The Washington State University Vancouver Center for Social and Environmental Justice and the Gifford Pinchot Task Force will host author Bill Carter who will talk about a proposed copper mine near Mount St. Helens
In a speech at Vermilion Community College in Ely, Minn., author and filmmaker Bill Carter talked about copper mining and the copper industry around the world.
The Hidden Costs of Going Green
11/19/2012 12:03 pm ET | Updated Jan 19, 2013 : by Bill Carter on The Huffington Post Blog
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Tucson Weekly: Miracle Metal
Nov. 15, 2012: by Jon Shumaker
This volume on copper may be the most important book you'll read all year
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Booklist Online Review
As the subtitle says, copper really does run the world. No matter whether you’re reading this review online, on a mobile device, or in print, you wouldn’t be reading it without copper. Nor would you be using a staggering number of modern-day conveniences and essentials—no phones, no lights, no motorcars. It’s a good metal, but it has a downside, as Carter learned when he discovered that his small vegetable garden on his property in Bisbee, Arizona, was seriously toxic. Its lead content was 32-percent higher than normal levels, but that was nothing compared to its arsenic, which was 100-percent higher than what’s considered acceptable for residential soil. Why was his soil so toxic? Turns out it’s because, for almost a century, Bisbee was a copper-mining town (the last mine closed in 1975), and the mining process has some potentially catastrophic side effects. This frequently surprising book—Did you know that the Rio Tinto copper mine in Spain has been operating for nearly 4,000 years?—chronicles Carter’s own education in the history of copper mining, in Arizona (home to 11 mines accounting for about 60-percent of the country’s copper production) and around the world. You wouldn’t think a book about copper would be an exciting read, but it is, because the story of copper mining is also the story of industrial innovation, technological revolution, and social and ecological change on a grand scale.
— David Pitt
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‘Boom, Bust, Boom’: We Need the Pebble Mine Like the Plague
10/29/2012 01:10 pm ET | Updated Dec 29, 2012 : by Joel Reynolds
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The Daily Beast : Copper, the Metal That Runs the World: ‘Boom, Bust, Boom,’ by Bill Carter
10.25.12 6:10 PM ET : by Peter Madden
What do houses, cars, computers, and cellphones have in common? Everything electrical needs copper to function. But author and filmmaker Bill Carter talks to Peter Madden about how we’re destroying ourselves to get to the metal.
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