In the Western U.S. and the north of Chile, large-scale mining has produced similar landscapes of extraction: open-pit and underground mines, smelter stacks, and large masonry structures. Transportation networks connected remote places to the world market, while many labor camps evolved into complex and vibrant communities. They also left their footprint on the natural environment: Polluted water and toxic fumes have made many of these sites inhabitable.

No other company left such a strong imprint in the mining regions of the Americas as the Anaconda Copper Mining Company—a “monstruous and complex organization,” in the words of historian K. Ross Toole—whose investments stretched from Butte, Montana to the Chilean desert. As the energy transition and its demand for lithium, cobalt, and other minerals drives a new mining boom, the history of Anaconda’s copper mining towns in Nevada and Chile can help us reimagine a just future not only in terms of how we power our lives, but in terms of fostering sustainable communities.

Though Anaconda’s history started in the late 19th century, much of the contemporary mining landscape dates to the boom that followed World War II, when growing demand, technological improvement, and massive capital investment, drove to increase production across the western hemisphere. As construction became more efficient, engineers spent considerable time perfecting the layout of crushing plants, smelters, and other facilities. At the same time, the company dedicated energy to perfecting the layout of workers’ domestic lives.

In the early 1950s, Anaconda started working in Yerington, Nevada. While many investors had tried to exploit the mines in the area with little success, in just two years, the company started producing cement copper at its new mine about 70 miles southwest of Reno. Isaac Marcosson, a journalist who wrote a 1957 history of Anaconda, called Yerington a “miracle” for transforming a “waste area” into a “productive community.” Its facilities included an open pit mine, metallurgical plants, and a townsite for workers called Weed Heights. Yerington was part of Anaconda’s larger corporate network. The mine required sulfur, which was brought from the Leviathan mine, some 50 miles away on the eastern slope of the Sierras, and its copper was sent to Montana for smelting and refining.

In the late 1950s, Anaconda built a modernist fantasy at 7,500 feet of altitude in the Chilean Andes. Chilean and foreign visitors marveled at the mine’s efficient organization and its perfect layout. While buses transported people back and forth to the mine, the ore moved quickly from the mine to the crushing plants to the concentrator. Before traveling to Anaconda’s elaboration plants in the United States, El Salvador’s copper took its final shape at the Potrerillos Smelter.

The designs of both the Yerington and El Salvador mines reflected ideas about efficiency and modernization that were coming into vogue at the time. In April 1960, Anaconda board president Clyde Weed wrote in the Engineering and Mining Journal that El Salvador was a great engineering achievement made possible by the combination of “capital, technical skills, and modern specialized equipment” and the “willingness of Chilean workmen.”

The mines, however, left permanent scars on the land, “ugly reminders of the visual and environmental price of extracting resources,” in the words of geographer William Wyckoff. In the north of Chile, Anaconda had started dumping copper tailings in the Pacific Ocean as early as the 1930s, destroying the local maritime life and embanking the bay. Yerington closed in 1978, shortly after Atlantic Richfield Company bought Anaconda. Like other abandoned open-pit mines, its pit quickly filled with toxic waste, leaving Nevada and Environmental Protection Agency authorities trying to sort out responsibilities and devise a cleanup strategy.

Workmen from an Anaconda smelter in Montana. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.

Despite these environmental tensions, Wyckoff reminds us not to forget that mines “have also been places of work that produced paychecks and built communities.” People fostered a sense of belonging in isolated places and under harsh conditions, building homes even as their lives were marked by backbreaking work, violence, and conflicts.

In the 1950s and ’60s, narratives of technological progress and efficiency also included workers’ living quarters. Historically, mining companies relied on the company town model, whose replicable urban grid and company-run social services promised order that would increase worker efficiency and avoid tensions that could undermine production. But many of the old camps fell short of expectations, and company abuses, control, and material limitations created sparked conflicts and strikes.

The new camps built in the 1950s attempted to remake the company town model by improving living conditions. Anaconda called Weed Heights the “most beautifully constructed and maintained mining camp in the United States”—an attractive place to raise a family, own a home, and pursue the American Dream. Rent was low, and residents could apply for a one-, two-, or three-bedroom house. Built at the height of what the historian Lizabeth Cohen refers to as the “consumer republic,” shopping areas guaranteed residents access to consumption in all forms: restaurants, sports, and recreation. There was also a ballpark, sports courts, and a swimming pool. “Neat” and “order” frequently appeared in the town’s descriptions.

Similarly, in El Salvador, the company’s architects wanted to avoid the “industrial look” and “develop an attractive, modern town that would be a highly desirable place to work and live.” Workers’ duplex houses, made of concrete blocks and painted in pastel colors, contrasted with the arid landscape, while the curved streets gave the illusion of an American suburb. By the late 1960s, the town had about 8,300 residents and, in addition to the curving streets of duplex homes, infrastructure that included a modern hospital, a school, and stores.

