I’m Indigenous Australian, and I Work for a Mining Company

For Over 20 Years, I’ve Been Trying to Change an Industry That Has Excluded, Displaced, and Exploited Native People

Being in mining was never part of my plan. As a young boy, I dreamed of becoming a priest with a pilot’s license, living and working in remote Australian communities. I got an advertising degree, joined the foreign service, and spent five years working for the government, including three years as a junior diplomat in Samoa. But I never really fit in. I resigned from the foreign service in January 1999, when I was 27, and returned to my hometown, the remote and dusty mining town of Mount …

Is There Such a Thing as a Sustainable Mining Boom?

An Early-20th-Century Copper Company Has Lessons for the Industry Today

In the Western U.S. and the north of Chile, large-scale mining has produced similar landscapes of extraction: open-pit and underground mines, smelter stacks, and large masonry structures. Transportation networks connected …

What Do Mining Claims and National Parks Have in Common? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

What Do Mining Claims and National Parks Have in Common?

America Enacted Two Environmental Laws 10 Weeks Apart in 1872. One Encouraged Drilling Into Public Lands—The Other Tried to Conserve Them

If you know where to go in Death Valley National Park, Wrangell-St. Elias Park and Preserve, Glacier Peak Wilderness, or Bears Ears National Monument, you might come across the remnants …

How a 16th-Century Bolivian Silver Mine Invented Modern Capitalism

Potosí’s Coins Ruled the Globe But Their Costs Included Violence and Environmental Destruction

Gold has always attracted special attention for its color, malleability, and resistance to oxidation, but silver has long held a close second place. Its relative abundance in relation to gold …