This book recently came to our attention and we wanted to call it to yours:
Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet by Timoth J. LeCain, published by Rutgers University Press in 2009.
While primarily about open pit copper mines, Southwest Oregon is being proposed as the location for a nickel strip mine and a new gold mine on the Oregon/California boarder, so understanding the long term impact of mining is important for our citizenry and communities. Here's excerpts from the description of
Mass Destruction:
Mass destruction mining soon spread around the nation and the globe, providing raw materials essential to the mass production and mass consumption that increasingly defined the emerging “American way of life.” At the dawn of the last century, Jackling’s open pit replaced immense but constricted underground mines that probed nearly a mile beneath the earth, to become the ultimate symbol of the modern faith that science and technology could overcome all natural limits. A new culture of mass destruction emerged that promised nearly infinite supplies not only of copper, but also of coal, timber, fish, and other natural resources.
But, what were the consequences? Timothy J. LeCain deftly analyzes how open-pit mining continues to affect the environment in its ongoing devastation of nature and commodification of the physical world. The nation’s largest toxic Superfund site would be one effect, as well as other types of environmental dead zones around the globe. Yet today, as the world’s population races toward American levels of resource consumption, truly viable alternatives to the technology of mass destruction have not yet emerged.
About the Author:
Timothy J. LeCain is an assistant professor in the department of history at Montana State University and a historical consultant and expert witness
in environmental litigation for the United States Department of Justice. Visit his website for the book. |
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