"If you can't grow it, you have to mine it" goes the miner's credo. The extraction of minerals, metals and fuels from the ground is one of humankind's oldest industries. And our appetite for it is growing. Society is more dependent on both greater variety and larger volumes of mined substances than ever before. If you live in a middle-income country, every year you use roughly 17 tonnes of raw materials – equivalent to the weight of three elephants and twice as much as 20 years ago. For a person in a high-income country, it is 26 tonnes – or four and a half elephants' worth.- BBC

Five years ago, Hague was part of the problem. Each winter, more than 6 feet of snow fell on the upstate New York town nestled between scenic Lake George and the Pharaoh Lake Wilderness Area. Each year, the highway department dumped as much as 2,200 tons of rock salt onto 110 miles of road – nearly 2 pounds of salt for every square yard of road. And Hague is just one of more than a dozen communities that dot Lake George’s banks. Their combined use of road salt has increased the lake’s salinity nearly threefold over the past several decades, according to research by the nonprofit Fund for Lake George. The lake’s salt levels are now more than 30 times higher than more isolated lakes in the Adirondack Mountains, the group found. - USA Today

As of November, nine major mining companies considered key players in the extraction of rare metals for electric vehicle batteries had 225 active applications to expand operations into or near Indigenous territories in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. U.S.-based financial institutions are among their top funders, according to a new report by Amazon Watch and the Association of Brazil’s Indigenous People, or APIB. In the past, those mining companies caused environmental damage that sickened Indigenous communities, stirred social discontent and contributed to the “trail of destruction” of the Amazon rainforest.  - Inside Climate News

The transition to clean energy won’t be complete without cleaning up the messes left behind by dirty energy. The federal government took a new step toward that goal this week. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced the release of nearly $725 million in funding for cleaning up old coal-mining facilities. It’s the first tranche of a record $11.3 billion dedicated to coal cleanup in last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to be disbursed over the next 15 years. States and tribes with abandoned coal mines will be able to apply for a portion of the funding in the coming weeks. - Canary Media

Mashona Dlamini knew his land was rich long before any mining company told him so.  As a child, he often followed his father, a healer called an inyanga, down through the silver-flecked red dunes around their village to the coast. There, they gathered the octopuses, sea urchins, and seawater that his father used to make medicine. In winter, the land on either side of their path heaved up sweet potatoes and corn, in summer thick bunches of bananas. As long as they took only what they needed, Mr. Dlamini’s father explained as they walked, there would always be more. So when international mining companies began to arrive in the early 2000s – first for titanium in the dunes, and later for gas they said might be beneath the ocean floor – Mr. Dlamini, along with many of his neighbors, wasn’t particularly interested in their pitch.  - CS Monitor

A unique gem mine in the mountains northeast of Mesa is in the process of rebuilding after a wildfire wiped it out in 2020. The Bush Fire is now the 5th largest in Arizona's history as firefighters battle multiple blazes. "The fire came roaring up the mountain. It was so intense," the mine's owner, Kurt Cavano said, as he gathered charred debris to be removed from the site. When the Bush Wildfire burned through nearly 200,000 acres northeast of the Valley, the flames raced up the side of Four Peaks, scorching everything in their path, including the mine. - AZ Family 

A $90 million settlement between the federal government, Colorado and the owners of the Sunnyside Mine will pay for additional cleanup at the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund site after years of litigation. The Environmental Protection Agency, Justice Department, Department of the Interior, Department Agriculture and state of Colorado announced Friday they have reached a settlement with Sunnyside Gold Corp. and its parent company Kinross Gold Corp. to fund remediation in the Bonita Peak Mining District near Silverton. In the case of an old-fashioned standoff, the federal government will drop its claims against Sunnyside Gold Corp. and Canadian mining company Kinross Gold Corp. and the two companies will drop their claims against the federal government after the settlement. - Cortez Journal

In 1900, gold miners working for an English investment corporation set off dynamite to blow a 5-meter gap in a 30-meter ridge. The site, now called The Kink in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, sits on the traditional land of the Hän and Dënéndeh people. Within hours of the explosion, the river abandoned the old channel and rushed down the new one, tearing at the bedrock and more than doubling the size of the gap. Over the next century, the new channel would morph from a waterfall into a series of rapids and would reveal how bedrock canyon incision works. - EOS

Europe’s magnesium shortage could shutter industrial operations within weeks, threatening thousands of businesses and millions of jobs in sectors from cars to packaging, associations warned. Chinese exports of magnesium -- a critical material for hardening aluminum alloys and used in everything from power tools to laptops - has plunged as the nation cuts output because of an energy crunch. That’s caused prices to spike and left buyers worldwide exposed. - Bloomberg

Years of recreational shooting left hazardous levels of lead in the soil of a parcel of land in the White Tank Mountains, and the site west of Phoenix will remain closed for three more years for cleanup.  The area was shuttered to recreational shooting after a pregnant woman was killed by a stray bullet more than three years ago.  The multimillion-dollar remediation effort comes as Buckeye aims to lease the land from the federal Bureau of Land Management for a park. It's an area that public safety officials previously describe as "a mess" because of the number of people shooting at all hours, in all directions. - AZ Central

There is perhaps nowhere in the Pacific where the costs of extractive industries are as heartbreakingly clear as Rennell Island. The island, a tiny dot in the vast South Pacific that lies at the southern tip of Solomon Islands, is home to a few thousand people. And it’s starkly divided.  On one side is pristine East Rennell, a Unesco world heritage site, which offers a glimpse of Rennell unspoiled. But in the last decade, West Rennell has suffered the triple assault of logging, bauxite mining, and a devastating oil spill from when a bulk carrier, hired by a mining company, ran aground on a reef. - Guardian

The vast majority of land on Earth — a staggering 97 percent — no longer qualifies as ecologically intact, according to a sweeping survey of Earth’s ecosystems. Over the last 500 years, too many species have been lost, or their numbers reduced, researchers report April 15 in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Of the few fully intact ecosystems, only about 11 percent fall within existing protected areas, the researchers found. Much of this pristine habitat exists in northern latitudes, in Canada’s boreal forests or Greenland’s tundra, which aren’t bursting with biodiversity. But chunks of the species-rich rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and Indonesia also remain intact. - Science News

California water officials have moved to stop Nestlé from siphoning millions of gallons of water out of California’s San Bernardino forest, which it bottles and sells as Arrowhead brand water, as drought conditions worsen across the state. The draft cease-and-desist order, which still requires approval from the California Water Resources Control Board, is the latest development in a protracted battle between the bottled water company and local environmentalists, who for years have accused Nestlé of draining water supplies at the expense of local communities and ecosystems. - HCN

The Rocky Mountains that lie within Blackfoot traditional territory are threatened with mountaintop removal. The Grassy Mountain coal project in Alberta, Canada, is slated to begin coal extraction in fall 2021. It is expected to be profitable for only 25 years. However, by then the almost 4,000-acre project will have blasted the terrain with explosives, separating the substrata from the coal and creating a new rock-scape the size of almost 3,000 American football fields.  Places where mountaintop coal removal occurs are never the same; just look at West Virginia, where mountain areas once rich with biodiverse forests have been reduced to barren desolation. And, as my grandmother taught me, disturbed areas are not places to practice Blackfoot traditional knowledge. - - High Country News Perspective

It’s no secret that the miners in this region work in difficult and often dangerous conditions — some in sanctioned and regulated areas, some illicitly. They labor under the threat of collapsing mines, falling rocks and temperatures in excess of 110 degrees.  Despite the risks, many of the miners speak to me about their work with pride, as if buoyed by a sense of tradition. - NYTimes