WHERE WOULD YOU BE WITHOUT MINING?
Without the hundreds of thousands of material benefits that come from the mining industry your world would be completely different from the way you now live.
Regardless of your age, eliminating the minerals and coal that are mined, processed, smelted or refined by the mining industry would mean that you would no longer be able to enjoy television, radio, or music from a CD…in fact anything that requires electricity. And children’s toys would certainly be much different without mining.
If you think about all the things that you use every day, you will discover for yourself the almost endless uses of metals and plastics and paper, all of which depend upon mining for their existence.
http://www.utahmining.org/brochure.htm
There’s a bumper sticker that I used to see plastered to the belongings and facilities of mining/mineral engineering students and professors in college. It said something like “If you can’t grow it, you gotta mine it!” And it’s literally true; besides air and water, every product that you ever buy ultimately derives from some combination of mineral ores and agricultural crops. You cannot oppose mining on its face without sending us back to the Stone Age. Oops, where do we get stones without extracting them from the lithosphere? I guess we have to go even further back beyond the Stone Age. Ouch.
What cannot be grown must be mined.