Wry Heat » environment

Tilting at plastic bags

Jonathan DuHamel — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:30:03 +0000

Tucson City Councilman Paul Cunningham wants to impose a fee on use of plastic bags because he’s “fed up with driving down the streets, noticing plastic bags plastered to the needles of what would otherwise be attractive desert plants.” This fee, essentially a tax on food and other items, is supposed to discourage use. Cunningham’s quest will probably work as well as Rio Nuevo, the City’s grossly mismanaged attempt at urban renewal. Just how will a fee on plastic bags solve the problem of littering?

Plastic bags are recyclable; some are even biodegradable. According to the Arizona Daily Star, “Tucson currently requires grocery stores to provide recycling collection for plastic bags.” Even easier is to dispose of the bags in your home recycle container.

The war on plastic bags is a current eco-fad. Other cities charge fees, some even ban plastic bags. But, alternatives to plastic bags present their own problems. Paper bags pose a littering problem too and use up trees.

Some people bring their own reusable bags, especially for groceries. But that too, has problems.

Bags made from non-woven polypropylene, the most commonly used material in reusable grocery bags, have been shown to contain excessive lead which can pose a danger. Also a study by Canadian microbiologist Dr. Richard Summerbell found that unless you wash reusable fabric grocery bags after each use, they can harbor unacceptably high levels of bacteria, yeast, and mold. “The study found that 64% of the reusable bags tested were contaminated with some level of bacteria and close to 30% had elevated bacterial counts higher than what’s considered safe for drinking water,” according to the National Post, Canada.

By the way, a British study of all types of bags found that plastic bags were superior because they take less energy and water to make and less energy to recycle, as well as taking up less space in landfills (link).

I suspect that some of the bags seen plastered to cactus needles are fugitives from garbage trucks and land fills.

It seems that Cunningham is following the second law of government institutions: “All problems will be solved with infusions of money taken by coercion from the people.” -Mark David Ledbetter

As for Mr. Cunningham’s concern about aesthetics, I have just one word: POTHOLES.

Rosemont copper mine would benefit economy and community but is buried in bureaucracy

Jonathan DuHamel — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:15:05 +0000

The proposed Rosemont copper mine to be developed south of Tucson will provide many benefits to the area. According to studies, the mine will produce over 400 direct jobs and about 1,600 indirect jobs that will provide about $3 billion in increased personal income over the next 20 years.

The mine will provide local governments with tax revenues of about $19 million per year and create $700 million in local economic stimulus in such things as services, real estate, retail purchases, utilities and manufacturing.

The total physical footprint of the Rosemont mine, including the mine itself, the waste and tailings dumps and the physical plant will be about 4,440 acres which is half the size of the Sierrita mine and one-third the size of the Mission mine. Even thought Rosemont will have a smaller footprint, it will produce more copper than the Mission mine, about 240 million pounds of copper per year versus Mission’s 170 million pounds. Pima County wasted $13,000 of taxpayer money building its own model of the footprint (see Hugh Holub’s stories on the mine here.)

Among the concerns with the Rosemont mine is water use. Rosemont is projected to use 6,000 acre-feet of water per year. To put that in perspective, the Mission mine uses about 7,200 acre-feet, the Sierrita mine uses about 29,000 acre-feet, and agriculture near Green Valley, mainly the pecan grove, uses 32,000 acre-feet per year. According to Rosemont, “The initial source will be groundwater withdrawn from wells in the Upper Santa Cruz sub-basin of the Tucson AMA basin and replenished by Colorado River water delivered by the Central Arizona Project.” Rosemont has already stored 45,000 acre-feet of water in the Tucson AMA. Rosemont’s water conservation and recycling techniques should result in the mine using only 50% of the water compared to older, traditional mining and processing methods.

Rosemont submitted a draft environmental impact study (DEIS) to the U.S. Forest Service in mid-2007. You can read the study at http://www.rosemontcopper.com/ (Click the Studies tab). The Forest Service had originally planned to release the study in the spring of 2009, but the bureaucracy has produced delay after delay, possibly due in part to opposition from some local politicians and environmental groups. (See Local Politicians Against Jobs.)

The Forest Service then promised to release the DEIS by the end of last year, but that was not to be. Just yesterday, buried deeply within an obscure part of the national Forest Service’s website, the Forest Service announced that they will publish the DEIS in the Federal Register in August, 2011, and publish a decision in January, 2012. After that there is a 90-day period for public comment. And then the plan must go to and get approval from so-called “cooperating” agencies which includes Pima County and a bunch of state and federal agencies.

