George Vrtis & John R. McNeill 
Mining North America [EPUB ebook] 
An Environmental History since 1522

 Over the past five hundred years, North Americans have increasingly relied on mining to produce much of their material and cultural life. From cell phones and computers to cars, roads, pipes, pans, and even wall tile, mineral-intensive products have become central to North American societies. As this process has unfolded, mining has also indelibly shaped the natural world and the human societies within it. Mountains have been honeycombed, rivers poisoned, forests leveled, and the consequences of these environmental transformations have fallen unevenly across North America.

 

Drawing on the work of scholars from Mexico, the United States, and Canada,
Mining North America examines these developments. It covers an array of minerals and geographies while bringing mining into the core debates that animate North American environmental history. Taken all together, the essays in this book make a powerful case for the centrality of mining in forging North American environments and societies.

Tabella dei contenuti

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments


Introduction: Of Mines, Minerals, and North American Environmental History

George Vrtis and J. R. Mc Neill


PART ONE. CAPITALIST TRANSFORMATIONS


1. Exhausting the Sierra Madre: Mining Ecologies in Mexico over the Longue Durée

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert


2. Reconstructing the Environmental History of Colonial Mining: The Real del Catorce Mining District, Northeastern New Spain/Mexico, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Antonio Avalos-Lozano and Miguel Aguilar-Robledo


PART TWO. INDUSTRIAL CATALYSTS


3. A World of Mines and Mills: Precious-Metals Mining, Industrialization, and the Nature of the Colorado Front Range

George Vrtis


4. Consequences of the Comstock: The Remaking of Working Environments on America’s Largest Silver Strike, 1859–1880

Robert N. Chester III


5. Dust to Dust: The Colorado Coal Mine Explosion Crisis of 1910

Thomas G. Andrews


6. Copper and Longhorns: Material and Human Power in Montana’s Smelter Smoke War, 1860–1910

Timothy James Le Cain


7. Efficiency, Economics, and Environmentalism: Low-Grade Iron Ore Mining in the Lake Superior District, 1913–2010

Jeffrey T. Manuel


PART THREE. HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE


8. Mining the Atom: Uranium in the Twentieth-Century American West

Eric Mogren


9. A Comparative Case Study of Uranium Mine and Mill Tailings Regulation in Canada and the United States

Robynne Mellor


10. The Giant Mine’s Long Shadow: Arsenic Pollution and Native People in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories

John Sandlos and Arn Keeling


11. Iron Mines, Toxicity, and Indigenous Communities in the Lake Superior Basin

Nancy Langston


12. If the Rivers Ran South: Tar Sands and the State of the Canadian Nation

Steven M. Hoffman


13. Quebec Asbestos: Triumph and Collapse, 1879–1983

Jessica van Horssen


Afterword: Mining, Memory, and History

Andrew C. Isenberg


Contributors

Index

Circa l’autore

J. R. Mc Neill is Professor of History and University Professor at Georgetown University. His most recent books are The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 and Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914.George Vrtis is Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Carleton College.