Environmental History of Mining

To the casual observer, the topic of mining history is a natural fit with the field of environmental history. Mining, after all, has caused massive landscape changes; mines and their downstream production facilities are responsible for large-scale air, water, and soil pollution problems. After mines close, they are very often the focus of complex environmental remediation projects, some of which raise new pollution risks and trade-offs for nearby communities, all potential fodder for the work of environmental historians. Furthermore, scholars and popular historians have published a vast amount of mining history focused on themes such as labor, the social life of mining towns, mine accidents, and business history. Many of these works are local histories that concentrate on an individual mine, a particular labor dispute, or a single mining company. In terms of genre, these works have taken the form of memoirs (authored by prospectors or individual miners), oral histories, commissioned company histories, and scholarly works, all valuable scaffolding on which to build environmental histories. Nonetheless, the vast majority of environmental histories of mining have been published only since 2010 (a reflection, perhaps, of the field’s slow movement away from themes such as wildlife conservation and natural parks toward more research on industrial landscapes). In a relatively short time, however, environmental historians have pushed the field of mining history into multiple new thematic areas: the immense power of the mining industry to radically alter landscapes; the expansion of colonial frontiers and the dispossession of subsistence-oriented Indigenous communities from their local landscapes; the struggles of workers and communities against industrial pollution and disease; and studies of environmental changes within broad sectors of the mining industry (i.e., coal, uranium, nickel, copper, etc.). All of this work has helped historians better understand the material foundations—and the immense environmental costs—associated with the great acceleration of industrial production and consumption that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. In terms of geographic representation, environmental historians have produced work on mining from across the globe, but a disproportionate number of studies have concentrated on the United States and Canada, a reflection of the broader dominance of US scholars in the field of environmental history, and also the recent surge of interest among Canadian scholars in resource development and Indigenous communities. One note to those who are using this article: the boundaries between the categories outlined below are very porous. Very often authors of book-length histories of individual mines will touch on a variety of themes, including pollution, occupational health, colonialism, and Indigenous people. For each work, efforts have been made to find the best thematic fit, and, where there is crossover with other sections, it is so noted. The works are divided thematically because alternative approaches, such as using political boundaries or dividing by the type of material mined, would have resulted in the grouping of very disparate works in a somewhat artificial way. Ultimately, the goal has been to show the way that even very local mining histories speak to themes that are linked through networks of mining knowledge and practice that are global in nature.