The Myth of Sustainable Cities

Note: this post is a version of an article published in the journal, Practicing Planner, in March, 2012.

          Over the past several decades, planners have been exposed to the concepts of sustainability, smart growth, green cities, etc. from numerous sources, the greater majority of which were created by urban and regional planners and landscape architects (McHarg 1969; Godschalk & Parker 1975; Spirn 1984; Rees & Wackernagel 1996; Innes & Booher 2000; Berke 2002; Wheeler 2004; Beatley 2010). Another level of complexity was added when the concept of sustainability science was introduced early in the 21st Century (Kates et al. 2001) and supporters began concentrating explicitly on the dynamic interactions between natural and social systems (Clark & Dickson 2003) and on how those interactions affect the challenge of sustainability (Reitan 2005). In addition, many universities have established sustainable cities centers or initiatives, e.g., Stanford University, University of Oregon, and University of Kentucky among numerous others. In addition, cities throughout the U.S. have also adopted sustainable initiatives, e.g., Seattle, Portland, Austin, Boston, and Jackson, Mississippi, to name but a few. As one final indication of the mainstream status of the sustainable cities concept, in 2000 the American Planning Association published its first Policy Guide on Planning for Sustainability.[1]

          This commentary focuses on cities and sustainability; therefore, defining our terms is a good place to begin. Without getting overly pedantic, the term city refers to relatively large, permanent centers of human populations engaged in socioeconomically productive activities. Defining sustainability is more problematic since varying definitions abound. Perhaps the best known definition of sustainable development is the one established by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), also widely known as the Brundtland Commission: “Sustainable development seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future.” At the United Nations World Summit (2005, 2) it was noted that the 1987 WCED definition of sustainability required reconciliation of environmental, social, and economic demands, or what have become known as the “three pillars” of sustainability.

          Since the Brundtland Commission’s hallmark effort, sustainable development has been defined in a number of ways. Fowke and Prasad (1996) identified at least 80 different definitions, many of which were competing and a number that were contradictory. Parkin et al. (2003) reviewed more than 200 definitions of sustainability and sustainable development. And Hopwood, Mellor, and O’Brien classified and mapped numerous different approaches to sustainable development, which they viewed as a “challenging and contested concept” (2005, 38).

          Regardless of how the term is defined, a critical consideration when the concept of sustainable cities is being discussed is environmental. City dwellers depend on productive ecosystems and habitats outside the city proper for food, energy, water, waste disposal, and renewable and non-renewable resources required to build dwellings, offices, and retail space and to manufacture the furnishings, equipment, materials, and supplies used in everyday life. That extended ecological footprint (Wackernagel 1994), also widely known as appropriated ecosystem, required by cities to function is seldom if ever considered by practicing planners in assessing the needs of cities or the effects of urban life on the larger environment (Jansson et al. 1999).  The goods and services produced by ecosystems are said to be “appropriated” through trade and commerce with distant cities (for example, coffee that is produced in the highlands of Ethiopia or Colombia is consumed by customers in Starbucks and other coffee outlets and supermarkets across the North America). When Folke et al. (1997) measured the appropriated ecosystems of cities around the Baltic Sea, they found those footprints to be at least 565 to 1,130 times larger than the areas of the cities themselves.

          That concept of appropriated ecosystem has meaning in real world terms as well as in academic journals. As an example, the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington Metropolitan Statistical Area consists of 9,286 square miles. If the mean (847) of the Folke et al. study is used to calculate that metro area’s ecological footprint, the result is an area of about 7,865,240 square miles, or 29 times the area of the State of Texas and slightly more than twice that of the entire United States. If the lower end of the Folke range is used as a multiplier, the appropriated ecosystem for the Dallas metro area is about 5,246,600 square miles, or one and one-third larger than the area of the U.S. Even though appropriated ecosystems are well beyond the control of practicing planners, that distancing effect does not make them less critical to the future of cities and their urban inhabitants or to the viability of the sustainable city concept.

