Taconite and the Fight over Reserve Mining Company

Author(s):  
Nancy Langston

Iron was a key component of steel, and steel was essential for industrial and military purposes. Postwar concerns about iron depletion led American mining interests to promote technologies and tax incentives to exploit taconite ore bodies. As the Reserve Mining case shows, taconite required expensive new processing technologies to be profitable, while creating new environmental consequences, particularly concerning finely ground tailings and the use of water. As taconite iron ore mining boomed in the Lake Superior basin in the three decades after World War II, faith in cooperative pragmatism began to clash with new industrial developments and new understandings of pollution mobility.

2019 ◽  
pp. 141-160
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Clark ◽  
Brian R. Jacobson

This chapter reads the French television hit Les Revenants (The Returned, Canal+, 2012-2015) as a parable of the uneasy legacy of France’s “Trente glorieuses,” the period of rapid economic growth that followed World War II. Situating the show’s fictional city and its story of failing dams in the history of the real dam that inspired it—the dam that displaced the village of Tignes in 1952—the chapter argues that Les Revenants encourages us to re-think the Trente glorieuses and its long-term effects and to ask both what became of the projects that defined these years and what has re-emerged from the shadows of their glories—from failing infrastructure and a police surveillance state to the environmental consequences now associated with the Anthropocene.


Author(s):  
Nancy Langston

Sustaining Lake Superior asks, What can we learn from the conservation recoveries of Lake Superior over the past century as we face new challenges of persistent pollutants that are mobilizing with climate change? Communities around Lake Superior have long struggled to address pollution concerns, and local, regional, and international efforts met with significant successes in the twentieth century. Pollution—and concerns about that pollution—have a complex history in the Great Lakes. As soon as industrial development burgeoned in the region during the nineteenth century, people began trying to comprehend and control industrial wastes. Some of the earliest efforts to control pollution worked surprisingly well, for they rested on understandings of natural resiliency that made a great deal of sense at the time—and still have much to teach us. The nature of pollutants has changed since World War II, but, nevertheless, exploring the success—and failures—of pollution control in the past can help us devise resilient strategies for facing the challenges of pollution in a globalized, warming world.


1963 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Snyder

Great cities have historically demonstrated an affinity for riverine locations. Current activity in Venezuela points to the creation of a major urban node on the south bank of the Orinoco River, at its confluence with the Caroni (Figure 1). Since World War Two, but especially in the last decade, an important series of events within this area of Venezuela has pointed up the opportunity, if not the necessity, of bringing this long dormant region into the nation's developed, effectivelysettled domain. The mining and shipping of iron ore from El Pao by Bethlehem Steel's subsidiary, Iron Mines Company, initiated before the war but not operational until 1950, was the first major stimulus. The region was further awakened with the arrival of United States Steel's Orinoco Mining Company which opened up the Cerro Bolívar iron ore deposit. The first shipment here was in 1954. In both these projects, the developers had to bring in everything necessary for the beginning of operations.


1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly A. Lee ◽  
◽  
George E. Vaillant ◽  
William C. Torrey ◽  
Glen H. Elder

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document