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Oct 30, 2023

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Slide 1 Extraction economy In U.S. environmental history Looking back at U.S. history, the work done to extract natural resources is one of the most significant environmental impacts and speaks to the history of how we’ve thought about and influenced the environment.

Slide 2 What’s “extraction”? » Among the oldest of technologies, the extractive industries refer to those processes that involve the removal and processing of raw materials from the earth : mines, quarries, collieries, oil and gas refineries, cement plants, and the heavy clay industries (brick, tile, and terra cotta). These processes transformed entire regions and markets, creating a much altered landscape with vast and deep quarries, pits, and mines; enormous furnaces, smelters, and kilns; fabrication shops and mills; and transportation networks to bring raw materials in and product out. Entire worker communities with houses, schools, churches and synagogues, pool halls, and stores were created to keep local labor close at hand. Many such sites, while rich in historical and architectural value, are also toxic environmental brownfields, thus making them especially problematic for contemporary reuse. – Frank Matero (2017) When we talk about extraction, what we mean is removing and processing raw materials from the Earth. Frank Matero here lists mines, oil and gas, and cement as several of these industries, and I’d add to that timber, which removes and processes trees. Matero points out that these industries not only removed the resource, but built an incredible array of infrastructure in rural areas to house laborers, extract and process these materials. Today, while many of these processing locations are abandoned, their legacy continues in our natural environment.

Slide 3 Forests » Late 1700s: New England lumber industry Ships to UK » 1800s: Midwest & NY, PA • Michigan logging industry dominates » 1900s shift to Pacific Northwest 3 Timber was one of the first resources that Europeans began to extract, dating back to the 1600s, as forests in the UK dwindled. By the 1700s, a strong lumber industry was in place in New England, and as these trees were used up, logging operations spread westward into the Midwest, then, eventually to the Pacific Northwest, where loggers found some of the largest trees of all, shown in the photo above. The photo to the right is from 1880, when logging in New York’s Adirondack Mountains clear cut trees, resulting in the landscape you can see there, and eventual regrowth shown in the image below.

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Slide 4 Regrowth of forests after extraction 4 While these clear cutting episodes are mostly centuries in the past, the effects can still be seen today. Forests are regrowing, but not always with the same species, shifting ecosystems. Environmental historians (and ecologists!) are quite interested in charting this regrowth and how the increase in forest cover over the past 100 yeas has impacted the environment. This chart shows the recovery of the forests in Connecticut (dark green) and New England (light green), and you can see here that while there’s been a significant increase in forest cover, there was a slight decline with the growth of suburbs after the 1950s. Image Source: The Hartford Courant

Slide 5 Gold Rush 5 Miners in the Sierras , 1851-52,Charles Christian Nahl and August Wenderoth Seeking gold in California river bottom, Mid 1850s, Harper's Weekly magazine, PD. Another extraction economy with a significant impact on the environment was the Gold Rush. This affected mostly parts of northern California, but also Nevada and Alaska. While we often think of the Gold Rush as a low-key affair, as shown in the painting on the right, it was actually a high-tech (at least for the time), high-impact resource extraction operation, as shown on the image on the left.

Slide 6 6 Union Diggings, Columbia Hill, Nevada County ,ca. 1871, Carleton E. Watkins Hydraulic mining, the impacts of which are shown here, involved using high-pressure jets of water to tear apart soil and rock to find gold. In addition to reducing large pieces of land to piles of rock, this type of mining also washed sediment downstream, flooding farmland and causing great ecological damage. This type of mining was banned in 1884, but the landscape of California was already significantly altered. Image source: https://americanexperience.si.edu/historical-eras/expansion/pair-miners-union- diggings/

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Slide 7 Environmental impacts » Deforestation » Dam construction » Runoff and erosion changes affect aquatic ecosystems » Transportation changes to/from mines » Hunting, over-harvesting » Tailings piles » Chemicals used to separate gold 7 Gold mining in California, shown here, and elsewhere, caused deforestation and runoff and erosion changes. Boom towns created by the mines and the transportation to and from these places also changed the landscape, as did the waste that was produced as miners dug through rock and soil to look for gold. The chemicals used for mining polluted the water and the soil.

Slide 8 Coal » Surface mines create major above-ground disruptions of ecosystems » Underground mines can result in land subsidence and health hazards to miners » Both types of mining result in water pollution, land use disruption & waste production 8 And just to give one more example, let’s talk briefly about coal mining. In addition to the issues of burning fossil fuels, the extraction of the coal itself can be problematic for the environment. We mine for coal both above and below ground. The above ground mining, sometimes called mountaintop removal mining, often leaves landscapes that look similar to hydraulic mining of the past. Underground mines are slightly less destructive but can collapse and pose environmental health hazards to the miners. Both types of mining can be problematic in terms of water pollution, disruption of land and ecosystems, and the waste produced. This photo is one that I took in Lyon Mountain, NY, in the Adirondacks, where everyday trucks cart away the mine waste (what’s called tailings). And this is actually what’s left after the mine closed in 1967, and I took this photo in 2011. So that is a lot of waste that’s left behind. Image source: Mapes/Lyon Mountain NY (taken 2011) mine closed in 1967

Slide 9 9 To wrap up, I just want to show a few more images of Lyon Mountain. This is early open pit mining for coal in 1880. The mining operation went underground in the early 1900s. Image Source: Lyon Mountain Museum

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Slide 10 1 0 Here’s an aerial image of the mining town, with the large piles of tailings. Image Source: Lyon Mountain Museum

Slide 11 1 1 This is another view of the mining town – many places like this are focused purely on one industry and are built by the mining company to provide housing (and recreation, as evidenced by the baseball diamond) for its workers. These settlements, particularly after the extraction is complete, can also impact the landscape. Image Source: Lyon Mountain Museum

Slide 12 12 1913 map of coal resources in the U.S. To wrap up, here’s a map of where coal resources were located in the U.S. back in 1913. Clearly, there is a heavy focus on the Appalachian Mountains, but coal was (and is still) found across the country in a few specific pockets. We’ve also now added fracking – the extraction of natural gas – to our list of extractive economies that affect the environment.

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