MANAGING OBSTACLES TO NEW MINING PROJECTS IN REGIONS IMPACTED BY PAST MINING OPERATIONS

摘要

The mining and beneficiation of base and precious metals have been critical drivers in the economic development of the United States. Although inextricably linked in popular culture with the American West, metal mining in what is now the United States started much earlier than the California gold rush of 1848 and much farther east. Copper mining by Europeans began in the mid-1700s in the Connecticut River Valley, and continued off and on for over 200 years. (The Bristol Copper Mine in Connecticut produced copper intermittently into the 1950s.) Base metal mining came to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the early 1840s, spurred by Douglass Houghton's publication of a report on the famed native copper deposits of the Keweenaw in 1841, followed closely by the discovery of iron ore deposits in Marquette County in 1844. Copper and iron mining boomed in the Upper Peninsula from 1844-1887, and continued intermittently in the Keweenaw Peninsula and western Upper Peninsula until the 1990s. The last active copper mine in Michigan (the White Pine Mine in Ontonagon County) closed in 1995. The state mascot of Wisconsin—the badger—is a reference to the hillside dwellings of lead miners who worked in the southwestern portion of the state in the early 1800s, well before mining began in the Wisconsin portion of the Penokee/Gogebic Iron Range in 1885.