Strip mining in Chicago

While flying over to Midway Airport in Chicago, I saw a bunch of strip mining operations in places where it was immediately surrounded by housing areas. I thought to myself, there's gotta be a lot of crappy stuff going on down there. I mean, I hear about all sorts of environmentalists and people hating on strip mining. And when I looked around in the area, it seems like it's all low-income sort of neighborhoods with shacks, generally smaller homes similar to those that you see in the movies that have garages and long alleyways and the house front on the other side. If you've played Silent Hill, you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about. But, in any case, it seems like there were strip-mining in the middle of suburbia and that really bothers me.

So, I decided to look up why we need strip mining at all in the first place...after like using half an hour that I could've used towards studying, I went ahead and researched the topic. So...for the rest of us that don't learn about mining engineering at....I have no idea if they actually teach this sort of stuff anywhere. I think Cal has the Hearst Mining building, but that left me puzzled as to the major itself, but I digress. So strip mining is basically open surface mining in which a mining company goes in and starts cutting open the ground and digs out material for whatever it is that they need. Here's the important part, when they have to go back and refill the land, they usually use this place as a waste dump and then cover over it with some vegetation and hope that the land will take care of the rest of the problem. You can already start seeing problems after the fact.

We're already going to have this whole landscape being torn down for mining with this giant hole in the ground, but now we're going to have to just dump crap into that hole and fill it up. Of course, after a decade or two, no one will even notice that there was a ton of waste underneath it and then just build on top of it. Yay for superfund sites. Clearly, the poor will have to suffer even more after strip mining. I'm almost certain that the neighborhood that's surrounding the quarry/strip mine has grown into the region through suburban sprawl, but it's going to be the poorer and likely disenfranchised folks that'll end up living in these regions. So, it'll just spiral downhill from there for them as the property value pummel deeper into the ground, pardon the pun. So, boo to mining near major cities.

Maybe I'm just making a mountain out of a molehill (oh, I love clever use of words, you know it), but what do the rest of you think about the whole idea of strip mining?