, I spent six years working for different UN agencies, most notably the UN Environment Programme. I worked on very relevant topics, but my job only motivated me to a certain extent – a lot of time was lost in administrative work, and there was hardly any time to get to know certain contexts properly. For example, I managed a study in Haiti, but was only allowed to spend short periods in the country. For me, this was unsatisfactory, I needed to understand what was really going on, and to be close to the people affected.

In 2018, I finally made the jump back to academia. One of the reasons was that the Institute had hired Susanna Hecht, an author whose work on Amazonia I had already been reading. My cooperation with her as my PhD supervisor turned out really well. I started doing preliminary research in Suriname, focusing on different ethnic groups and their relations to mining activities.

Right after my preliminary thesis defence, the pandemic hit and for the next two years I couldn’t reach Amazonia anymore. In those two years, I continued studying the mining history of Suriname through archival sources. When I zoomed out from the mines to also look at the aluminium smelters, I realised that these required hydroelectric projects to be able to operate. Then, I started recognising a similar structure (which I call the “aluminium complex” in my dissertation) in Brazil, and another one in Venezuela. That is when I decided that I should make aluminium the central component of my research. Suddenly, I was writing about complexes that were so big they could be literally seen from outer space – but that no one had written about as a single phenomenon. They are only obvious if you depart from the aluminium and look at what goes into its production.

In 2022, with the pandemic finally under control, I received a Doc.Mobility scholarship to spend a semester at the Center for Advanced Amazonian Studies in Belém, Brazil. I spent that semester travelling to the different sites that were of interest for my research, performing interviews, connecting with local researchers, and giving guest lectures at local schools and universities. It was quite a tour de force to do research in all these locations in four countries (Brazil, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela), sometimes under very difficult circumstances, but it was also very rewarding and captivating.

Can you describe your thesis questions and your methodology?

With my dissertation, I have aimed

• to provide an overview of the emergence and development of the aluminium complex in Amazonia;
• to situate it against the backdrop of the social and environmental history of aluminium production worldwide;
• to assess how the aluminium industry has viewed and portrayed traditional populations in Amazonia;
• to record traditional populations’ memories of their interactions with the aluminium industry;
• to assess to what extent the aluminium industry has been able to live up to its “promise” of development; and
• to record conflicting interpretations of what the current turn to “sustainability” would entail for the aluminium sector, and to contribute to bridging existing gaps between such interpretations.

I visited European and South American archives, not only to unravel the historical events, but especially to see how the affected populations were described – if they were mentioned at all. I travelled through South America to find the locations where these affected populations currently live, and I used ethnographic and oral history methods to learn from them about the same events that I found in the archival trail, but from the opposite perspective.

In the final year, I started working more closely together with bauxite and aluminium companies themselves. Many of them have changed their production methods in an attempt to make their production processes more “sustainable”. This has led to improvements in some cases, while in other cases the impacts are not really that impressive (you can read more about that in an article I wrote in Aluminium International Today).

What are your major findings?

I found how the development of an aluminium complex in a developing country was invariably presented as an offer that one cannot refuse: it was expected that it would make these countries rich and modern. People have realised for quite some time that mining-centred economies risk becoming victim of the “resource curse”, but aluminium smelting is an industrial activity, and countries like Suriname and Guyana thought (and sometimes still think) that by building the necessary infrastructure, they could become “industrialised” and “developed”, and escape the fate of a purely “extractive” economy. In the cases of Brazil and Venezuela, erecting an aluminium complex was really a way to modernise and integrate the Amazonian interior of these countries (consistently described as backward), sometimes even opening up parts of the country that the central governments themselves hardly knew. The “dream of modernity” also justified enormous expenses, for example to build the necessary hydroelectric dams to power the aluminium smelting. This caused Brazil to become one of the world’s main debtors to the World Bank, and ate a large proportion of Venezuela’s oil revenues. 

For these mines, dams and industrial facilities to emerge, governments had to remove the original populations. The latter’s activities (hunting, fishing, and subsistence agriculture) were alleged to be incompatible with the development that aluminium would bring, and sometimes even presented as ecologically destructive. Governments quickly removed these populations from their lands, often without or with very limited compensation, as it was believed that the aluminium complex would benefit everyone in the long run.

This turned out to be wishful thinking. The aluminium complex did provide some jobs, but not as many as the livelihoods that had disappeared because of its emergence. New jobs were created, for engineers and other high-level professionals, but farming and fishing livelihoods disappeared in turn. Aluminium smelting did not help “develop” Amazonia as foreseen. Instead, it led to new “company towns” that sometimes transformed into industrial hubs, while local populations became the new urban poor. The industrial infrastructure, as well as the roads and powerlines, also provided access to formerly inhospitable regions where gold mining then emerged. One extractive activity opened the way for the next one. But such impacts of aluminium smelting are rarely taken into account.

What could be the social and political implications of your thesis?

My dissertation can be read as a cautionary tale. When attempting to industrialise in order to achieve development and modernity, countries have to take into account that not all kinds of industrialisation will contribute to employment or will have trickle-down effects. Aluminium, for one, is an industry that requires a lot of energy and employs very few people, while most developing countries have the opposite problem: they are short on energy and require jobs. These countries are better off without an aluminium complex.

On the other hand, the companies that in the present day produce aluminium in Amazonia are mostly (run by) conglomerates from the Global North, while at the same time the aluminium sector as a whole (like so many metals and minerals) is falling into Asian hands. A movement is underway whereby Northern audiences increasingly demand sustainable production, including of metals – whereas most Asian producers have lower social and environmental production standards. 

The only sustainable metal is the one that is left in the ground, but if we assume that metals are necessary (for the energy transition, for example), some of the best practices in existence are carried out by those companies that source their bauxite from the Brazilian Amazon. This places me in front of a dilemma: I am convinced that aluminium production in Amazonia is a bad idea in the first place, but now that the entire complex is already there and not likely to be torn down again, I think it is better that we, academics, cooperate with the producers currently present in the Brazilian Amazon, so that they can improve their practices, rather than to oppose them with the possible consequence that the entire sector will come into the hands of companies with much lower social and environmental performance. This occurred in Guyana, and the consequences are not positive.

What are you doing now?

I am currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Synthetic Lives: The Futures of Mining”, led by Professor Filipe Calvão here at the Institute. I’m broadening my horizon to include other metals and minerals beyond aluminium, and to evaluate ongoing technological changes in their production processes from a social science perspective. At the same time, I’m still closely connected to the aluminium sector. Together with Professor Calvão and Professor Hufty, I have also taught a course on “Extractivism” in the interdisciplinary curriculum.

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Simon Lobach defended his PhD thesis in International History on 12 February 2024. Professor Amalia Ribi Forclaz presided over the committee, which included Professor Susanna Hecht and Associate Professor Filipe Calvão, Thesis Co-supervisors, and, as External Reader, Professor Marjo de Theije, Faculty of Social Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

Citation of the PhD thesis: 
Lobach, Simon. “Aluminium from Amazonia: A Socio-Environmental History of an Industrial Complex in a Peopled Biome (1915–Present).” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2024.
Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the thesis via this page of the repository. Others can contact Dr Lobach.

Banner image: Dead trees in a branch of the reservoir created by the Brokopondo dam, Suriname. Photograph courtesy of Ted Sun.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.