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Peter Soppelsa, "Intersection: Technology, Mobility, Geography"

Film Review
Joseph November, "When Women Were Computers: LeAnn Erickson, Top Secret Rosies"

Essay Reviews
Shannon Jackson, "Technology, Bodily Limits, and Ways of Knowing: Joy Parr, Sensing Changes"

Eda Kranakis, "'And it is, it is a glorious thing/To be a Pirate King!': Adrian Johns, Piracy"

Peter A. Shulman,"The Richest Hills Unearthed: Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction"

Amy E. Slaton, "The Uses of Context: Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, Bernard Delahousse, and Martin Meganck, eds., Engineering in Context"

Technology and Culture
October 2011

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

Peter A. Shulman
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 mining as a form of mass destruction. “The pit” of the chapter’s title is Utah’s Bingham Canyon copper mine, where Daniel Jackling pioneered the techniques that mining companies subsequently copied for other minerals around the globe. Jackling’s early-twentieth-century mining innovations, which incorporated new technologies like dynamite and steam shovels to accelerate extraction and ore concentrators to tease minute quantities of metals from vast amounts of rock, broke through an environmental barrier that had once restricted mining to deposits with relatively high concentrations of valuable metals. Before the turn of the twentieth century, Bingham Canyon would never have been considered a potential mining site, because its ore contained less than 2 percent copper, which had been too small an amount to mine efficiently or profitably. But after Bingham Canyon such large deposits of trace minerals became valuable, resulting in the mass destruction of the landscape and poisoning of wide swaths of western land.

The key advantage of open-pit mining was not its economies of scale, LeCain argues, but the speed with which it could turn vast quantities of low-grade ore deposits into the copper sheets, wires, tubes, and bars so integral to industrial civilization. Other observers have called open-pit mining “mass production” applied to mining, but LeCain disputes this characterization, noting that it developed alongside, not after, mass-producing factories. Further, this form of mining’s defining feature was not what it created, but what it destroyed.

As LeCain acknowledges, our contemporary connotations of mass destruction are weapons of war and terrorism, and he states that he uses the term advisedly (p. 7). At least for me, it is hard to look at the Bingham Canyon mine and not think of the craters produced by nuclear test blasts. More problematically, LeCain goes on to link mining and weapons by “suggesting they both rose from the same suspect technological and moral logic that lay at the heart of a modern culture of mass destruction,” by which he means a faith in speed, efficiency, and “nonselectivity,” especially the seeming inevitability of these techniques during the twentieth century (p. 183).

But are the two, in fact, linked? Were the same processes, in fact, involved in dehumanizing millions of noncombatants during World War II and the ecological destruction of open-pit mining and copper smelting? Were the lessons learned in one venue actually transferred in any analyzable way to the other? Or can we hold two different models of devastation simultaneously? I am inclined to prefer two different models; as LeCain himself concedes, “for all the damage it wreaked on the natural environment, Jackling’s system of mass destruction mining did not raise moral issues quite so deeply troubling as those surrounding the mass destruction of entire cities of human beings” (p. 186). If so, I would have preferred that he employed a less freighted term. As LeCain notes in his epilogue, increasing consumption in the developing world will continue to demand the kinds of mass-destruction mining that he critiques, and he can only realistically (and ironically) call for a greater commitment to technological mediation of mining’s most damaging consequences (pp. 227–28). Unlike weapons of mass destruction, then, mass destruction in mining appears to be something we can, and must, tolerate, at least for now.

One additional feature of the book further distracts from its important central argument. LeCain frequently includes speculation about causes and motives (for example, see pages 87, 111, 113, 114), and while always noted as such, they sometimes do a disservice to the book. When LeCain suggests that “Jackling likely would have understood and applauded Vannevar Bush as he analyzed the numbers and concluded that the cheapest and quickest means of winning the Pacific war lay with mass incendiary bombing of civilian populations” (p. 186), it seems worth pointing out that this claim about moral and political judgments deserves to be either concretely documented or excised from the narrative, especially as it has no bearing on the actual history at stake (and seems to misrepresent Bush’s views to boot).

Still, the larger argument remains important. Agricola defended mining in the mid-sixteenth century by claiming that damaged landscapes could be restored for cultivation. In a perverse fulfillment of that claim, by the end of the twentieth century the land around the Anaconda Copper Company’s massive Washoe stack, near Butte, had been converted by Montana into a state park—only it was a park with land so polluted that aspiring visitors were prohibited from actually visiting it, and the park itself lay within the boundaries of a 300-square-mile Superfund site. This unvisitable park is a legacy of a century of mining that will long haunt us, and LeCain has produced a valuable work that forces its readers to confront the material price of the modern industrial economy. It is a bill we hoped never to pay for, but all debts come due eventually.

Dr. Shulman is an assistant professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, where he is working on a book about energy, steam power, and U.S. foreign relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.