Mining devastates both landscape and the human soul it employs.

Evidence

Agriculture restores and beautifies, mining destroys and devastates, turning the earth inside out, making it hideous, and blighting every green thing, as it usually blights man’s heart and soul. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 211

Categorization

• APHORISMS: Compresses a whole moral cosmology into one line: what we do to land, we do to ourselves.
• SEED: Angle: an essay on extractive industry’s double wound — visible ruin of terrain, invisible ruin of the people who work it, told through 1870s travel writing.