Mining Morality: Prospecting for Ethics in a Wounded World [Hardcover]

Employing self-sharpening tools found in the work of theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan, Pope Francis encyclical Laudato si, and international law, William P. George brings mining to personal and collective moral awareness by prospecting for ethics at selected sites: (1) Butte, Montana, the Richest Hill on Earth, once bound to Chuquicamata, Chile, by a company that spanned two continents and nearly owned a state; (2) the tiny island nation of Nauru, called Pleasant Island until it was devastated by phosphate mining and the breaking of a sacred trust by foreign powers; (3) the deep seabed, governed by the United Nations Law of the Sea, a constitution for the oceans that regards much of the resource-rich seabed as humankinds common heritage; (4) Africa, with its uranium mines but also its conflicts over what being nuclear means in the wake of colonialism, apartheid, and Hiroshima; and (5) mineral-rich asteroids speeding through space where mining rights are contested, even as space entrepreneurs look to become the worlds first trillionaires.

George introduces readers to remarkable moral minersthe women of Butte and Chuquicamata, a World Court judge from Sri Lanka, and the Rocket Boys of Coalwood, West Virginia, to name a fewand leads them to consider not only the morality of miningwhats good and not so good about resource extractionbut also the mining of morality, a venture that Socrates called the examined life.

William P. George has written a wise and penetrating book on the ethics of mining underground, underwater, and in outer space. Deeply concerned about injustice and the ecological threat, he is not driven by ideology or pre-conceived solutions but invites the reader into careful reflection on an industry that has received too little attention in Christian ethics. Daniel Finn, Clemens Professor of Economics and Professor of Theologlƒ}