Mining Knowledge and Canada’s Nice Acceleration – Energetic Historical past

Josh Sandlos

That is the fourth submit in a collection concerning the Nice Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental historical past. The posts on this collection are cross-posted with NiCHE.

Every year in my “Canadian Historical past Since Confederation” survey class, I take my college students on a deep dive into one thing that has excessive potential to be boring: Statistics Canada tables on historic mineral and vitality manufacturing. I often put a number of information tables on a display and ask the scholars to type as tight a semi-circle as doable. Confronted with columns exhibiting mineral manufacturing charges by pound, and the worth of the ore by greenback, I ask the scholars what a historian would possibly do with such seemingly impenetrable collections of numbers. The broader objective of the exercise is (spoiler alert!) as an example the huge improve in materials manufacturing that accompanied the Nice Acceleration—the unprecedented surge in industrial manufacturing that occurred in Canada starting  within the Eighteen Nineties.

After a good bit of squinting, college students inevitably supply their interpretations of the primary batch information. Usually the very first thing they observe is the dramatic change in copper between 1896 to 1914, roughly a sevenfold improve from simply over 9,393,000 to 75,763,000 kilos. What may need prompted this, I inevitably ask? “An enormous copper discovery,” is often the primary reply, not so removed from the reality contemplating the graduation of copper manufacturing in Sudbury and elsewhere occurred withing this date vary. “However,” I counsel, “no one goes to speculate cash into massive copper mines except there’s demand for it, so what massive contextual adjustments in Canada throughout this era may be driving the manufacturing of a lot copper?” Usually a scholar will make the connection to the fast improvement {of electrical} infrastructure throughout this era. “For certain,” I reply again, “take into consideration what we talked about in different lessons: urbanization, the rise of manufacturing unit manufacturing, and fast financial development, all trusted electrical energy, making copper wiring one of many hottest commodities of the day.”

Fig. 1: Map of Canada exhibiting a choice of main mining developments from the late 19^th to the mid-20^th century. Map by Charlie Conway beneath contract to the creator.

I ask them to look once more on the manufacturing tables and see if they’ll discover different patterns. Whereas solutions fluctuate from yr to yr, the scholars would possibly discover that iron manufacturing greater than doubled between 1896 and 1914, nickel output elevated from zero to 45,000,000 kilos throughout this similar interval, and cobalt manufacturing rose from nothing to 702,000 kilos. Some college students join this huge improve in base metallic manufacturing to the financial increase of this era, whereas others extra particularly make the connection to the fast growth of metal and different metallic alloys used to fabricate sturdy client items and ultimately armaments for the battle that was quickly to return.  

Taken as an entire, the mineral tables counsel little in the best way of continuity in Canada’s mineral business. As an alternative, the explosive will increase in mineral manufacturing charges point out an abrupt rupture with the previous; a startling improve within the consumption of supplies that’s the hallmark of the Nice Acceleration (the opposite being the rise in vitality manufacturing within the type of coal, and later, oil).¹

Fig. 2: A waste rock pile meets the boreal forest on the deserted Pine Level lead-zinc mine on Nice Slave Lake, NWT, 2009. Picture by the creator.

Some might learn the numbers as optimistic indicators of progress and financial development, however I counsel that college students take into account the toll of the Nice Acceleration in mineral manufacturing on the pure setting. In spite of everything, most ore our bodies include solely tiny percentages of precious materials. By the point a mining operation has blasted, crushed, chemically handled, and smelted the ore right down to its Most worthy parts, tonne after tonne of waste rock and high quality tailings sand has been left behind. This materials usually accommodates heavy metals, or generates acid, which pollutes water and soil within the quick setting. When ore was roasted or smelted, an entire host of contaminants (arsenic trioxide, sulfur dioxide, lead, and so on.) have been launched, polluting air, water, and soil in an enormous radius across the mine website. A few of these mines turned zombies upon closure, seemingly useless however nonetheless exerting malevolent influences on native environments that will require costly (and infrequently publicly funded) remediation tasks or care and monitoring in perpetuity. Though the environmental file of Canadian mines has improved for the reason that imposition of a stricter regulatory setting within the Seventies, the advanced environmental challenges related to the zombies are among the many most vital penalties related to Canada’s Nice Acceleration, a degree simply underscored just about the muti-billion greenback cleanup tasks as locations equivalent to Yellowknife’s Large Mine or the deserted Cyprus-Anvil mine at Faro, Yukon.² 

Fig. 3: The deserted Large Mine in Yellowknife on the early phases of the Large Mine Remediation Challenge, 2009. Picture by the creator.