Delays such as this are unconscionable but seem to be the norm with the current administration and its policies of putting all possible impediments in the way of developing our natural resources.

The bureaucracy is exacting the cost of lost opportunity upon us at a time when we could have been enjoying the economic stimulus of a new enterprise.

Disclaimer: I am a retired geologist who was employed by a major copper mining company, but I have no connection to Rosemont Copper.

The Pristine Myth

Jonathan DuHamel — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:52:33 +0000

Pristine: “belonging to the earliest period or state; uncorrupted by civilization.”

We often hear the plea from preservationists that we must save the pristine desert, or stream, or forest, or jungle, or whatever, because these are the “last best places” untrammeled by man. But are they really so pristine?

Archaeological and anthropological research during the last 15 years or so, shows that much of what we thought was pristine in the Western Hemisphere, even the Amazon rain forest, is actually human-formed landscape created by the first New World inhabitants, the Indians. It seems that American Indians, from North America, Mexico and South America, were the ultimate land managers, and they transformed the land to suit their needs. They constructed the world’s largest gardens.

The quest of some preservationists to return the land to pre-Columbian times, to its state prior to 1492, is a quest in pursuit of a myth. “The pristine view is to a large extent an invention of nineteenth-century romanticist and primitivist writers such as W.H. Hudson, Cooper, Thoreau, Longfellow, and Parkman, and painters such as Catlin and Church.”¹ Reality, according to the new research, is quite different.

The Amazon forest in the Beni region of Bolivia consists of “an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long.”² Researcher Clark Erickson of the University of Pennsylvania believes “that the entire landscape, 30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways, was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago.”² “A growing number of researchers have come to believe that Indian societies had an enormous environmental impact on the jungle. Indeed, some anthropologists have called the Amazon forest itself a cultural artifact, that is, an artificial object.”²The 1539 expedition of Hernando de Soto across what is now the southeastern U.S. encountered not some primeval forest, but “thickly settled land, very well peopled by large towns.”² In 1519, Hernan Cortes saw that the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was bigger than Paris and contained “wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away.”² Even the first settlers in the northeastern U.S. found that forests were open and park-like, not the dense grow romanticized by writers hundreds of years later.

Many researchers estimate that the Americas were well-populated before the arrival of Columbus, with a population of between 40- to 80 million, greater than the population of Europe at the time. “Moreover, the native impact on the landscape of 1492 reflected not only the population then but the cumulative effects of a growing population over the previous 15,000 years or more.”¹American Indians built cities and civilizations, cultivated forests and farms, and developed more than half of the crops grown worldwide today. Indians, rather than subsist passively on what wild nature provided, instead “survived by cleverly exploiting their environment.”² Their principal tool was fire.³ They did not domesticate animals for meat, but instead used fire to change whole ecosystems to raise deer, elk, and bison. “Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms.”²

But then the Europeans came and unintentionally brought with them smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles, (and later on cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever). Within about 130 years after first contact, 95% of the native population was wiped out by disease.² By 1682, when French explorers retraced de Soto’s journey, they found the land nearly deserted. Because the hunters were gone, buffalo, elk, and deer populations exploded. Because the fire-using land managers were gone, dense forests, romanticized by 19^th century writers had taken over the carefully managed forest parks. In one sense, Europeans did not destroy pristine wilderness, but recreated it.

By “1492, Indian activity had modified vegetation and wildlife, caused erosion, and created earthworks, roads, and settlements throughout the Americas. This may be obvious, but the human imprint was much more ubiquitous and enduring than is usually realized. The historical evidence is ample, as are data from surviving earthworks and archaeology. And much can be inferred from present human impacts. The weight of evidence suggests that Indian populations were large, not only in Mexico and the Andes, but also in seemingly unattractive habitats such as the rainforests of Amazonia, the swamps of Mojos (Bolivia), and the deserts of Arizona.”¹

I would argue that humans have enriched the land by making it produce more, and have increased diversity by creating more habitats than would otherwise occur. When preservationists whine about losing our “pristine” desert, and pine for a return to Walden, when the “vision” statements of federal land management agencies speak grandiosely of ecosystem management in search of the pristine myth, remind them that nature is not so pristine. It is always changing. The “forest primeval” doesn’t exist.

References:

1: Denevan, William M., ca. 1992, The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin.

2: Mann, Charles C., 2002, 1491, The Atlantic Monthly, March 2002.

3:Krech, Shepard, 1999, The Ecological Indian, W.W. Norton & Co.