          Exploring the many facets of urban sustainability requires an examination of the physical effects urban development has on natural environment systems. Readers can participate in that challenge by thinking about what the area that became Rome was like in 800 BCE, Manhattan Island in 1500, Los Angeles in 1600, or Chicago in 1700. No one would claim those areas were anything like they are today. Those involved in the process of creating or expanding cities destroyed or degraded almost beyond recognition the environments that had been extent and built vertical and horizontal hardscapes unlike anything encountered in a “natural” setting (Campbell 1996, 297). Residences took the place of forests, meadows became shopping centers, free-flowing streams were transformed into concrete channels or underground drainage systems, central business districts grew over riverside terraces, wetlands were drained and converted into industrial areas, and native vegetation was removed and replaced with exotic species. All the LEED-certified buildings and delightful, walkable, diverse, connected, human-scale streetscapes in the world will not disguise the fact that those cultural artifacts were built on the ruins of natural ecosystems that had been functioning in place for many thousands of years. Therefore, if cities are about destroying and degrading ecosystems, the question that must be asked is how then can they be characterized as environmentally sustainable. That question is especially pertinent today when virtually all of the world’s population growth for the foreseeable future is projected to occur in urban areas (Cohen 2004, 48).

          If we return to the concept of ecological footprint, all or almost all city inhabitants depend on food produced by agricultural enterprises at considerable distance from the city center. The most critical point about that situation is not the incurred transportation or carbon-related costs, but the very nature of agriculture. Cultivated fields are not natural phenomena; they are replacements of the previous natural ecosystems and destroyers of habitat and biological diversity (Daily 1997; Hall 2004). And, if destroying and degrading ecosystems is not sufficient evidence to indicate agriculture’s non-sustainability, the dominant agrochemicals used today are responsible for the vast majority of the eco-toxicity found in freshwater sources (Tilman 1999) and for the well-documented Dead Zones found throughout the world and off the coast of Louisiana (Rabalais et al. 2010).

          But that view of agriculture is not universal. According to the American Society of Agronomy (1989, 15), sustainable agriculture is one that, over the long term, “enhances environmental quality.” Although that statement in itself should be sufficient to raise eyebrows, critical observers may wonder how the quality of biological systems can be enhanced when the systems themselves have been ripped out and replaced by many hundred thousand square miles of corn, soybean, hay, wheat, and many other crops. Therefore, a logical question would be exactly what part of agriculture at any scale can be interpreted as environmentally sustainable. As far as biologists can tell, apple orchards, cotton fields, and rice paddies, etc., are monocultures rather than essential features of natural ecosystems. Agriculture may become economically sustainable but only at the expense of destroying indigenous ecological systems, habitats, communities, soils, and biodiversity. The conclusion is evident: agriculture can never be regarded as environmentally sustainable.

          What we have, therefore, is a situation consisting of cities that were created by destroying natural environments and urban residents who are supported by agriculture that was created by destroying natural environments and, yet, many planners blithely insist that system is or can become environmentally sustainable (Wheeler 2004). That existing situation with respect to cities is one of meaningless lip service being paid to the concept of environmental sustainability while economic sustainability is more often the true focus of attention. Thus, people who refer to cities as sustainable can best be understood as wistfully appealing to a fashionable myth or to a wished for fiction rather than reality. To see the world as we want it to be we are encouraged to close our eyes so we do not see the world for what it is. Lewis Carroll would have been hard pressed to create a more phantasmagorical view of reality.

          It is also important to explore, at least briefly, how urban water and energy supplies fit into the current conception of sustainable cities. Since many cities worldwide are located in arid or semi-arid environments, here’s a small but telling query that concerns the sources of potable water for Los Angeles. Los Angeles is located in a climate zone that from 1877 through 2010 averaged slightly less than 15 inches of precipitation annually. The answer to my inquiry is fairly straightforward: approximately 35 percent LA’s potable water is from the Eastern Sierra Nevada watershed via the Los Angeles Aqueduct, about 11 percent is a result of mining regional groundwater, and around 54 percent started as snowfields in the Colorado River Basin and the central Sierra Nevadas and traveled almost 450 miles in canals and pipelines via the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta and the California Aqueduct (Villaraigosa 2008). It might be instructive for planners throughout the U.S. to think about what has happened as a result of water wars between the City of Los Angeles and landowners in Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. The answer is painfully obvious: Owens Valley has been sucked dry. The primary question that remains is, what part of Los Angeles’s water supply can be thought of as environmentally sustainable now or in the foreseeable future. Perhaps readers should be thinking about Owens Valley and alkali dust storms (Reheis 1997).