College students are additionally usually unaware of the value the Nice Acceleration has exacted on the employees uncovered to the underground setting. Certainly, mine staff died by the hundreds in Canada, with even better numbers struggling debilitating accidents, in tandem with the nice elevated within the variety of exhausting rock mines within the late nineteenth century. If the numbers of deaths pale compared to Canadian casualty charges on the battlefields of Europe, they’re startling, nonetheless. In Alberta, 773 miners misplaced their lives between 1906 and 1930;³ 2,548 died in Nova Scotia’s coal mines between 1838 and 1992; in Ontario, 2,640 perished within the province’s exhausting rock mines between 1892 and 1971.⁴ Invariably the best mortality charges occurred through the increase years previous to World Conflict 1, when largely unregulated working circumstances prevailed in immediate cities equivalent to Sudbury, Cobalt, Timmins, and Kirkland Lake.

The causes of demise different, however underground mines featured no scarcity of doubtless deadly hazards. Falling rock, rock bursts, surprising explosions (from misfired dynamite or from methane gasoline in coal mines), toxic gases, and minor seismic occasions may all take the lives of staff. Miners additionally expertise slower types of demise from lung ailments linked to dangerous mud (silicosis, black lung illness, asbestosis, mesothelioma), or most cancers linked to poisonous exposures to arsenic, lead, uranium or radon. In Ontario, simply certainly one of these ailments—silicosis—took the lives of 1,303 miners between 1926 and 1972.⁵ The well being and security file of the mining business improved dramatically after legislative interventions within the Seventies, however within the sudden development within the business starting within the Eighteen Nineties meant the publicity of ever-increasing numbers of staff to the well being and security dangers inherent to extracting the minerals that fed the increasing materials urge for food of the Nice Acceleration.

Fig. 4: The roasting facility at Large Mine simply previous to demolition in 2013. Staff within the roaster have been uncovered to excessive ranges of arsenic trioxide mud, a supply of controversy all through the operational lifetime of the mine. Picture by the creator.

Again in school, the clock ticks to the highest of the hour and the scholars begin to get stressed. I attempt to seize their consideration with an even bigger level: the teachings of mining improvement throughout Canada’s first Nice Acceleration may be instructive as we embark on a brand new mineral rush to energy up the vitality transition away from fossil fuels. In line with a latest World Financial institution report, people might want to dig up 3.1 billion tons of essential minerals by 2050 to construct windmills, photo voltaic panels, and batteries required to maintain a warming local weather from rising greater than 2 levels Celsius above pre-industrial ranges. That is along with all of the minerals which are fed into the tens of millions of cell telephones and computer systems produced globally yearly. Environmentalists may need hoped at one time for a local weather answer that prioritized an unlimited discount in complete vitality and materials consumption (a Nice Deceleration, if you’ll), however time is operating out. Virtually inarguably, given the ever-rising international demand for electrical energy, and the necessity to act shortly, the manufacturing of huge quantities of renewable vitality is the one doable response. How will we reconcile environmental safety with the fabric calls for of this new Nice Acceleration? This, I counsel to the category, is more likely to be the first problem going through their era.

John Sandlos is a professor within the Division of Historical past at Memorial College of Newfoundland.

1. John Sandlos and Arn Keeling, Mining Nation: A Historical past of Canada’s Mines and Miners (James Lorimer & Co., 2021); R. W. Sandwell, Powering up Canada: A Historical past of Energy, Gas, and Vitality from 1600 (McGill-Queen’s College Press, 2016). On a world scale, John McNeill’s work on the Nice Acceleration has highlighted vitality and mineral manufacturing as central options of this era of fast change. See Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are People Now Overwhelming the Nice Forces of Nature?” in Ambio: A Journal of the Surroundings 36, no. 8 (2007): 614-21; John Robert McNeill, One thing New Underneath the Solar: An Environmental Historical past of the Twentieth-Century World (W.W. Norton & Firm, 2000).

2. Tu ?idlini Dena Elders, Brittany Tufts, and Caitlynn Beckett, “The Reclamation and Rematriation of Ts? Z?l: The T? ?ídl?ni Dena’s Story of the Faro Mine,” Journal of Political Ecology 32, no. 1 (2025), https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.8094; Kevin O’Reilly, “Legal responsibility, Legacy, and Perpetual Care: Authorities Possession and Administration of the Large Mine, 1999–2015,” in Mining and Communities in Northern Canada: Historical past, Politics, Reminiscence, ed. Arn Keeling and John Sandlos (College of Calgary Press, 2015), 341-76; John Sandlos, The Worth of Gold: Mining, Air pollution, and Resistance in Yellowknife, with Arn Keeling, McGill-Queen’s Rural, Wildland, and Useful resource Research Sequence 19 (McGill-Queen’s College Press, 2025).

3. Karen Buckley, Hazard, Loss of life and Catastrophe within the Crowsnest Move, 1902-1928 (College of Calgary Press, 2004), 201.

4. This information was taken from, Ontario Division of Mines, Experiences on the Mining Accidents in Ontario, 1923-1957 (Queen’s Printer, 1958), and Ontario Mine Inspection Department, Annual Experiences, 1958-1971 (Queen’s Printer).

5. Dieter Grant Hogaboarn, “Compensation and Management: Silicosis within the Hardrock Mining Trade, 1921-1974” (Grasp’s Thesis, Queen’s College, 1997).