The old view conceived the world as a living organism, often figured as a nurturing maternal presence. Since antiquity, particular opprobrium was reserved for excavatory mining, which, in texts by Pliny the Elder, Ovid and Seneca, was considered an act of aggression driven by greed (for gold) or blood thirst (for iron ore). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lust was added to the roster, and such mining was denounced by poets including Edmund Spenser and John Milton, who described it as a rape of the Earth. The imagination of the time saw “a direct correlation between mining and
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