In the News...

Bingham Canyon Mine, Utah

Located 20 miles outside Salt Lake City in the Oquirrh Mountains, the Bingham Canyon copper pit is about 2.75 miles wide and 4,000 feet deep. Two Empire State buildings stacked one on top of the the other wouldn’t reach the top. By 2015, the mine will be 500 feet deeper, and a third Empire State building will fit inside. The terraces inside the pit, which provide a base for the digging equipment and also stabilize the slopes, can be more than 80 feet high.

Berkeley Pit, Butte, Montana

This former copper mine operated between 1955 and 1982. An elaborate system of pumps and drains kept the local water level low enough for mining. Today, the 1,780 foot-deep pit is filled with around 900 feet of contaminated water filled with metals and chemicals such as arsenic, cadmium, pyrite, zinc, copper and sulfuric acid. The water can be as acidic as battery acid, and copper can actually be “mined” directly from the water. Currently, the 1-mile-by-0.5-mile pit is listed as a federal Superfund site with the potential to contaminate surrounding ground water, and, surprisingly, is also a tourist attraction, complete with gift shop and $2 admission fee.

Source: Huge Holes in the Earth: Open-Pit Mines Seen From Space, Wired Magazine

In the News...

Earth on Fire (Wired Magizine) Thousands of hidden fires smolder and rage through the world’s coal deposits, quietly releasing gases that can ruin health, devastate communities, and heat the planet.

Sunken Fires Menace Land and Climate (NY Times)

Coal fires man, this ain't no kiddie stuff. There has been a fire burning in Mount Wingen in Australia for 6,000 years. There are thousands all over the world, mostly man made.

In the News...

Back to Petroleum

Thanks to the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the public is finally seeing through BP's decade-long greenwashing campaign.

In the News...

China’s Cancer Villages Are Real—and Probably Worse Than Reported

Because Chinese media and academic journals are governmentally controlled, their reports tend to be conservative about politically sensitive and negative subjects. However, there have been no reports disputing the cancer-village phenomenon. There is no known national ban on cancer-village reporting, though new cancer-village reports are rare after May 2009. There are reports that local government agencies and polluting factories threatened, harassed, and assaulted investigators and reporters. The government often disciplines and removes newspaper and journal editors who publish politically sensitive and negative reports. … In addition, the traditional Chinese culture continues to identify people with the particular village where they are from. A personal label of “cancer village” would turn away potential investors, tourists, friends, and spouses.

Lee Liu, writing for Environment.

Reblogged from Utne Reader.

Geo-engineering...is it such a good idea?

What can we do about the climate crisis? Well, we could treat the symptoms by trying to offset the greenhouse gas effects of warming. Maybe we could dump a surrey of iron into the ocean to spur the growth of carbon-sequestering algae. Maybe we could "dope the stratosphere" with sulfate aerosols in order insulate the globe from the sun's radiation. (The recent volcano in Iceland actually did this for us.) Or...SPACE MIRRORS!

These schemes seem a little dubious. And very presumptive.

Yay, NPR!!!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125789622

Anthropocentrism

All Natural Water Purification....with a catch.

The Catskill Watershed provides water for New York City. This is where I live!

In order to create the 8,300-acre Ashokan reservoir several communities in the valley were flooded; people either abandoned or moved their homes. The house that our local fire chief lives in, a quarter of mile down the road from me was transported in the early 1900’s from Olive, a town that was flooded to make the Ashokan Reservoir. Miles and miles of railroad track was removed and relain, highways were discontinued, and over 30 cemeteries and the bodies in them were relocated. A steam whistle was sounded a full hour just before the area was flooded indicating that people had to leave. Then the waters came rushing in. Can you imagine? Entire towns were relocated to just outside the reservoir’s boundaries, hundreds of houses built and thousands of people relocated. Historical markers indicate where towns used to be. "Former site of..."

In my mind’s eye, I can see entire towns simply submerged under water, laundry still on the line. Of course this isn’t true. But during a drought, when the reservoir was dry my parents walked along the reservoir floor they found evidence of the towns, stone foundations, windowpanes, old plates. This might be an apocryphal story, the drought was before my time, but it is compelling nonetheless.