Parergon

Abstract:

The proliferation of mines in Europe since the late twelfth century is well documented, but only recently have scholars begun to fathom the scale of the industry’s ecological impact, on the one hand, and its role in stimulating environmental thinking and action, on the other. Focusing on the extraction and processing of metal ores, this article begins by illustrating how the renascent sector reshaped different ecosystems, as traced by several palaeo-scientific methods. It then turns to cultural-historical sources to propose that, rather than becoming passive, unwilling, or ignorant victims of a polluting industry, contemporaries criticised what they perceived as extraction’s harms and sought to reduce them, but also developed ways to justify their risks. Communities’ actions, which mingled with the materiality of mines and their surroundings, wrote a major chapter in Europe’s environmental history, one whose ongoing impact remains poorly understood.