The first time these destructive forces were applied on such a mass scale was in the early 1900s at Bingham Canyon in Utah, where the American mining engineer Daniel Jackling used high-grade explosives to dislodge vast quantities of rock which could then be processed on a mass scale to extract the copper it contained. Lower and lower grades of copper ore could be mined using increasing economies of scale, with ever-greater quantities of ore being mined and crushed to extract the same amount of copper. These technologies allowed for a hockey stick-like hike in copper production that has continued into the present. In 2019, the open pit mine of Bingham, which has kept on expanding, produced more copper than was produced in the entire world in 1880.
As Che Guevara saw with his own eyes in the Atacama Desert, this technology didn’t stay in Utah. This new kind of extraction was portable and scalable. In our edited book, Born with a Copper Spoon, we refer to this new kind of extraction—built on new technologies, new ways of labor control, and, importantly, exploitation of the environment—as the American world of copper. Through the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century these developments in copper extraction reshaped our world, a process that continues today. Demand for metals is once again poised to rise dramatically as the world faces another potential revolution in extraction to power the green transition.
Devouring the World
Dramatic expansion of copper production went hand-in-hand with the Second Industrial Revolution that began in the 1870s, as copper was required for generating and transmitting electricity. Historians of natural resources have increasingly emphasized the importance of what happens out of view in the frontiers (places in the global periphery where resources are abundant like the Atacama desert or African copperbelt) and countryside of the world economy rather than focus on the familiar technologies of consumer products. Industrial change does not simply have an impact upon frontiers in the sense that demand creates supply: rather the opposite. Bringing our perspective closer to the mining pit, the steam shovel and dynamite emerge as technologies at least equally as important as familiar ones like the lightbulb or combustion engine, which made possible the Second Industrial Revolution.
This huge expansion of copper production was a global event. Only a few years after Bingham Canyon Mine began eating into Utah, open pits were established in the Chilean Andes, the Central African Copperbelt, Mexican deserts, and Japanese mountains. The spread continued over the twentieth century, and in the following decades these gaping holes appeared in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Indonesia, Iran, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, and beyond.