MASS DESTRUCTION:

The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (Rutgers University Press, 2009)

Timothy J. LeCain

Mass Destruction is the fascinating story of Daniel Jackling, a Utah mining engineer who created the gigantic Bingham open-pit copper mine near Salt Lake City. One of the largest human-made artifacts on the planet, the Bingham Pit entailed literally “moving a mountain,” replacing it with a yawning chasm that is now three-quarters of a mile deep and two and a half miles wide (below).

Bingham Pit

Jackling blasted out more than five billion tons of low-grade ore with a new system of “mass destruction” mining that gave Americans the cheap and abundant copper needed to electrify the nation. Jackling’s open-pit mass destruction mining technology soon replaced constricted and deadly underground mines like those in Butte, Montana, that probed nearly a mile beneath the earth. Mass Destruction tells the story of the deep Butte mines as well, where miners survived only with the aid of advanced life-support technologies. When these machines failed them, as in the disastrous 1917 Speculator Fire, scores could perish.

Berkeley Pit Flooded

Jackling’s immense pit and scores of imitators became the ultimate symbol of the modern faith that science and technology could overcome all natural limits. What emerged was a new culture of mass destruction that promised nearly infinite supplies not only of copper, but also of coal, timber, fish, and other natural resources. Mass destruction technology was thus the foundation of mass consumption and the celebrated modern “American Way of Life.” Yet, the costs were paid in immense dead zones of environmental and human devastation. Back in Butte, underground mining gave way to the Berkeley Pit. Abandoned in 1982, the pit is now flooded with acidic water impregnated with a toxic brew of poisonous heavy metals (above). Part of the largest Superfund site in the nation, the Berkeley Pit is a haunting reminder of the consequences of the still-growing American and global appetite for copper and other essential natural resources.

Mass Destruction offers a compelling look at a critical but largely overlooked chapter in the creation of the modern technological world. Mass destruction technology was environmentally devastating, yet it also wired America and much of the world. Where future supplies of copper to do the same for the billions of new consumers in India, Brazil, and China will come from remains a troubling question.

Advance praise for Mass Destruction:

“The colossal open-pit mines of the past century have left behind some of the largest artifacts on the face of the earth. Timothy LeCain’s engaging history of this mega-industrial enterprise is remarkable for its insight, clarity, and wisdom. Readers interested in the contours of our technological and environmental past—and the inextricable connections between the natural and artificial—will find Mass Destruction a treasure trove of reasoning and enlightenment.”

—Jeffrey K. Stine, Smithsonian Institution, author of America’s Forested Wetlands:

“This is an eloquent and searing portrait of the environmental cost of the coins in our pockets and wires in our walls. As Timothy LeCain argues in this hard-hitting book, the quest for efficiency that gave us mass production and mass consumption also brought us mass destruction of the environment.”

— Edmund Russell, University of Virginia, author of War and Nature

For more information, visit Rutgers University Press or buy the book on Amazon.

The hurricane protection systems that failed New Orleans when Katrina roared on shore in 2005 were the product of four decades of engineering hubris, excruciating delays, and social conflict. In Perilous Place, Powerful Storms, Craig E. Colten traces the protracted process of erecting massive structures designed to fend off tropical storms and examines how human actions and inactions left the system incomplete on the eve of its greatest challenge.

For more information see: http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1177

Historians have long assumed that new industrial machines and power sources eliminated work animals from nineteenth-century America, yet a bird’s-eye view of nineteenth-century society would show millions of horses supplying the energy necessary for industrial development. Horses were ubiquitous in cities and on farms, providing power for transportation, construction, manufacturing, and agriculture. On Civil War battlefields, thousands of horses labored and died for the Union and the Confederacy hauling wagons and mechanized weaponry.

The innovations that brought machinery to the forefront of American society made horses the prime movers of these machines for most of the nineteenth century. Mechanization actually increased the need for horsepower by expanding the range of tasks requiring it. Indeed, the single most significant energy transition of the antebellum era may have been the dramatic expansion in the use of living, breathing horses as a power technology in the development of industrial America.

Ann Greene argues for recognition of horses’ critical contribution to the history of American energy and the rise of American industrial power, and a new understanding of the reasons for their replacement as prime movers. Rather than a result of “inevitable” technological change, it was Americans’ social and political choices about power consumption that sealed this animal’s fate. The rise and fall of the workhorse was defined by the kinds of choices that Americans made and would continue to make—choices that emphasized individual mobility and autonomy, and assumed, above all, abundant energy resources.

Book description from Harvard University Press web site.

Read the New York Times book review here.

We are very glad Joel received this recognition for his contributions to the field and would like to join SHOT in congratulating him.

The SHOT award citation begins like this: “Since the 1990s, one of the most exciting developments in historical studies has been the convergence of environmental and technological history. Joel Arthur Tarr began to explore this convergence a generation earlier. His scholarship, both painstaking and pioneering, has pointed the way for many scholars now working at the intersection of technological and environmental history. From the late 1960s to this day, as a scholar, educator, and citizen, he has studied the interplay of human-built systems, processes, and values with the natural environment. Beginning his career as an urban historian, he asked new questions, examined new sources, and synthesized a new range of disciplinary approaches. At once an urban, environmental, and technological historian, Joel Tarr demonstrates the impossibility and irrelevance of labeling subfields, when the unifying and ultimate topic is the story of humanity’s interactions with the non-human world.”

Joel Tarr is the Richard S. Caliguiri University Professor of History & Policy in the Department of History, Carnegie Mellom University.

A new book from envirotechie Jeffrey K. Stine: America’s Forested Wetlands: From Wasteland to Valued Resource

From the darkest, most forbidding swamp to the smallest soggy bog at the side of a housing development, wetlands provide invaluable ecological services to life on earth. Yet, prior to the 1930s, few people worried about the mounting loss of these essential landscapes.

America’s Forested Wetlands chronicles the history of American attitudes and actions toward the ambiguous transitional areas between dry land and open water. From the clear-cutting of cypress swamps and the wholesale filling and draining of marshes and bottomlands to the growing recognition of how these lands contribute to flood control, water quality, and biological diversity and on to today’s energetic political debates over “no net loss” policies designed to protect, enhance, restore, or recreate wetlands, the story involves increasing human understanding and appreciation of an important but limited resource.

America’s Forest Wetlands addresses one of the most persistent and contentious issues in natural resources management and offers an essential primer for landowners, teachers, students, journalists, and government decision makers and advisors.

To order, contact the Forest History Society at 919/682-9319, or order online at www.foresthistory.org.

For more information, see http://finnarne.jorgensenweb.net/