Sudbury’s smelters killed surrounding forest leaving land bare enough for NASA testing.

Evidence

Then Lionel went to work in the mines at Sudbury, Ontario, left the woods to work underground, digging nickel ore from the earth to be fed into the maw of furnaces. Sulfur dioxide and heavy metals poured from the stacks, making a toxic acid rain that killed every living thing for miles, a gigantic burn mark on the land. Without vegetation, the soil all washed away, leaving a moonscape so bare that NASA used it to test lunar vehicles. The metal smelters at Sudbury held the earth in a leg-hold trap, and the forest was dying a slow and painful death. Too late, after the damage was done, Sudbury became the poster child for clean-air legislation. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 693

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘earth in a leg-hold trap’ metaphor ties industrial extraction to earlier harvest ethics — directly relevant to environmental-racism and land-rights course threads.
• ADDENDUM: Concrete case of extractive economies imposed on Indigenous land that complements the On Sacrifice framing of industrial costs borne by colonized territories.