Mining and its secondary effect

For LeCain, there are three types of technofixes, which are: the transformational techno-fix, the relocational techno-fix and the delaying techno-fix. He argues that they are important and useful since they “provide useful insights into how early pollution problems were solved, and […] why they were perceived as having been solved.” (LeCain, 138). However, as all kind of techno-fix that attempts to make a solution, there is always some kind of “secondary effect” on the environment, which seems not to be treated or to be forgiven. What is more, these ideas could reflect that there are limitations regarding the technology and science that can be applied: “all three types of techno-fixes ultimately resulted in other environmental problems, and they thus offer some insight into the strengths and limitations of the engineering and scientific methods used.” (LeCain, 139).

Personally speaking, mining should be an activity that must be regulated by the governments, whatever they are -statewide, regional, national. This means that all these political bodies should be the responsible for the concern, attention and caution of these mines. In addition, although technological fixes exist, they must be found and created in the sense that they can reduce to the full the consequences and impacts on the environment that they can produce. If we take into account the example of copper, it provoked an enormous quantity of dead animals in farms and ranches, due to the ingest of arsenic that copper smelters produced. In fact, an utopian situation would be the non-use of mines at all, that we could be able to extract similar materials from other resources, but it seems pretty impossible.