Moving mountains: Technology and the environment in western copper mining

This dissertation examines the role of technology in environmental change by investigating the development of large-scale mass copper mining in the United States. German miners established the basic technical principles and educational institutions needed to support large-scale mining during the seventeenth century, thereby greatly increasing mining's environmental impact. Nineteenth-century Americans drew on German models to found the major U.S. mining schools where students were increasingly trained to design and supervise large corporate mass mining operations.; Ironically, many mining engineers entered their profession because they enjoyed nature and outdoor adventure, yet their work called on them to exploit nature. For some, these contradictory goals were reconciled by the early twentieth century conservation movement which suggested that engineers could conserve natural resources simply by increasing the efficiency of mining operations. The federal government also supported the idea of conservation through efficiency. With the 1872 Mining Law the government encouraged the explosive development of mining while providing almost no controls oversight. The 1910 organic act for the federal Bureau of Mines also provided it with no regulatory power. Instead, Bureau of Mines employees--like corporate mining engineers--could do little more than encourage the mining industry to operate more efficiently.; However, by the 1930s the pursuit of conservation through efficiency had failed in several cases. In Montana, where smoke from copper smelters had poisoned livestock and land for decades, the Anaconda Company used the widely accepted idea that conservation through efficiency should also produce profitable by-products to resist the adoption of a powerful new smoke control technology. Likewise, at Bingham Canyon, Utah, mining engineers took the idea of efficiency to its logical extreme by creating a powerful new system of open-pit mass mining. Paralleling the development of mass production technology, this new system of mass mineral extraction was highly efficient and was a critical factor in providing the vast amounts of minerals that fed modern industrialization. Yet open-pit processes also increased the environmental impact of mining to a scale never before imagined possible, leaving behind toxic waste problems that may take generations to solve.