To see accurate pricing, please choose your delivery country.
 
 
United States
£ GBP
All Shops

British Wildlife

8 issues per year 84 pages per issue Subscription only

British Wildlife is the leading natural history magazine in the UK, providing essential reading for both enthusiast and professional naturalists and wildlife conservationists. Published eight times a year, British Wildlife bridges the gap between popular writing and scientific literature through a combination of long-form articles, regular columns and reports, book reviews and letters.

Subscriptions from £33 per year

Conservation Land Management

4 issues per year 44 pages per issue Subscription only

Conservation Land Management (CLM) is a quarterly magazine that is widely regarded as essential reading for all who are involved in land management for nature conservation, across the British Isles. CLM includes long-form articles, events listings, publication reviews, new product information and updates, reports of conferences and letters.

Subscriptions from £26 per year
Academic & Professional Books  History & Other Humanities  Environmental History

Mining North America An Environmental History Since 1522

By: John R McNeill(Editor), George Vrtis(Editor), Andrew C Isenberg(Afterword by)
443 pages, 6 b/w photos, 8 maps
Mining North America
Click to have a closer look
Select version
  • Mining North America ISBN: 9780520279179 Paperback Aug 2017 Not in stock: Usually dispatched within 6 days
    £29.99
    #234302
  • Mining North America ISBN: 9780520279162 Hardback no dustjacket Aug 2017 Out of stock with supplier: order now to get this when available
    £80.00
    #234301
Selected version: £29.99
About this book Contents Customer reviews Biography Related titles

About this book

Over the past five hundred years, North Americans have increasingly turned to mining to produce many of their basic social and cultural objects. From cell phones to cars and roadways, metal pots to wall tile and even talcum powder, minerals products have become central to modern North American life. As this process has unfolded, mining has also indelibly shaped the natural world and North Americans' relationship with it. Mountains have been honeycombed, rivers poisoned, and forests leveled. The effects of these environmental transformations have fallen unevenly across North American societies.

Mining North America examines these developments. Drawing on the work of scholars from Mexico, the United States, and Canada, Mining North America explores how mining has shaped North America over the last half millennium. It covers an array of minerals and geographies while seeking to draw mining into the core debates that animate North American environmental history generally. Taken together, the authors' contributions make a powerful case for the centrality of mining in forging North American environments and societies.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Of Mines, Minerals, and North American Environmental History
      George Vrtis and J. R. McNeill

PART ONE. CAPITALIST TRANSFORMATIONS

1. Exhausting the Sierra Madre: Mining Ecologies in Mexico over the Longue Durée
      Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert
2. Reconstructing the Environmental History of Colonial Mining: The Real del Catorce Mining District, Northeastern New Spain/Mexico, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
      Antonio Avalos-Lozano and Miguel Aguilar-Robledo

PART TWO. INDUSTRIAL CATALYSTS
3. A World of Mines and Mills: Precious-Metals Mining, Industrialization, and the Nature of the Colorado Front Range
      George Vrtis
4. Consequences of the Comstock: The Remaking of Working Environments on America’s Largest Silver Strike, 1859–1880
      Robert N. Chester III
5. Dust to Dust: The Colorado Coal Mine Explosion Crisis of 1910
      Thomas G. Andrews
6. Copper and Longhorns: Material and Human Power in Montana’s Smelter Smoke War, 1860–1910
      Timothy James LeCain
7. Efficiency, Economics, and Environmentalism: Low-Grade Iron Ore Mining in the Lake Superior District, 1913–2010
      Jeffrey T. Manuel

PART THREE. HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
8. Mining the Atom: Uranium in the Twentieth-Century American West
      Eric Mogren
9. A Comparative Case Study of Uranium Mine and Mill Tailings Regulation in Canada and the United States
      Robynne Mellor
10. The Giant Mine’s Long Shadow: Arsenic Pollution and Native People in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
      John Sandlos and Arn Keeling
11. Iron Mines, Toxicity, and Indigenous Communities in the Lake Superior Basin
      Nancy Langston
12. If the Rivers Ran South: Tar Sands and the State of the Canadian Nation
      Steven M. Hoffman
13. Quebec Asbestos: Triumph and Collapse, 1879–1983
      Jessica van Horssen

Afterword: Mining, Memory, and History
      Andrew C. Isenberg

Contributors
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

J. R. McNeill is Professor of History and University Professor at Georgetown University. His most recent books are The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 and Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914. George Vrtis is Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Carleton College.

By: John R McNeill(Editor), George Vrtis(Editor), Andrew C Isenberg(Afterword by)
443 pages, 6 b/w photos, 8 maps
Media reviews

"Mining North America is a kaleidoscopic and exhaustive volume that places mining at the center of a cutting-edge historical analysis of human society's relationship with the environment, ranging from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. This unique collection of essays covers an impressive array of interrelated yet heretofore overlooked topics. Vividly written and timely, this book should engage a wide, multidisciplinary audience."
– Ryan Dearinger, Associate Professor of History at Eastern Oregon University and author of The Filth of Progress: Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of Canals and Railroads in the West

"This fascinating exploration of North American mining history fills a gaping hole in the field and illuminates a fraught and wide-ranging struggle to meet our voracious demand for the minerals underlying modern life. From the silver mines of Mexico to the tar sands and gold mines of Canada, Mining North America shows how industrial capitalism reshaped a continent and left behind a toxic legacy of inequalities."
– Paul Sabin, author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future

"This book advances the argument that mining the earth has been central to modern history. After absorbing its impressive stories and evidence, ranging across a continent's incredible mineral wealth, from gold and silver to uranium, iron ore, and bitumen, we can no longer look on mining simply as a romantic and colorful adventure from the past. Mining creates our world, for good or bad. Powerfully convincing!"
– Donald Worster, author of Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance

Current promotions
New and Forthcoming BooksNHBS Moth TrapBritish Wildlife MagazineBuyers Guides