People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest Colombia: Rural Afro-Colombian artisanal miners work hillsides with hand tools or dredge mud from river bottoms. Migrant miners level the landscape with excavators, then trap gold with mercury. Canadian mining companies prospect for open-pit mega-mines. Drug traffickers launder cocaine profits by smuggling gold into Colombia and claiming it came from fictitious small-scale mines. Through an ethnography of gold that examines the movement of people, commodities, and capital, Shifting Livelihoods investigates how resource extraction reshapes a place. In the Chocó, gold enables forms of “shift” (rebusque)—a metaphor for the fluid livelihood strategy adopted by forest dwellers and migrant gold miners alike as they seek informal work amid a drug war. Mining’s effects on rural people, corporations, and politics are on view in this fine-grained account of daily life in a regional economy dominated by gold and cocaine.

Much has been written over the years about life in the coal mines of Appalachia. Not surprisingly, attention has focused mainly on the experiences of male miners. In Daughters of the Mountain, Suzanne Tallichet introduces us to a cohort of women miners at a large underground coal mine in southern West Virginia, where women entered the workforce in the late 1970s after mining jobs began opening up for women throughout the Appalachian coalfields. Tallichet's work goes beyond anecdotal evidence to provide complex and penetrating analyses of qualitative data. Based on in-depth interviews with female miners, Tallichet explores several key topics, including social relations among men and women, professional advancement, and union participation. She also explores the ways in which women adapt to mining culture, developing strategies for both resistance and accommodation to an overwhelmingly male-dominated world.

Committee Serial No. 24. Considers problems related to mining claim patents; withdrawal of public lands from mineral development; access to rights-of-way from mining claimants; and other issues involved in proposed revision of U.S. mining laws as they effect mining, livestock, and lumber industries, and wildlife conservation. Hearings were held in Spokane, Wash.

A miner and his friends get stuck in a mineshaft. Will they be able to get out? Ralph, Melvin, and Garen have been mining for years together. They always return home safely, but this time, two of them are trapped by boulders. Dynamite won’t help, so maybe a few explosive monsters could do the trick… mix in a river with a waterfall and the discovery of a valuable treasure, and this diary can be a lot of fun to read!

The development of specialised feeding habits during the course of time by human beings is paralleled in the majority of animals, in particular have developed special peculiarities, and insect larvae which in most cases are quite characteristic of the species concerned. This applies especially to phytophagous insect larvae, and anyone with the requisite experience can say with a fair degree of certainty which insect larva is responsible for any damage to be found on a plant. It leaves behind a definite "feeding pattern" which might be compared to a "visiting card" on which the genus and species are marked in runic characters. Whoever has learned to read the runes can readily determine who has been feeding on the affected spot, solely on the basic of the "visiting card" left behind. From the known factors - the name of the plant and the type of feeding patter- and after some study of the various types of plant infestation, both the genus and species of the larva producing the feeding pattern can be worked out without difficulty. The importance of "feeding pattern investigation" has now far outstripped the successes to be obtained by normal collecting. Previously, when wishing to list the species of insects present in any given locality they were caught with the net, by sugaring and other methods. This always resulted in a very defective "list" of the insects in fact existing in the locality concerned.