The Richest Hills Unearthed: Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction

In his classic 1556 mining text De re metallica Georgius Agricola observed that among the many criticisms of mining was a claim about its harmful effects on nature. Mining defiled fields, vineyards, and olive groves, the critics warned, and its appetite for wood denuded forests and destroyed habitats for game and fowl. “Further,” wrote Agricola for the critics, “when the ores are washed, the water which has been used poisons the brooks and streams, and either destroys the fish or drives them away.” As Agricola recognized, these were strong claims, devastating if true, yet he briskly brushed them aside. He reassured his readers that mines were typically located in unfarmed mountains and desolate valleys, far from pastures and crop fields. Denuded forests really provided new lands for cultivation—all damage could be repaired. And if birds or beasts or fish were still somehow harmed, Agricola insisted that the wealth extracted from mining allowed the residents of the region to procure these food sources from more distant lands.

But what happens to Agricola’s defense when mines grow so large that their wastes unquestionably poison farmland? When the technology for excavating and processing their ores grows so sophisticated that mines need not be restricted to rich, isolated deposits, but can instead be located almost anywhere that has even trace amounts of metals? Or when, by the late twentieth century, human activities displaced so much earth that they surpassed natural erosion as a force transforming the planet’s landscape?

These questions are the subject of Timothy LeCain’s Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Pp. 288. $26.95), an exploration of the technological and environmental transformations of twentieth-century mining. LeCain examines copper extraction in two sites of the American West: Butte, Montana—“the richest hill on earth”—and Bingham, Utah—“the richest hole on earth.” Butte and Bingham together pioneered the techniques that led to what LeCain provocatively describes as “mass destruction”—the high throughput, open-pit extraction that both facilitated unprecedented industrial growth as well as massive landscape and ecological devastation. Introducing this term, LeCain seeks to add a third modernity-defining process to the more familiar “mass production” and “mass consumption,” none of which, he argues, was possible without the other two.

The book’s five chapters explore the emergence of mass-destruction mining from a range of perspectives. Following an introductory chapter detailing the key themes of the book, chapter 2, “Between the Heavens and the Earth,” explores the natural and social history of copper and its extraction. LeCain here describes how the emerging electrical, telephone, and manufacturing industries accelerated the demand for copper beginning in the late nineteenth century, and how underground hard-rock mining in the West struggled to keep pace. Chapter 3 analyzes “The Stack,” the massive exhaust systems that released toxic fumes from copper smelting. LeCain argues that mine managers at Anaconda placed excessive faith in a technological fix to smoke pollution—in this case Frederick Cottrell’s electrical precipitator, a device that employed powerful static charges to capture poisonous wastes. This chapter covers much of the same ground as Fred Qui-vik in his important 1998 University of Pennsylvania dissertation, “Smoke and Tailings: An Environmental History of Copper Smelting Technologies in Montana, 1880–1930,” but in contrast to Quivik, LeCain emphasizes the long-term consequences of technological choices made in the early twentieth century. For instance, since smelting companies were persuaded to capture their wastes, in part, to profit from selling them for other purposes, the arsenic recovered from Anaconda’s stack wound its way into agricultural pesticides sprayed across the United States. The fifth chapter, “The Dead Zones,” examines the normalization and acceptance of ecological destruction around Anaconda’s mines and smelter specifically, and in twentieth-century resource production more generally. LeCain calls this development “the culture of mass destruction,” whose contours he describes through technological developments and advertisements.

The conceptual heart of the book, though, is its fourth chapter, in which the author explores the origins of twentieth-century...