Mining California: An Ecological History

By Andrew C. Isenberg

Book Overview

An environmental History of California during the Gold Rush Between 1849 and 1874 almost $1 billion in gold was mined in California. With little available capital or labor, here's how: high-pressure water cannons washed hillsides into sluices that used mercury to trap gold but let the soil wash away; eventually more than three times the amount of earth moved to make way for the Panama Canal entered California's rivers, leaving behind twenty tons of mercury every mile--rivers overflowed their banks and valleys were flooded, the land poisoned. In the rush to wealth, the same chain of foreseeable consequences reduced California's forests and grasslands. Not since William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis has a historian so skillfully applied John Muir's insight--"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe"--to the telling of the history of the American West. Beautifully told, this is western environmental history at its finest.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809069326
• ISBN13: 9780809069323
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

downstream was a bad place to be

Some 15 years ago, Marc Reisner came out with a surprisingly well received book, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition. It described how the American West developed via huge government subsidies for dams and water distribution systems. Isenberg's recent book can be understood as a useful supplement to Reisner. He focuses on California since the Gold Rush days of 1849. Describing how $1 billion in gold was extracted at tremendous expenditure of labour and capital. With an emphasis on the literally downstream cost. The huge use of water to wash away hills containing gold meant silted runoffs that adversely affected agriculture and wildlife depending on that water. Worse yet was the use of mercury to process the gold ore. The mercury contaminated effluent was discharged with little or no attempt at remediation. Yes, the benefits of the Gold Rush were far reaching. It built up California's population and the industrial and agricultural base. But there were costs often neglected in standard histories of the time. The take home message is that downstream was a bad place to be.