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.

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.

For more information, see the series description.

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.

If you visit the web page at http://www.envirotechweb.org/ you will find many new improvements, such as the possibility to post comments and start discussions of news items, options to post your own news items, RSS feeds of new posts, a calendar of upcoming events, as well as a brand new look.

Please let me know how this new format works for you – all comments regarding the web page and this email are welcome!

Thanks,
Finn Arne Jørgensen

List of recent posts to the Envirotech web site

News Items

• Lost in Transcription
• Sharing Waters: St. Lawrence-Great Lakes – A Special Issue of Québec Studies
• A Call for Manuscripts: The University of Akron Press Series on Technology and the Environment
• WANTED: Graduate Candidate interested in Environmental Communication
• Press Release from Montana Tech
• Literary Sources relevant to Envirotechies
• Media Sources relevant to Envirotechies
• Manufactured Landscapes available for institutional sale and rental
• Solidarity, Sustainability, and Non-Violence (SSNV) Research Newsletter: If not the MDGs, then what?
• Short Films on Air Pollution
• Jeffrey Stine’s Recent Retrospective on Worster’s Dust Bowl in T&C
• Manufactured Landscapes DVD

Member News

• New envirotech PhD
• Frank Popper
• Pat Munday on SHOT Envirotech Roundtable
• Pat Munday: President Bush Grills an Endangered Species
• Honorable Mention for Book by Envirotechies
• Walker and LeCain Awarded NSF Grant: Will Compare Japanese and American Reactions to Mining Pollutants
• Two new books edited by Tom Zeller

Conference Announcements

• Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World
• CFP: 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS 08)
• CFP: World Congress of Environmental History 2009
• CFP: Ecological restoration and human flourishing in the era of anthropogenic climate change. September 5-7, 2008, Clemson University
• ICOHTEC 2008 Call for Papers

http://www.acqs.org/qc_studies_journal/table_of_contents.html

Québec Studies 42
Fall 2006/Winter 2007

Sharing Waters: St. Lawrence-Great Lakes
A special issue coordinated by Vincent Desroches and Sylvie Paquerot

Vincent Desroches and Sylvie Paquerot Sharing the Waters: The challenges of Understanding the Other

Madeleine Cantin-Cumyn Legal Status of Water in Quebec

Nicolas Milot and Laurent Lepage The Integrated Management of the St. Lawrence River

Brian Slack and Claude Comtois Short Sea Shipping: The Need for a Realistic Assessment

Sébastien Blouin et Frédéric Lasserre Eau potable au Québec dans la vallée du Saint-Laurent: les impacts des changements climatiques

Alexandre Brun Gestion de l’eau au Québec: quand la politique de l’eau et politique agricole se conjuguent à l’imparfait

Jean-François Bibeault and Christiane Hudon Water Availability: An Overview of Issues and Future Challenges for the St. Lawrence River

Patrick Forrest The Legal Geography of Water Exports: A Case Study of the Transboundary Municipal Water Supplies between Stanstead (Québec) and Derby Line (Vermont)

Sylvie Paquerot The Challenges of Legitimate Governance of the Great Lakes and of the St. Lawrence: Between Ecosystem Considerations, Diversity, and Fragmentation

Amy Lovecraft Bridging the Biophysical and Social

Previously published volumes in the series include:

Jeffrey Stine, Mixing the Waters: Environment, Politics, and the Building of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway

James Rodger Fleming and Henry A. Gemery, eds., Science, Technology, and the Environment: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective

James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California

Dale H. Porter, The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London

William McGucken, Lake Erie Rehabilitated: Controlling Cultural Eutrophication, 1960s-1990s

Hugh S. Gorman, Redefining Efficiency: Pollution Concerns, Regulatory Mechanisms, and Technological Change in the U.S. Petroleum Industry

Jonathan Richmond, Transport of Delight: The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles

Please contact the series editor:

Stephen Cutcliffe, STS Program, 327 Maginnes Hall, Lehigh University, 9 West Packer Ave., Bethlehem, PA 18015.

Phone 610-758-3350

e-mail: stephen.cutcliffe@lehigh.edu.

Luis
_______________________________________________________

The Vol. 3, No. 11, November 2007 issue of the

Solidarity, Sustainability, and Non-Violence (SSNV) Research Newsletter http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv03n11.html

has been posted. The focus this month is the question:

“IF NOT THE MDGs, THEN WHAT?”

Table of contents:

RESEARCH REPORT & MONTHLY DIGEST
1. Global News & Emerging Issues
2. Negative Assessments of the MDGs
3. Positive Assessments of the MDGs
4. Balanced Assessment of the MDGs
5. If Not the MDGs, Then What?
6. Current Research on the MDGs
7. Web Resources & Links Database
8. Prayer, Study, and Action
9. Links to Archived Newsletters

INVITED PAPER
Eco-Humanism and Popular System Dynamics as Preconditions for
Sustainable Development, by Leslaw Michnowski.

http://pelicanweb.org/solisustv03n11michnowski.html

Please forward this notice to friends and colleagues who might be interested in the global transition to a new culture.

Sincerely,
Luis

PS — Consider writing an article for the newsletter!

————————————————————–
Luis T. Gutierrez, Ph.D., P.E.
The Pelican Web ~ http://pelicanweb.org/ SSNV Newsletter ~ http://pelicanweb.org/solisust.html
Email: pelican@pelicanweb.org

The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century