          If we even engage in a cursory examination of the role energy consumption plays in cities, data collected in 2009 by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (2010) reveals that nearly 80 percent of our energy was from fossil fuels, a little over eight percent from nuclear energy, and slightly less than eight percent from renewable sources. And of the electrical energy produced in the U.S., almost 50 percent of the national total is from burning coal. Since almost none of those fossil or nuclear fuels are produced within cities, the energy consumed by city dwellers is imported, leading to yet another massive environmental incompatibility with the concept of sustainability, not to mention the telling fact that a whopping 92 percent of that energy is from non-renewable resources. Thus, sustainable energy remains an elusive sprite.

          While on the topic of energy, Siemens, Cisco Systems, IBM, Living PlanIT, and many other firms are today locked in competition to build what they refer to as eco-cities that “can manage growth and development in a sustainable way that minimizes disruptions and helps increase prosperity for everyone.”[2] In a similar movement, land investors proposed massive eco-developments in the mid-2000s for Abu Dhabi, China, Southeast Asia, United Kingdom, the U.S., and numerous other countries whose publicly stated goals were to re-shape the future by reducing or even eliminating the environmental costs of urban living through innovative use of technology. Planners might want to take those claims with a grain of salt or two, even for the relatively few projects that have made it off the drawing boards in these challenging financial times.

          Perhaps it is time for practicing planners to be honest with ourselves. Cities will never be environmentally sustainable, or eco-anything. To expect them to be is like expecting a pride of hungry lions on the Serengeti Plain to turn vegan and start rooting for tubers. The problem is that behavior is simply not in their nature.

          What cities can and should be is less environmentally and energy profligate. In other words, they should be greener, smarter, more equitable, and better than the existing cities most of us practicing planners have had a hand in planning and building. Marking progress toward planning better cities should be our metric, not something as intellectually indefensible as environmental sustainability. As part of that metric, it is critical for all practicing planners, council members, and Planning and Zoning commissioners to realize that working toward better cities is a means to a more environmentally responsible future, not an end-state/goal that could be achieved in X number of years or even decades.

          Planners and many others have long ignored the environmental aspect of the sustainability definition because that part of the tripartite equation—economy, society, environment—is the most difficult for modern North American culture to reconcile with our production-consumption lifestyles and deep-seated reluctance to give up the “In Growth We Trust” paradigm. Thus, the easy way out for planners has been to pretend we can have our cake and eat it too with sustainable cities (supported by sustainable agriculture) as well as diverse and productive biological systems undiminished in geographic extent. As all real-world planners should know, the only place where that could happen is if we dive down the rabbit hole into the fantasy world of Alice’s Wonderland.

          As professional planners we know what cities are and perhaps have an inkling of what they might become if we keep our eyes open, our minds sharp, and our creativity levels high. As a first step, let’s stop deceiving ourselves and faking it with city councils, P & Z commissions, stakeholders, and the public about what is possible and what is not. To say we can make cities environmentally sustainable involves smoke and mirrors and is intellectually unsupportable. To say we can help cities become environmentally less profligate and more economically and socially sustainable is on target and achievable. We should be talking about better cities, not sustainable cities. Deliberate obfuscation or misdirection should never be cards that planners play.

          To move cities along the greener-smarter-better path, we must begin by getting directly involved in how much our individual cities can improve each year, each decade, each half-century. We have to think of practical ways to reduce energy consumption, find methods that will leave significant swatches of land in a quasi-natural state so at least some ecological values remain, identify restoration projects that will result in more rather than fewer functioning habitats while improving biodiversity. Building more compact, denser, diverse, transit-oriented, walkable cities has little to do with environmental sustainability but has everything to do with creating urban places that are more environmentally responsible, more energy efficient, and more socially equitable.

          It may be instructive to reflect on why many practicing planners (and other urbanists) have been captivated by the myth of sustainable cities. Much like Plato’s allegory of the cave, where a group of chained prisoners mistook shadows on the wall in front of them for the reality that lay behind, something has prevented planners from turning around to see the reality. Perhaps the enticing shadows of the continued and often comforting cycle of production-consumption have mesmerized us. Perhaps the real world difficulties of confronting the power political structure involved in the “In Growth We Trust” paradigm have played an avoidance role. Perhaps it is something we desperately want to believe in and so we do. In any case, a quick scan of internet sites that delve into the topic of “Sustainable Cities” should be sufficient to demonstrate the myth’s pervasiveness in urban planning circles, even in numerous academic departments that perhaps should have conducted a more intellectually rigorous analysis before jumping on that bandwagon.

