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Mining Danger: Industrial Disease, Accidents, and Pollution in Canada’s Mines and Mining Communities,
1870-1990
About The Project
Thirty years ago, scholars such as Richard White, Chris Sellers, and Arthur McEvoy implored environmental historians to take work and workplaces more seriously. Obviously, human work is one of the most important mediums through which human beings have shaped the natural world, but factories, mines, and other industrial facilities are themselves environments worthy of historical analysis. Human interactions with industrial environments are inherently risky, threatening workers through exposure to toxic substances or accidents that may cause injury or death. Workers’ responses to these threats are a crucial from of working-class environmentalism that historians have often neglected.
The Mining Danger Project will document threats to workers in one of Canada’s most dangerous industries. At the surface, ore processing facilities (roasters, ore concentrators, and smelters) produced even more pollution, contaminating air, water and soil while exposing miners and their families to toxins such as lead, arsenic trioxide, and sulfur dioxide (Sandlos and Keeling 2021).
The project will document health and safety threats to miners across multiple cases studies and sectors in the industry. We will trace the impact of health and safety issues on miners and their families, and also political battles between organized labour and mine owners over mine accidents, industrial disease, and pollution. Our overarching goal is to further connections between labour and environmental history, analyzing occupational health and safety in mines as one facet of class, race and gender struggles.
We are grateful that our work is funded through a SSHRC Insight Grant (2023-28) that will allow us to range far and wide in provincial and federal archives. We expect to encounter unexpected themes, stories, and case studies, but our initial plan is to focus on the following sub-projects:
• The health impacts of industrial diseases, especially silicosis and black lung disease;
• The multiple pathways of workplace exposure to asbestos, from mines, to processing facilities, to classrooms and offices;
• The historical impacts of mining accidents on;
• The impacts of mine smelter and refinery pollution in working-class communities.
In all of these cases, we will foreground the struggles of mine workers to create safer workplaces by actively shaping the mining environment, engaging in struggles for improved occupational health and safety through their unions, or by actively campaigning against pollution in their communities.
