The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit.

摘要

For a small city with fewer than 100,000 people when it peaked in 1918, Butte garners a lot of scholarly attention. This is mainly because of its deserved reputation as mining's "richest hill on earth"-the second largest silver producer in the United States and, from about 1882 to 1920, the world's leading copper mining district. Though underground mining steadily declined, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company's (ACM) Berkeley Pit played a major role in Butte's economy from 1955 to 1982. After 1982, Butte became ground zero of America's largest Superfund site, and the Berkeley Pit a large toxic lake.