Jerome V. Degraff

I’ve been retired from environmental work for ten years, but I’m still reading books I picked up during my career. This one has some local interest, since three of the mine sites described are in Colorado and one of the authors is an old acquaintance. Mining is a particular bugaboo of environmentalists; geological reality dictates that most mines will be in pretty scenic country, and the stuff that’s left over after mining – especially if the mine was combined with some sort of ore beneficiation plant – can be pretty nasty. Nevertheless, you can’t have electric cars or solar panels or bicycles or even organic food without mining.

The same geology that dictates many mines are in mountainous country also makes cleanup problematical; mountain climate limits the work season and may reduce the efficiency of some cleanup methods, and mountain topography may limit access to the site, especially for heavy equipment (I’m often amazed at coming across old mine sites in the mountains; somebody hauled impressive weights – boilers, stationary steam engines, stamp mills – out to the middle of nowhere using only human and animal muscle power).

I was interested in the amount of effort that went into background studies. The public can be impatient with these; it seems like nobody is doing cleanup, just taking samples and interviewing “old timers” and studying reports. In fact, as with a lot of environmental projects, you need to thoroughly understand what’s wrong before you try to fix it, even though it may look to outsiders like you’re not doing anything.

This is a collection of individual papers rather than an organized discussion of mining and mining wastes. Nevertheless if you live somewhere where mining is or was active you’ll probably find something of interest. For more on mining waste, see https://www.librarything.com/work/5723051/reviews/32672172.… (meer)