The Anaconda era was tainted by its projects of social engineering, its anti-union practices, and impact on the environment. Living conditions were better than those of many other working-class suburbs, but geographical isolation and managers’ control over the living and working spaces created many tensions. In Chile, the Cold War political climate and the attitude of U.S. corporations created sharp divisions between managers and employees. Conflicts were common, and strikes lasted for weeks at the time. In 1971, the Chilean government nationalized U.S.-owned mines, including Anaconda’s properties.

Today, few mines consider building permanent camps or invest in local communities. Instead, they prefer to bus in workers, establish commuting systems, or offer temporary dormitory-style lodging near the worksite. These practices have created new problems, such as long and dangerous shifts and workers isolated from their families for extended periods of time. In places like Chile, the low-income communities that surround mining complexes have become sacrifice zones, areas that are heavily dependent on mining-related informal jobs and commercial activities and that bear the harsh environmental consequences of extraction.

Rethinking mining booms in a time of climate change and job insecurity should start by incorporating input from a diverse array of voices, including labor unions, environmental activists, businesses, and local populations. Only through working closely with communities directly impacted by mining can the transition to renewable energy truly create a sustainable future.

The post Is There Such a Thing as a Sustainable Mining Boom? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In early modern times, and really up until the 20th century, one could argue that silver, not gold, was the precious metal that ruled the world. Though minted in Spanish America or Europe, silver coins could be used to buy pepper in Sumatra or cotton fabrics in Bengal, and the same money could be spent on troops or warships. Any monarch or state with ready access to silver harnessed the sinews of war.

But to understand what the costs and benefits of this first global currency were—how it changed the lives of the people who mined it and the natural environments that were upended along the way—consider the story of Potosí, a silver mining town established in highland Bolivia in 1545. Potosí offers sharp lessons about who wins, who loses, and how profoundly a mother lode of shiny metals can shape a region over the course of nearly 500 years.

Potosí, located at a breathtaking 13,200 feet above sea level in the eastern cordillera of the Bolivian Andes, still produces silver today, but miners tend to make more money from related base metals, mostly zinc and lead. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, when silver first went bust, Potosí’s salvation was tin. For a very long time, the Rich Hill, or Cerro Rico, of Potosí had it all, save gold.

But today the city fights for its life amid a drying climate and collapsing, over worked mines. The talk of the town today, despite its toxic environment and challenging altitude, is tourism. The fact that Potosí still lives by mining after nearly 500 years is a riddle that only makes sense in a woefully poor and underdeveloped country.

And this tension—how a place so rich in natural resources could remain so impoverished—has made Potosí a poster child of the so-called resource curse. Locally, the Cerro Rico was and remains the “mountain that eats men.” In colonial times, many of those men were native Andeans sent underground or into mercury-soaked refineries against their will, while the fortunes of Spain’s kings rose and fell on Potosí silver futures. In his still-popular polemic on underdevelopment, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano declared Potosí the epitome of colonial excess.

But a closer look at historical sources suggests that Potosí was something more complex and contradictory than the passive canvas for Spain’s “giant sucking sound” imagined by Galeano. Yes, the colonizer exhausted the mountain. Yes, the colonizer shamelessly abused Bolivia’s native Andean population. And yes, everybody inhabiting Potosí abused the natural environment, fouling streams and stripping every twig from every bush or tree for hundreds of miles around. Indeed, for its first hundred years Potosí could be described as an oasis of horror in a sea of ichu grass—an early modern nightmare.

Countless Andean workers and generations of outraged Catholic priests pled the case for reprieve before the Habsburg monarchs of Spain only to see the infamous draft of indigenous labor, the mita, revived again and again.

Yet, even with this dark knowledge in mind, one stumbles upon paradoxes that complicate the story. The search for silver was not monopolized by European colonizers, and control over the mines and their products was always contested. Though disadvantaged by law and custom, some native Andean miners and refiners made fortunes. Andean women drove a thriving informal economy by seizing on the city’s insatiable need for food and drink, aided by an accidental royal tax exemption.

Unintended consequences and spontaneous acts of charity abounded despite an atmosphere of greed and shortsightedness. The complexities of mining and refining, particularly as shafts dove deeper and ores grew refractory, led to a wide range of technical innovations that then reverberated around the region and the globe. While Potosí’s royal mint was staffed almost entirely by enslaved African men from Angola and Congo, the coins it produced supplied the world with ready money, which transformed societies in ways both positive and negative everywhere it traveled.

Panoramic view of Potosí, Bolivia. Courtesy of Martin St-Amant/Wikimedia Commons.

