Becoming WMDs

Mass Destruction is a perfect environmental history for our times. And that's its problem. It is so very much of the moment, it feels dated already. Yet it provides such a useful demonstration of the strengths and weaknesses of the dominant trends in the field, it is well worth reading.

Timothy J. LeCain uses the history of two huge open pit copper mines in the American West—the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, and the Bingham Canyon Mine near Salt Lake City, Utah—to stake a large claim: that the modern era of mass production and mass consumption is also an era of mass destruction. This may sound like an old-fashioned environmental Jeremiad—and, in some ways, it is—but there's a twist. LeCain wants his readers to apprehend that the destruction of the Berkeley Pit and Bingham Canyon enables them to turn on the lights to read his book. He wants us to feel the pain we cause the planet and not turn away. We must awake from our modern consumerist amnesia, which allows us to artificially feel separated from nature while the whole planet is being turned into one vast interconnected technological machine. "The mass destruction factory is not separate from the natural world," LeCain writes, "the mass destruction factory is the natural world."

If this sounds familiar, it is because some of the most oft-used and powerful tropes in the environmental humanities today are woven through LeCain's history: the separation of the human and the natural as a brief modern form of forgetting from which we may be awakening; the hybrid nature of the natural and technological systems bequeathed to us by modernity; the moral necessity of really feeling the pain that we cause nature and other people as a prerequisite for reaching enlightened understanding and taking right action.

This is environmental history with a passionate point of view, though to call it "environmental" may be selling it short in LeCain's view. LeCain prefers the term "envirotech," which is also the name of a special interest group that emerged in recent years among scholars who frequent the annual meetings of the Society for the History of Technology and the American Society for Environmental History. "Our technological environment is inextricably linked to our natural environment," LeCain writes. "Indeed, we would do better to learn how to think of the two as a unified whole or an 'envirotechnical system,' both because this reflects physical realities and because this analytical approach offers greater insights into preserving the best aspects of both wilderness and civilization."

LeCain invokes historian William Cronon's famous critique of the modern environmental movement for "getting back to the wrong nature" to issue his own call for us to find our way back to the "right nature." The wrong nature for LeCain, as it was for Cronon in his seminal essay "The Trouble with Wilderness," is nature separate from people. For LeCain, the right nature has to include technology too.

LeCain blames the "mass destruction" caused by copper mining on the "dangerous idea" that people "could engineer a technological world largely independent from the natural world." In his telling, that dangerous idea became massively destructive in the transition between underground and open pit mining of copper in the American West in the twentieth century. The mining engineers of the late nineteenth century created artificial environments underground, but "engineering was still a humanistic profession," LeCain writes: above ground these engineers deeply admired nature and wilderness and were concerned about encroaching civilization. They were connected to the material world, LeCain argues. And he admires them. Not so the modern engineers of mass destruction.

In the early twentieth century, LeCain writes, mining engineers and metallurgists like Daniel Jackling, who modernized the Bingham Canyon mine and made it into the largest open pit in the world, became more like Spock, the Vulcan scientist in Star Trek—hyper-rational, entirely reliant on logic, and incapable of emotion. "More than any mine before...