Corporate Futures, Energy Transition, and Natural Prosthetics in Colombia’s Cesar Mining Corridor

This essay examines the socioecological transformations of mining and post-mining landscapes in the mining corridor of the Cesar Department, northern Colombia. When an open pit mine is about to close or has recently closed, companies promote post-mining strategies framed as ecosystem restoration and social compensation. Yet daily practices reveal a contrasting reality: confinement, land and water grabbing, pollution, disregard for legal rulings, and large-scale ecological disruption. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted since 2018, I discuss how landscapes shaped by these specific forms of capitalist extraction configure transformed, fragmented, and reconstituted forms of nature suitable for future forms of extractive value production through rehabilitated yet toxic ecologies, agro-industrial projects, and energy transition initiatives. These processes generate prosthetic landscapes and ecologies where nature is simultaneously restored and destroyed. I argue that corporate narratives of restoration, responsibility, and compensation function as mirages, obscuring violent corporate practices while legitimizing emerging regimes of energy extractivism.