Tearing away the mountains, and Clint Eastwood too

While there’s a lot not to like about the process of mining coal, and I’ll try to give it some historical context in an least a couple of postings, there is no doubt that currently the most destructive, ecologically, geologically and culturally is mountaintopping. You can get a basic idea of the destruction by following the link to an NPR article and photo essay below.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2009/03/removing_mountains.html?ps=bb4

Replace Appalachian Mountains with Santa Monica Mountains while you look at it.

If you think something like that can’t happen in California, it already has. Fortunately it ended before most of us were born, but the scars still remain. The ‘49er with his pick and red long johns is something of a romantic figure, but he quickly gave way to American industrial ingenuity. First, streams in the northern Sierra Nevada were redirected so the streambeds could be dug up and loaded into sluice boxes that washed everything downstream except the heavy gold that settled to the bottom. Mining on that scale required capital investment and as the streams played out and the quantity of gold available declined sluicing wasn’t profitable enough. Things needed to scale up. So hydraulic mining started. Enormous water cannons were constructed, capable of blasting water 400 feet or more at high enough pressure to eat through a mountainside. There’s are historic pictures of the process at this link.
http://cprr.org/Museum/Hydraulic_Mining/

And this site has a basic overview of the process and the devastation to agriculture downstream that finally ended it.
http://www.museumca.org/goldrush/fever19-hy.html
Make sure you click on the link for the Malakoff Diggins. That’s the landscape after over 100 years of recovery.

Finally, I remembered that Clint Eastwood’s 1985 Western “Pale Rider” had scenes of hydraulic mining with the hydraulic miners as the villains. Wonder if that particular plotting had anything to do with Eastwood being a native of northern California?

And after the coal is burned you have...sludge

I'm going to spend some time later writing about the impact of coal mining and use on local eco-systems, but this wire service report encapsulates what happens with the stuff that doesn't go up the chimney.

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/us/2009/03/16/D96V7GT00_coal_ash_potomac/index.html

It's just a lump of coal

The last couple of weeks I’ve found myself thinking about coal. What started it was the case from West Virginia before the U.S. Supreme Court. Two West Virginia coal companies were suing each other and when the Massey Coal CEO thought he was about to lose, he set about to buy a West Virginia Supreme Court judge to make sure he won. The question before the U.S. Supreme Court is whether he bought him legally.

That reminded me that Massey Coal is one of the most notorious mountain top removers in the Appalachians. And all that thinking got me to doing some research. The more I read the more intrigued I became. Coal was central to American industrialization, labor history, transportation development, and urbanization. It is inextricably linked to the culture of rural Appalachia and over a billion tons a year continues to be mined in the United States. But the cost, both to produce it and to the environment continues to rise. There’s a lot of thinking to be done about coal, and I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts with you over the next few weeks.