Pioneering With Taconite

With humor and insight, E. W. Davis tells the story that begins with the discovery of then-valueless taconite on Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range in 1870 and several decades of attempts to process taconite commercially. Davis details the ups and downs of the exciting, decades-long research effort that resulted in a workable extraction method, followed by frustrating attempts to form the concentrate into small pellets. Finally, Davis describes building the first successful commercial processing plant at Silver Bay in the 1950s and the contributions by various companies to the birth of the industry. Along the way insider Davis recounts the founding of the three new northern Minnesota taconite towns, Babbitt, Silver Bay, and Hoyt Lakes.

Winner of the Midwestern History Association's 2016 Hamlin Garland Prize The Iron Range earned its name honestly: it was once among the world’s richest iron ore mining districts. The Iron Range propelled the U.S. steel industry in the late nineteenth century, and iron mining sustained generations in the region with work and a strong economy. But long before most other parts of the country faced the realities of industrial decline, Minnesota’s Iron Range was already striving to maintain its core industry. In Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota’s Iron Range, 1915–2000, Jeffrey T. Manuel examines how the region fought the dislocation that came with economic changes, technological advances, and global shifts in industrial production. On the Iron Range, efforts included the development of taconite mining as a technological fix for the drop in hematite mining. Manuel describes the Iron Range’s modern history and how the downturn was opposed by individuals, civic groups, and commercial interests. The first book dedicated to thoroughly exploring this era on the Iron Range, Taconite Dreams demonstrates how the area fit into a larger story of regions wrestling with deindustrialization in the twentieth century. The 1964 taconite amendment to Minnesota’s constitution, the bruising federal pollution lawsuit that closed a taconite plant, and the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board’s economic development policy are all discussed. Ultimately, the resistance against economic decline is also a battle over mining’s memory and legacy, one that continues today. Manuel’s history sheds much-needed light on this important yet widely overlooked mining region as well as the impact of the past century’s struggles on the people who call it home.

Over the past five hundred years, North Americans have increasingly turned to mining to produce many of their basic social and cultural objects. From cell phones to cars and roadways, metal pots to wall tile and even talcum powder, mineral-intensive products have become central to modern North American life. As this process has unfolded, mining has also indelibly shaped the natural world and North Americans’ relationship with it. Mountains have been honeycombed, rivers poisoned, and forests leveled. The effects of these environmental transformations have fallen unevenly across North American societies. Mining North America examines these developments. Drawing on the work of scholars from Mexico, the United States, and Canada, this book explores how mining has shaped North America over the last half millennium. It covers an array of minerals and geographies while seeking to draw mining into the core debates that animate North American environmental history generally. Taken together, the authors' contributions make a powerful case for the centrality of mining in forging North American environments and societies.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- PREFACE -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- ONE: Ecological History of the Lake Superior Basin -- TWO: Industrializing the Forests, 1870s to 1930s -- THREE: The Postwar Pollution Boom -- FOUR: Taconite and the Fight over Reserve Mining Company -- FIVE: Mining Pollution Debates, 1950s Through the 1970s -- SIX: Mining, Toxics, and Environmental Justice for the Anishinaabe -- SEVEN: The Mysteries of Toxaphene and Toxic Fish -- EIGHT: The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements -- NINE: Climate Change, Contaminants, and the Future of Lake Superior -- NOTES -- INDEX -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

Are judges competent to decide complex scientific disputes over toxic chemicals and hazardous wastes? Have courts gone too far in awarding damages to victims? Does the judiciary unreasonably constrain free market forces and usurp power from democratically elected branches of government? What constitutes judicial "due process" in the regulation of health-safety and environmental risks? David O'Brien addresses these and other key questions in a comprehensive survey of the role of courts in resolving science-policy disputes. He theorizes that such disputes, with their burden of scientific uncertainty and intense value conflict, become judicialized in the United States because they pose an uncomfortable trilemma for policy makers: how to accommodate competing demands for scientific certainty, political compromise, and procedural fairness in the regulation of risks. When policy negotiations break down, courts are called on not to settle scientific controversies per se, but in their traditional role as independent tribunals for settling value conflicts and imposing norms in a pluralistic society. This interpretation is enhanced by a unique set of case studies, including DES and asbestos litigation and the ban on Tris (a carcinogenic flame-retardent). O'Brien's analytical framework and his detailed examples illuminate the extent, the implications, and the underlying causes of the judicialization of risk regulation.

A well-written and extremely informative book about our energy industries, their significance to the economy, and how economists analyze the problems associated with energy production and consumption. The reader with only a cursory knowledge of economic principles, as well as trained economists, will learn much from Peirce's incisive and sometimes acerbic examination of the coal, oil, natural gas, electric utility, nuclear power, and the alternative energy industries. Choice review of First Edition Economics of the Energy Industries, Second Edition, examines the industry, in general, and its component industries (petroleum, natural gas, coal, electricity, nuclear, and alternative fuels). Dr. William Peirce blends technical and historical information about the component industries and analyzes the mixture with economic tools. The text provides the reader with a combination of the analytical concepts, the historical and institutional background necessary to understand the role of energy in modern economies, and the issues involved in public policy related to energy. Dr. Peirce incorporates environmental issues as well as the current status of industry regulation in his thorough and completely revised edition.

A thorough inventory of research resources in American repositories, the Guide lists collections in the history of chemistry and chemical engineering, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, and a number of related chemical process industries and businesses, from personal and professional papers of chemical scientists and engineers to business records of the chemical process industries.

Honors Minnesotans who faced war with equal amounts of determination and dread, courage and fear, in places as far away as the Pacific and Europe and as close as our hometown.