Mass Destruction

Price: $26.95  

Subtitle: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet
Author: Timothy J. LeCain
Subject: History, Environmental, Technology
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4529-5
Pages: 280 pages, 20 illustrations
Publication Date: July 2009

Praise for Mass Destruction

"In examining the history of one mining industry, LeCain funnels a great deal of American history and culture into his narrative, resulting in a work that should catch a broad audience, from Old West history buffs to environmentalists."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Written in a clear, straightforward style, Mass Destruction focuses our attention on the mining of copper--an industry both essential to the electrical age and ruinous to the
environment.  In so doing, LeCain shows the interconnections between the natural world of raw materials and the human world of technologies and commodities." —Andrew Isenberg, author of Mining California: An Ecological History

"The colossal open-pit mines of the past century have left behind some of the largest artifacts on the face of the earth. Timothy LeCain's engaging history of this mega-industrial enterprise is remarkable for its insight, clarity, and wisdom. Readers interested in the contours of our technological and environmental past--and the inextricable connections between the natural and artificial--will find Mass Destruction a treasure trove of reasoning and enlightenment." —Jeffrey K. Stine,
author of America's Forested Wetlands: From Wasteland to Valued Resource

"This is an eloquent and searing portrait of the environmental cost of the coins in our pockets and wires in our walls. As Timothy LeCain argues in this hard-hitting book, the quest for efficiency that gave us mass production and mass consumption also brought us mass destruction of the environment."
—Edmund Russell, University of Virginia

The place: The steep mountains outside Salt Lake City. The time: The first decade of the twentieth century. The man: Daniel Jackling, a young metallurgical engineer. The goal: A bold new technology that could provide billions of pounds of cheap copper for a rapidly electrifying America. The result: Bingham’s enormous “Glory Hole,” the first large-scale open-pit copper mine, an enormous chasm in the earth and one of the largest humanmade artifacts on the planet. Mass Destruction is the compelling story of Jackling and the development of open-pit hard rock mining, its role in the wiring of an electrified America, as well its devastating environmental consequences.

Mass destruction mining soon spread around the nation and the globe, providing raw materials essential to the mass production and mass consumption that increasingly defined the emerging “American way of life.” At the dawn of the last century, Jackling’s open pit replaced immense but constricted underground mines that probed nearly a mile beneath the earth, to become the ultimate symbol of the modern faith that science and technology could overcome all natural limits. A new culture of mass destruction emerged that promised nearly infinite supplies not only of copper, but also of coal, timber, fish, and other natural resources.

But, what were the consequences? Timothy J. LeCain deftly analyzes how open-pit mining continues to affect the environment in its ongoing devastation of nature and commodification of the physical world. The nation’s largest toxic Superfund site would be one effect, as well as other types of environmental dead zones around the globe. Yet today, as the world’s population races toward American levels of resource consumption, truly viable alternatives to the technology of mass destruction have not yet emerged.

Timothy J. LeCain is an assistant professor in the department of history
at Montana State University and a historical consultant and expert witness
in environmental litigation for the United States Department of Justice.