As early as the 1590s, Potosí’s decade of peak production, the city, mines, and refineries prefigured industrial capitalism at its best and worst, its most innovative and its most destructive. Stamp mills crashed all night, and miners worked around the clock. Everyone suffered the effects of airborne mercury, lead, and other toxic metals in addition to consuming foul water. Yet financial innovations followed on technical ones, giving rise to whole new classes of entrepreneurs, among them the long-distance coca traders of Cuzco, Peru. Merchants from Lima, Peru, brought Chinese silk, Basque iron, and Sri Lankan cinnamon to a wide range of colonial consumers. Potosí consumed the world even as the world consumed Potosí.

A fountain of fortune, Potosí’s iconic Cerro Rico promised socioeconomic gain for all types of people and both sexes, transforming a rigidly hierarchical world where self-fashioning was dangerous. Women and men from many corners of the world came here rather than to Madrid—the center of empire—to flip their own fortunes. With a restless population well above 100,000 at a time when Paris and London were not much bigger, Potosí was a beehive of opportunity for smooth and rough operators: pickpockets, pícaros, charlatans, and assassins. The city’s brothels and gambling dens were infamous, as were its comedians and other entertainers. For over 100 years Potosí boomed before its first great bust.

Another paradox of Potosí was its longevity. The Cerro Rico sputtered after 1650 but never gave out. It was still mined in 1825 when Simón Bolívar climbed it to celebrate his liberation of a continent.

When the Spanish colonizers left Potosí in the 1820s, the British, French, and ultimately Yankees came, each seeking to do what they believed the despised Spanish had been too stupid or technologically backward to do. In reality, it was Bolivians, including native Andeans as well as the descendants of Spaniards, who kept Potosí alive in the 19th century, often reviving old technologies and managing risk in ways not amenable to industrial capitalism as practiced in the Northern Hemisphere. There were ways to mine silver without thinking of how to maximize returns to shareholders.

There was always more silver inside the mountain, which many believed to be magical, a mother’s womb or Pachamama capable of regeneration. Even in the earlier years, when times got hard, mine owners and native prospectors fanned out into the countryside in search of new bonanzas, transforming a distant mountain or remote range into a fleeting shadow of the great Cerro Rico. Each hinterland boom produced its own wave of violence, harsh justice, wasteful spending, and environmental destruction, but each also produced new innovations amid labor shortages and discoveries of different ore types. One such innovation—born of short hands and hard rock—was to blast out ore with black powder, not safe, but effective.

Only with cyanide processing, hydroelectricity, and railroads in the early 20th century did Potosí begin to look something like a Leadville, Colorado, or a Virginia City, Nevada. A modern brewery arrived to supply miners with Potosina Pilsener by 1907.

But there was always something different in Potosí despite the modern accouterments, something ancient. As in colonial times, modern mining in Potosí has always toggled back-and-forth between the big and the small, the heavily capitalized and the informal or cooperative. A main driver of these swings has been the perennial uncertainty of global commodity prices, coupled with Bolivia’s extreme poverty and shifting government directives.

Eduardo Galeano may be right that what matters in the end is underdevelopment, extraction without compensation, wanton brutality, enduring racism, environmental degradation, all the worst effects of the resource curse in a former colonial backwater. Outsiders are to blame, from Spaniards to Yankees.

But if one asks Bolivian miners inside the Cerro Rico today what they make of Potosí’s strangely durable legacy, they are apt to say that the whole thing, from the very start, has been a devil’s bargain. The resource curse set loose in Potosí now lives inside us all.

The post How a 16th-Century Bolivian Silver Mine Invented Modern Capitalism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For five years, from 2010-2015, British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews traveled throughout this part of the world, chronicling its people, politics, and geography. Her photos detail not only the elements of its famous geology—which include oil and uranium—but also the practices that connect residents to a land they see as by turns mystical, practical, religious, and therapeutic. In her photos, Azeris seek healing by sitting in baths of crude oil in the town of Naftalan, Azerbaijan, while two Kazakh sisters walk through a field of rock towards an underground mosque.

Published by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press, and accompanied by exhibitions at Aperture Gallery in New York and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, Mathews’ Caspian: The Elements offers a disquieting and kaleidoscopic look at human life in a region of the world most often seen through the lens of natural resources and geopolitics.

The post A Disquieting Look at Life Around the Caspian Sea appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear California Trees,

When are you going to stand up and take some responsibility for all the damage you do to this state?

It’s not only the blue-purple blossoms that you jacarandas use to stain Californians’ cars, or the colonies of disease-carrying rats that you palms harbor, or even the roots you magnolias use to keep messing up the sidewalks on my street. It’s not even that your out-of-control-fires foul California’s air, destroy homes, and drain the state budget.

