Mining devastates landscapes and corrupts the miners who pursue it.

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. There was mining everywhere along that grand road, with all its destruction and devastation, its digging, burrowing, gulching, and sluicing; and up all along the seemingly inaccessible heights were holes with their roofs log supported, in which solitary and patient men were selling their lives for treasure. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 449

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense moral-physical parallelism - mining as both literal desecration of earth and spiritual corruption of the digger - that resists summary.
• STORYSTEM: The ‘solitary and patient men selling their lives for treasure’ in log-roofed holes on inaccessible cliffs is a ready-made image for a story about obsession.

Related

• Mountain gold mining washed muddy debris down into the Sacramento (similarity 0.83)
• Silver mining dominated the Colorado Rockies in this era. (similarity 0.79)