Frankly a shame. Since there's a been a lot of development in mining technologies over the years.

Even for the folks that have an ecological focus, there's quite a few methods developed with limited degradation of the landscape, and reclamation of the mining sites into alternative uses (park, forestry, entertainment, tourism). The Wieliczka saltmine in Poland's an especially impressive example [1]

[1] https://www.wieliczka-saltmine.com/individual-tourist/touris...

And these days, there's also a huge number of resources in terms of mineral identification and site mapping. The EMIT Imaging Spectrometer from NASA's a cool example that does remote satelite mineral identification from orbit. [2]

[2] https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/instrument/overview/