No, what most upsets me is that, instead of being accountable for the trouble you cause, you leave us humans to solve all your problems. You trees are more aloof than any Hollywood star. Do you think the Lorax from Dr. Seuss is going to show up to speak for you? Or do you think you’re magical heroes, like the trees from The Lord of the Rings?

The only reason you get away with this irresponsibility is your millions of human apologists, who constantly shift blame away from you flora and onto us fauna.

We are told that the stuff you trees do is really the fault of environmentalists who make it hard to cull you, or loggers who cut down too many of you, or utilities who don’t keep you guys away from their power lines, or government agencies who don’t properly manage you, or rural homeowners who insist on living among you in the wilderness, or even the homeless who seek shelter among you.

Your defenders even rail against human overpopulation! That’s pretty rich when you recognize the reality: This state is much more yours than it is ours. There are 4 billion live trees in California—100 times more than the mere 40 million people who live under your rule. And you dominate geographically, with forests covering one-third of the state’s land mass.

Now, to your credit, you in the forestlands pull your weight in some ways: You provide opportunities for recreation and contemplation. You store carbon, helping limit climate change. And a big shout-out to you trees in the Sierra: You collect and store the snowpack that California humans depend on for water and, while you’re at it, you filter pollutants out of runoff and reduce erosion that would send sediments into our streams.

But, lately, trees, your job performance has been slipping.

Why? It starts with your total failure to plan for self-defense, a lack of foresight that looks like some combination of laziness and grift, as you profited from the good nature of humans while shortchanging us in the process.

You exploited our fire suppression policies in order to grow far too great in number. And while humans did you the favors of reducing our birth rate and limiting development (not to mention giving up newspapers), you grew everywhere, creating forests with 10 times more trees per acre than a century ago. And while that might have been OK if you’d produced the grand and majestic trees that you once did, instead you gave us small, flimsy imposters. (Many of you are also non-natives—unauthorized immigrants—but let’s not get too much into that here, lest ICE try to deport you.)

Today’s overcrowded forests are more vulnerable to drought and diseases. Exhibit A is the drought and the infestation of bark beetles that caused an estimated 129 million California trees to die between 2010 and 2017.

And did you responsibly clean up your dead? No. Instead, deceased trees fell onto buildings, roads, and power lines, while littering the forests and fueling apocalyptic fires that burned for months. To take just one example, 2017’s Wine Country fires killed 22 people and caused $8 billion in damage and destruction—more than the state’s annual investment in the University of California—torching 14,000 homes, 4,000 commercial buildings, and 3,200 cars.

Such fires extinguished much of the goodwill you built with your environmental work. After all, mega-fires have badly lowered air and water quality you trees are supposed to protect, while emitting carbon you’re supposed to store.

To reverse these trends, your forests must be thinned, with smaller or diseased trees removed so that larger healthy trees survive. This is hard and costly work because you trees tend to die in inaccessible places. But do you help us humans with massive and money-losing thinning projects across such huge swaths of California? Do you tax yourselves to cover the costs of making the forests healthy? No, just like California’s human taxpayers, you seem to think that someone else will pay to manage and restore the forests.

Your lack of leadership on tree issues has created a void that has been filled by polarized human politics. It’s sad. Once, you trees—especially the great coastal redwoods and the signature sequoias like General Sherman—were great unifiers. But today you just fuel the partisan fires.

When Governor Brown proposed regulatory changes to speed up forest thinning, he got mostly grief. Environmental groups said thinning would just ease logging practices that harm forests, and argued that wildfires are more the fault of grasslands and that dastardly chaparral than of you trees. At the same time, logging-minded folks and homeowners in the North State suggested they needed more freedom from environmental regulation to cull the forest. That descended into all kinds of other arguments, including how responsible utilities should be for wildfires that stem from their power lines.

Meanwhile, you trees, in failing to address your own problems, even gave an opening to the political arsonist in the White House, who blamed environmental lawsuits for not getting rid of more fire-prone trees. This was dishonest scapegoating, since most of our tree problems are on federal lands that his government fails to manage adequately.

Reflexively, humans blame themselves and not you for such problems. I’ve seen some commentary about state agencies not moving fast enough to address tree problems. But that’s not true. Years ago, Governor Brown saw this problem emerging and convened a Tree Mortality Task Force that comprised state agencies, local governments, scholars, utilities, emergency services, and pretty much every stakeholder in our forests except you trees.

Without the task force’s work on maintenance and dead tree removal, the tree situation in California would undoubtedly be worse. It might have helped if you trees had demanded a much greater budget allocation for the tree crisis, but you preferred to remain quiet.

You can’t play shy anymore. The truth is that California’s tree problems may have become too big for humans. For us to help you, we’d have to come together as never before to engage in long-term collaborations to restore our massive forestlands, to find significant new funds for managing forests, and to embrace very different systems for fire prevention and land preservation. That kind of thoughtful, far-sighted governance has been impossible for California even when it comes to housing ourselves or educating our children, so it’s unlikely we’ll get our act together to save you trees.

Which is why, California trees, it’s time for you to face the same reality that confronts every interest group. If you want to solve your problems in this state, you trees will have to do the work yourselves.

The post California’s Trees Need to Stop Just Standing There appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That environment is changing, in part as a result of global warming, but more significantly because of a range of other factors including land degradation, monsoon variability, and groundwater depletion. With those changes, the farmers’ lives and livelihoods become more precarious.

But a more immediate menace threatens the people, flora, and fauna in the region: an invasive vine called Mikania micrantha. First imported to South Asia in the 1950s and ‘60s to help camouflage military installations, it has systematically spread, smothering everything in its path. By 2010 it had covered at least one-fifth of the national park. Using young trees and shrubs for support, the bright green, flowering weed forms a dense cover over native plants and fodder grasses.

Not content to merely block its victims’ access to sunlight and water, Mikania micrantha poisons them, releasing chemicals to inhibit their growth. The plant propagates by producing thousands of lightweight barbed seeds, plus roots from its own broken stems and leaves. But park officials are reluctant to turn to chemicals to fight it, fearing damage to the ecosystem

What if Mikania micrantha could be used to solve some of the very problems it’s causing? If harvested on a large scale and turned into a charcoal product called biochar, the plant could offer all sorts of advantages to local farmers. Biochar is made by burning organic matter like wood or plants at low oxygen levels, turning it into a stable, porous charcoal material that can filter water, sequester carbon, and can be a source of income when sold as a fertilizer or fuel, as has been done successfully in Haiti.

Biochar is often added to soils as a fertilizer, increasing crop yields and helping the soil retain water. Biochar can also be converted into “green charcoal” and used as a fuel, reducing the time and effort needed to gather firewood—time and effort usually expended by women and children—and relieving pressure on local forests.

Invasive weed Mikania micrantha is smothering native flora across Nepal’s Chitwan National Park.

 
Implementing this adaptation requires innovations in harvesting, to develop a user-friendly tool that ensures the entire plant is yanked out. Improvements in biochar processing to dry and pyrolyze the biomass efficiently are also needed. Right now, a team of researchers from Arizona State University (including one of us—Netra), and Tribhuvan University and the Agriculture and Forest University in Nepal, in collaboration with the Community Forest Users Group and farmers in the region is piloting a solution that’s customized to the particular needs of the area. The team hopes ultimately to help lift the smallholder farmers out of poverty, empower their communities, and better adapt to climate.

That last sentence might seem to be missing a word (shouldn’t it be “adapt to climate change”?), and the connection between an invasive species in a remote corner of the planet and climate adaptation may not be apparent—but that’s the point.

Nepal’s attempt to deal with its weedy invader by turning it into biochar doesn’t have a connection to climate change beyond its use as an environmentally friendly fuel and fertilizer. Rather, the project pragmatically addresses a number of problems in order to make farmers in the region more resilient to soil exhaustion, food and water insecurity, deforestation, and a changing and unpredictable climate.

Even if climate change were to magically disappear, typhoons would continue to slam into coastlines, flooding would damage property and take lives, and farmers would have to deal with pernicious invasive species. Until our climate adaptation agenda reflects that reality, efforts that address mainly the problems caused by climate change can only ever have a marginal impact on helping communities to thrive.

What we do have control over, and are actually quite good at, is reducing the two factors that allow hazards to cause harm in the first place: exposure (whether people or property are subject to a hazard) and vulnerability (the susceptibility of suffering negative impacts when exposed to that hazard). Effectively addressing these two factors in a way that makes a community more resilient may have little direct connection to climate change. Instead, these adaptations promote or improve things like public health, emergency preparedness, community education, zoning laws, insurance regulation, and sustainable development.

This is precisely what the project in Nepal seeks to do. By transforming an invasive species into a fertilizer, filter, and fuel—even a source of income if the biochar is sold—this adaptation reduces some of the precariousness of smallholder farming and can provide a foundation for sustainable development no matter what hazards a warmer climate might pose.

The post A Killer Weed Finds New Life as Fertilizer, Filter, and Fuel appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The conservationists’ efforts culminated with the Alaska Lands Act of 1980, the most significant land conservation measure in U.S. history. It protected over 100 million acres of federal lands in Alaska from development, doubled the size of America’s national park and refuge system, and tripled the amount of land officially designated as “wilderness,” America’s most protective status. The Lands Act was generally cheered in the U.S., and Alaskans played key roles in its passage. But the new state’s experience of having so much land—so much wealth—wrested from it by the federal government left most Alaskans resentful and wary. President Obama’s recent proposal to extend wilderness protection to the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge—at once a prospective oil resource and the richest wildlife habitat and most scenic part of the Refuge—reopens an epic, and repetitive, conservation battle.

It’s a fight I’ve been involved with since the summer of 1989, after my junior year in college, when a buddy and I drove from Florida to Alaska to help clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill. A year later, I moved to Fairbanks, Alaska to work for the Northern Alaska Environmental Center as a grassroots organizer to help end America’s dependence on fossil fuels by constraining supply (keeping oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from ever going to market) and driving the price of crude to where alternative energy sources could compete. I rolled into Fairbanks the day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and went straight to work organizing Alaskan preservationists against Alaska’s congressional delegation and the Alaskans who said “it’s our oil”—by which they meant Alaska’s oil to pump and sell. But the Alaskans with whom I worked—on the notion that “this land is our land”—defeated the Alaskan majority, as they had in 1980, by allying with groups like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society that could mobilize the national majority of people who wanted wild places protected.

In the political quiet that followed, I explored the Arctic. I soon bought a small wilderness guiding company, which I was able to grow because the Refuge’s pristine vibrancy—and the attention from the political controversy surrounding “The Last Great Wilderness”—made a ready market.

Visitors to the Refuge get silence—some of the lowest ambient noise values on Earth—and clean air that you could imagine rolling down from the North Pole. Only in the Arctic Refuge can you float 100 miles of untrammeled, free-running river from its headwaters into the Arctic Ocean. And somewhere along the way as you acclimate to the 24-hour daylight, your small party can be overrun by caribou. You can spot wolves with bloodied snouts and pendulous bellies cruising the tussocky ground with heads low, ears flat. Or happen upon a polar bear den while walking atop a perennial snowdrift. But only if you accept wilderness on its own summer terms: wind storms that flatten every tent in camp, pooping in a group latrine in horizontal snow, portaging boats and gear over ice floes, or welcoming a snow squall as relief from mosquitoes.

Alaskans who would rather get at what oil may lie beneath the coastal plain point out that the vibrant summer season is the exception in the Arctic Refuge. No one visits during the cold, forbidding eight-month winter so the Refuge should be made to yield something for Alaskans. Most of Alaska’s richest one percent created their wealth from raw materials like timber, fish, minerals, and oil, and most everyone else in the private sector makes a living serving those industries. But oil is king. Ninety percent of Alaska’s state budget is funded by oil. Oil pumped today has to be replaced with new discoveries, and Obama’s intentions cast a dark cloud over future discoveries and Alaska’s future.

Alaska’s winters—particularly in Fairbanks—cause an acute utilitarianism that doesn’t readily recognize non-economic values. Even today, life is a struggle that can seem an unfair contest at minus 40 F. So why would anyone—by enlarging a wilderness area—take an economic possibility off the table?

I know why, because I have had the great privilege of knowing the coastal plain. I also believe President Obama’s proposal to protect the coastal plain is a palliative to his move—also recently announced—to allow oil drilling off the East Coast from Georgia to Virginia. The hand that giveth also taketh away, and most Alaskans will count themselves among the taken as the president allocates America’s wealth in land and water to balance America’s need for oil and its desire for wilderness.

The post At Minus 40 Degrees, It’s Hard to Argue for More Wilderness appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And while we’re used to water scarcity in Australia, we do have particular periods of national drought, the latest stretching from 1997 to 2010. It has taught all of us that water is priceless, because we cannot live without it. It’s also brought a greater understanding in Australia’s towns and cities of what it is like to live in the bush. A drought so long and severe required all Australians to bear the burden.

Schools and community groups got deeply involved in Waterwatch, a national, volunteer water quality monitoring and water education program. Farmers installed observation bores on their property and regularly measured water table levels and groundwater quality, to guard against salinity that can spoil water and land in droughts. If you drove into a country town during the drought, the first thing you saw was a large sign stating the level of water restrictions.

In the cities, people stopped washing cars, then stopped watering lawns, and then stopped watering gardens. Many of us had a bucket between our legs in the shower, but that was voluntary! The country has expanded water recycling, with many places aiming to recycle 100 percent of their wastewater. We also invested heavily in desalination (though now, because the drought has dissipated, much of the expensive, energy-consuming equipment is no longer needed). The Australian nation has had to learn together to learn to turn the tap off and treat fresh water as a valuable resource.

Australians love water and we mostly live by the sea, but getting access to fresh water is getting more dangerous for those in the northern parts of the country. Recently a 15-foot-long crocodile plucked a bloke out of his boat in front of his family in a national park. The croc was shot (a rare event, since crocs have been protected from shooting since 1972) and the man’s body recovered. The culprit was as much the dry conditions as the croc. Crocodiles always guard their piece of waterway, and they are always growing bigger. As it gets drier, the big crocs and humans have less water to use, and are drawn closer together.

As an agricultural consultant on a recent trip to Northern Queensland, which is still in drought, I was introduced to a new term—“sell’em or smell’em” meaning that if you do not sell your cattle livestock, you will smell them dead. There was just not enough water to keep them alive.

But droughts are not new to Australia, and historically our landscapes have been able to function and flourish. The question is how a modern society can cope with the droughts, which affect everyone in our nation. Perhaps we can learn from Peter Andrews, a racehorse breeder and grazier from New South Wales, who wrote an excellent book called Back from the Brink. The book explains how the Australian landscape was distinguished by its ability to hold fresh water underground in huge floodplains. These plains released water over time, but also accommodated floodwaters by absorbing them into underground aquifers.

This natural process stored excess water and then released it in dry times, feeding streams at their highest point. Reed beds acted like biological safety values. They held water back, and the water would rise. The rising floodwater and floating debris increased leverage on the top of the reeds. Then they would flatten like a protective blanket, protecting what was beneath them.

This process is no more as livestock and machinery have drained the floodplains of fresh water, removed the reed beds, and in many cases allowed salt to move down into the lower parts of the landscape. The drought has again taught us that we need to mimic nature and learn to read the landscape in order to start to repair it.

For those in drought, my simple message is to remember that a drought normally ends with some form of flood, which can do even more damage. As there is little vegetation to slow down the flow of water and precious topsoil is washed away, too much water ends up degrading farmland and undermining bridge foundations. You can’t erase a drought all at once. So be prepared.

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Over half of American seafood imports are farmed fish, mostly from countries where environmental and food safety regulations are not as stringent as ours. Farmed fish production in Asia, in particular, has a historically bad reputation. Reports of fish being grown in polluted water, destruction of mangroves and slave labor conditions in shrimp farming, and overuse of antibiotics and chemicals have reached the U.S. from these high export countries.

Our consumption of fish isn’t dropping—while the U.S. is among the top three consumers of seafood in the world, it is also the second largest consumer of beef in the world per capita—which is one more reason we need to develop policies that encourage local fish production. Fish raised using sustainable aquaculture methods can provide a healthy animal protein source to U.S. consumers, with a lower impact on environmental resources than many other forms of animal protein production.

But what could “sustainable aquaculture” look like in America today? A 21st-century farm might be found in the middle of a large city, at the heart of a mixed-use development with affordable housing—and it might not use soil. This is the plan for the Hunters Point Family farm, which is currently being built in a 500-acre redevelopment project near the San Francisco waterfront. A joint project of the nonprofits Evo Farm, REDF, and Hunters Point Family, the Hunters Point Family farm is developing a pilot greenhouse aquaponics farm that will supply the local market with the very freshest catfish, lettuce, herbs, and tomatoes.

Aquaponics is the term for a farming practice that combines aquaculture and hydroponics into one system. The Hunters Point Family farm will grow fish in tanks and use the waste from these tanks as a natural fertilizer for plants grown hydroponically (in water). The plants’ natural filtration cleans the water—which is then returned back to the fish. It is a closed loop system that can provide a complete meal.

Recirculating tank aquaculture is considered environmentally sound for several reasons. It requires less water than other aquaculture systems; it offers the ability to control and monitor the inputs and outputs of the system and manage the quality of the water; the containment eliminates concerns about farmed fish from open ocean pens escaping and mingling with wild; and it requires fewer antibiotics to control disease than other aquaculture systems, such as those on ponds, because a farmer can shut down one of multiple tanks if there is a disease outbreak.

This type of production system, where fresh fish and vegetables can be grown in warehouses or greenhouses in cities and can be available locally, is sprouting up in cities throughout world. Thousands of aquaponics systems of various sizes are in place in the United States, from Hawaii to New York. Aquaponics has the potential to meet the triple bottom line of being good for people, communities, and the planet.

This kind of aquaponics system is also fairly easy to build. A team of Los Angeles Unified School District students, under the mentorship of David Rosenstein, the founder of Evo Farm, constructed a greenhouse aquaponics facility on the grounds of the Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets. The facility supplies tilapia and kale, along with an integrated education in environmental science and business economics.

The students have a bright idea for their own future in more ways than they might have imagined. We are already seeing the impacts of climate change on our food system: Callifornia cattle are being moved in record numbers to Texas and other regions because our persistent drought is dramatically reducing the amount of grassland and water to raise them. Warmer temperatures impact the ability to grow some of our popular fruit crops, and invasive pests—linked by some to climate change—threaten others. In the coming decades, regions will struggle with food security on a new level, beyond the chronic question of equitable distribution and affordable access; in other words, the question may become one of whether we can even meet the current level of supply. Fish farming in climate resilient indoor tank systems could be a key part of an ecologically sound foodscape.

Cities, states, and countries around the world are realizing the importance of creating regional, sustainable food systems to address the most vexing issues stemming from our current industrialized and globalized model of food production and distribution. The conventional system, which favors the large scale, works well for many, but its edges are frayed. On the production end, small-scale farms are struggling; on the consumer end, hunger and obesity remain problems. Aquaponics could address both ends of the equation—while narrowing an economic and accessibility divide, doing well by the environment, and providing people with a healthy food source: fish that are as whole and fresh as backyard fruit.

The post The U.S. Is Almost as Fish Dependent as It Is Energy Dependent appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But even if people in California understand how important water issues are, they don’t necessarily understand their complexity. “We have so many demands on our water—“and they’re all valid, and they’re all necessary,” said Sarah Woolf, president of water management company Water Wise, who also works in her family’s San Joaquin Valley farm business. We have to look at meeting these demands as one big issue rather than placing them in siloes, with each area of the state deserving different things, she said.

West Basin Municipal Water District public information and conservation manager Ron Wildermuth explained how his district purifies both sewer water and ocean water. First, the water passes through a filter with holes 300 times smaller than a human hair; then they use reverse osmosis technology to put the molecular structure of water through a sheet of plastic.

But as advanced as this technology is, people remain hesitant about the prospect of drinking salty water and wastewater. How, asked Sipchen, do you move beyond this?

It’s as simple as tasting the water, said Wildermuth. “Your mind’s going to say, ‘This tastes like water.’ We can take every contaminated source and make it as good as bottled water.” In the future, he said, the goal is to make recycled water 25 percent of our future supply.

It’s easy to see desalination as the future; the ocean is an unlimited resource. But the process has problems, said Sipchen. It’s extremely energy-intensive and generates a great deal of heat. And there are questions about its impact on marine environments and what to do with the salt that’s left over.

Orange County Water District president Shawn Dewane said that the problems of desalination have to be dealt with site-by-site; Huntington Beach, for example, is dramatically different from Monterey Bay. “We wouldn’t advocate for a one-size-fits-all permitting structure,” he said. The science and technology of desalination “has been proven worldwide and is used worldwide,” he added.

In discussing the work of his water district, Dewane used the phrase “the water we create.” Sipchen asked if this is inaccurate—new water can’t be created since it already exists in the universe.

“It’s new water for us,” said Dewane—it’s used water that would otherwise be dumped into the ocean. Orange County Water District’s goal is to reuse all of the water used by their urban population. “It’s important to understand that no one is drinking toilet water,” he said—but water that’s been cleaned to an “unimaginable level.”

Scott Slater is president and CEO of Cadiz Inc., a company that plans to capture groundwater in eastern San Bernardino County and sell it to Southern California cities. Santa Margarita, an Orange County city, has a contract with Cadiz, said Sipchen. Does producing water from a new source, Sipchen asked Slater and Dewane, send the wrong message to a part of the country that should be limiting its water use?

Dewane said that while new water supplies might encourage growth, we know that regardless, population growth is going to outstrip our ability to conserve water.

“We all want to provide a reliable source of water,” said Slater—and Cadiz’s water is 100 percent reliable. “The question is: new growth or backfill?” he said—and that’s up to local agencies, not his company. Plus, water use is changing here. This year, L.A. took less water from the Owens Valley than any time in history. “It’s not 1950 anymore,” he said.

In the San Joaquin Valley, you used to see huge sprinklers dumping water over the land, said Sipchen—now you see much more efficient drip irrigation. Is there more that can be done there to recycle water?

Farmers are using wastewater to irrigate crops, said Woolf. Her husband’s family farm takes the waste that’s a byproduct of producing tomato paste and uses it to water their tomato crops. There are a number of pilot projects working on cleaning the region’s groundwater, which contains boron and high levels of salinity. Desalination and distilling plants have also come to the San Joaquin Valley. We’re not as far along as Southern California, but we’re working on it, she said.

In the audience question-and-answer session, guests asked the panelists to look to California’s water future.

Will we be able to recycle water in our own homes?

No, said the panelists. These projects work best at a very large scale, said Dewane—who couldn’t imagine it being economically efficient for individuals. (Orange County’s system serves 2.5 million people.) Safety is also a concern, said Slater.

Could desalination or treated sewage supply areas of L.A. that are further inland—from the Wilshire corridor to downtown? Desalination plants are all at sea level, and the best recycled water comes from higher elevations.

Wildermuth said that another alternative for these types of areas is to clean and use contaminated groundwater—which is the major thrust of L.A.’s new water supply.

We have to start thinking about portfolios that are complimentary, said Slater.

There’s not one solution to our water problems—but “several silver bullets,” said Wildermuth.

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