Three of the largest human-caused environmental disasters in recent memory were the result of technological failures within mining systems: the Mount Polley disaster in British Columbia; the Gold King mine disaster in Colorado; and the Bento Rodrigues mine disaster in Brazil.
​Mining systems are composed of three main elements: human, material and environmental. Within mining systems, human actors rely on knowledge, expertise, and  material technologies to interact with ore bodies - and  in order for mining systems to successfully function, the human and material elements need to be adaptable to environmental changes. In the three environmental disasters listed above the mining systems failed, due to a mixture of negligence, technological malfunction, and environmental change.  

"A picture is worth a thousand words", or in the case of this image - thousands of trees.     

It has been over a month since my last blog post - I've been busy working on my dissertation proposal, and recently returned from a really fruitful trip to a handful of archives in Minnesota. I'm still processing much of what I gathered at the archives - (and will be doing so for a number of months) - but I have been dwelling on the image above and what it says about the mining industry: What cultural and environmental impacts of past mining have we forgotten? and What other hidden impacts of mining might we begin to reconsider? 

This morning I came across this great collection of historical sketches of some prominent Michigan individuals at the turn of the 20th century. There are roughly 60 illustrations of folks from the U.P., including this image of the John Longyear - a Michigan native who was influential in shaping the landscapes of the Lake Superior Iron District.
   

I just found this neat little documentary about the forced abandonment of old Hibbing to allow for the expansion of Oliver Iron Mining Co.'s  Hull-Rust Mahoning open pit iron mine - circa 1920. I'm in the process of digging a little deeper into the region's past, and have just returned from the fantastic archives at the Minnesota Historical Society where I was able to locate many of the original affidavits. 

I recently had the opportunity to visit an abandoned fluorspar (or fluorite) mine in New Mexico.  The Bonita Mine is located in the Zuni Mountains, about 1.5 hours west of Albuquerque.  This area has been home to both extensive logging activity, as well as mining of both copper deposits and the aforementioned fluorspar.  

A mine remains active long after it stops producing.  Scary stuff from Nova Scotia.  Really interesting write up from the CBC here.  

I scanned this map because I think it is a great representation of an historical mining landscape.   Both extremely convoluted and strikingly organized, with geologic and political boundaries meshing together in a geometric cacophony.  Maps like these illuminate how interpreting the historical mining landscape can be especially challenging, due to the scale of extraction and the overlapping of ownership from one claim to the next.   This historical complexity often obfuscates some of the envirotechnical activity that created the landscapes we see today, as well as makes tracking the environmental legacies within these landscapes troublesome.