Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet

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.

• War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Environmental History and the American South Ser.)
• A Plague of Sheep (Studies in Environment and History)
• Baptized in PCBs (New Directions in Southern Studies)
• Car Country: An Environmental History (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)
• Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New Approaches to the Americas)
• Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West
• Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
• Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES
• Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
• We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher