1. Exhausting the Sierra Madre: Mining Ecologies in Mexico over the Longue Durée

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. List of Illustrations ix
4. Acknowledgments xi
5. Introduction: Of Mines, Minerals, and North American Environmental History 1
6. Part One. Capitalist Transformations
7. 1. Exhausting the Sierra Madre: Mining Ecologies in Mexico over the Longue Durée 19
8. 2. Reconstructing the Environmental History of Colonial Mining: The Real del Catorce Mining District, Northeastern New Spain/Mexico, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 47
9. Part Two. Industrial Catalysts
10. 3. A World of Mines and Mills: Precious-Metals Mining, Industrialization, and the Nature of the Colorado Front Range 73
11. 4. Consequences of the Comstock: The Remaking of Working Environments on America’s Largest Silver Strike, 1859–1880 108
12. 5. Dust to Dust: The Colorado Coal Mine Explosion Crisis of 1910 132
13. 6. Copper and Longhorns: Material and Human Power in Montana’s Smelter Smoke War, 1860–1910 166
14. 7. Efficiency, Economics, and Environmentalism: Low-Grade Iron Ore Mining in the Lake Superior District, 1913–2010 191
15. Part Three. Health and Environmental Justice
16. 8. Mining the Atom: Uranium in the Twentieth-Century American West 219
17. 9. A Comparative Case Study of Uranium Mine and Mill Tailings Regulation in Canada and the United States 256
18. 10. The Giant Mine’s Long Shadow: Arsenic Pollution and Native People in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories 280
19. 11. Iron Mines, Toxicity, and Indigenous Communities in the Lake Superior Basin 313
20. 12. If the Rivers Ran South: Tar Sands and the State of the Canadian Nation 339
21. 13. Quebec Asbestos: Triumph and Collapse, 1879–1983 369
22. Afterword: Mining, Memory, and History 398
23. Contributors 413
24. Index 417