Mining North America: An Environmental History Since 1522

Introduction, Page 4-5:

"This book...aims to contribute to the emerging field of mining environmental history by focusing on North America and exploring relationships among North American societies, mining, and environmental change since the Spanish first began developing mines in the region north of Mexico City in 1522. In the fourteen original essays that follow, scholars from Canada, Mexico, and the United States tackle a wide array of issues and developments in the environmental history of North American mining. While authors were given the freedom to explore the questions and issues that interested them most, they were also asked to consider several common focal points. Among these were physical environmental change, human health issues, regional comparisons, and the various ways that people thought about mining, the natural world, and the environmental changes that intertwined both. By encouraging attention to these common focal points, our goal was to illuminate important aspects of our subject, lend coherence to the volume as a whole, and most important, begin to open windows on how and why North America’s differing cultural, social, political, and physical contexts influenced the various ways that mineral development, environmental change, and environmental concern have historically influenced one another.

This last goal, we believe, is a particularly interesting and important one. At a time when North American societies are becoming ever more dependent upon minerals and producing ever more radical environmental changes in their pursuit and use of them, they are also simultaneously forging and deepening social and cultural patterns based on those developments. In a world of infinite resources and infinite pollution sinks, this might never become a problem. But ours is not that world, and concerns are mounting on many fronts. To better understand those contemporary concerns and the layers of history wrapped up in them, we hope that the continental and comparative perspectives deployed here prove illuminating for environmental historians, historians of mining, and everyone concerned about today’s ongoing struggles to secure maximum quantities of minerals with minimal scarring of nature.

The book is organized into three thematic sections that unfold in a roughly chronological sequence. Those thematic sections, in order, are titled “Capitalist Transformations,” “Industrial Catalysts,” and “Health and Environmental Justice.” As even a quick perusal of these themes suggests, the essays in this book address several core features of North American environmental history. Capitalism, industrialization, environmental justice— these themes run right through the heart of environmental history, animating some of the field’s most profound insights and historiographical interventions. 12 While many of these essays speak to more than one of these themes (and to other areas of inquiry as well), we have positioned the essays in the book based on the major thrust of their argument. In working through the balance of this introduction and the essays that follow, then, we hope that readers will recognize the unmistakable centrality of mining to these larger historiographical conversations and to the North American experience. Indeed, we hope that after reading through this book, they will find it hard to imagine North American environmental history— and nearly every other field of North American history, too— in quite the same way." (4-5).