Industry Economic Human Landscape
Landscape
The artificial terraces, incisions, and towering machines associated with mining operations, like those in Utah’s Bingham Canyon - visible throughout Salt Lake Valley - are visually arresting. Throughout the American West, hikers stumble across the openings to abandoned mines, the only clue that mining once took place in seemingly isolated landscapes. Tourists often travel great distances to witness remnants of the mining industry’s once-thriving communities turned ghost towns. Mining’s least visible impacts, however, can be some of the most devastating. Dumping sites and abandoned mills, far from metropolitan areas, continue to infiltrate water sources and chemicals released into the air are mining’s “hidden” elements on the landscape.