          In a way, I have saved for last the most important and practical rationale for abandoning the untenable sustainable cities concept. A critical incentive to never use the word sustainable, or any of its variants, with reference to cities, is political ideology. Many political conservatives hold dear to their hearts sentiments that Pirages and Ehrlich (1974, 43) defined as the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP), or what many today identify with conservative (free market) environmentalism. At the risk of oversimplification, I’ll define the DSP as a system in which human domination over nature is regarded as the natural order; resources are believed to be enormous and will provide unlimited opportunities for humans; technological progress makes all, or almost all, problems ultimately solvable; and traditional economic growth is both morally good and sustainable (Rees 1997, 303). On the other side of the ideological divide is what social ecologists have identified is the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), which can be summarized briefly as the continuance of human civilization depends on the survival of natural systems (Catton and Dunlap 1978, 1980).

          Since cities have a mix of voters aligned with both political ideologies as well as a great many people located somewhere between those polar positions, and also since a significant proportion of planners take issue with the DSP and conservative environmentalism, it behooves practicing planners to remove what threatens to become an enormous bone of contention from the public arena. We can do that by forgetting we ever heard the term “sustainable cities” and by focusing on environmental values people of all political persuasions share and support. Those shared values include saving money by cutting energy and infrastructure costs via techniques like low impact development, breathing fresh outdoor air, swimming in clean water, catching fish that are not laced with chemical poisons, bringing back wildlife diversity, restoring wetlands and riparian systems to more natural states, or improving urban parks by planting only indigenous species and systematically removing invasive and exotic flora and fauna. Even the most ideologically committed citizens are unlikely to advocate wasting taxpayer dollars on unnecessary energy or infrastructure projects, or to reject efforts that would result in more native trees and shrubs and thus more birds, bunnies, and butterflies in our parks and backyards. After all is said and done, it would be difficult to find people who would be vociferous opponents of improving everyone’s quality of life by building better and more environmentally responsible cities.

          But using the word sustainable to describe what we plan to do can cause political temperatures to rise and tempers to flare until we run the risk of having citizens no longer talking to each other but yelling across a growing divide (Hoffman 2011a, 2011b). As practicing planners we should be aware that not all environmental regulations are workable just like not all free market environmental solutions are unworkable.

          It should be noted that tolerance for competing or conflicting viewpoints has its own set of difficulties, especially when closely held value systems are in conflict (Phillips 2003, 5). A number of researchers believe that little progress can be made on critical social issues without rational public conflict (Cobb 2000, 2). Advocacy and community-based planners who acknowledge their actions are not value-neutral surely have played powerful roles in advancing social positions in planning, as was illustrated by Davidoff (1965). But, the difficulty with advocacy, as Cobb (2000, 25) noted, is as soon as people begin spouting “scientific facts” in support of a specific ideological position, those facts themselves become politically tainted and can easily be rejected individuals and groups who oppose that position.

          It is my contention that political differences can be moderated without significant disagreement when planners decline to support either side of what could become an environmental argument and instead emphasize shared values. Keeping our dialogue as free from ideological conflict as is possible while discussing shared environmental values—such as turning to low impact development and green infrastructure to reduce the cost of stormwater drainage—avoids the ideological divide and is surely a step in the direction of responsible environmental action. Another of those first steps in that direction should be to throw the term “sustainable cities” into the trash bin in the move toward a more pragmatic yet better and brighter urban future.

          I want to conclude this discussion by referring to a highly significant issue concerning cities and environment that was highlighted by Rees (1997) that practicing planners should never overlook or devalue. Planning efforts to green our cities can only go so far since ecological footprint is largely determined by individual consumption rather than by urban form and pattern, the built environment, or institutional function. Consequently, if practicing planners want to be at the forefront of building more environmentally responsible cities, they must be directly involved in community outreach efforts that focus on educating the general public with respect to putting shared environmental values into action and to the significance of those actions regarding the future of cities and their inhabitants.

          As Arie De Geus, the well-known organizational learning specialist (1988, 70) who also served as Dutch Royal Shell’s corporate Coordinator of Group Planning, perceptively noted, “. . . planning means changing minds not making plans.” Therefore, both practicing and academic planners must be creative about how to begin changing minds, including our own, as we plan more environmentally responsible cities.

References Cited

American Society of Agronomy, 1989. Decision reached on sustainable agriculture. Agronomy News. Madison, Wisconsin, January 1989, p. 15; cited in Norman, D., Janke, R., Freyenberger, S., Schurle, B. and Kok, H. (1997). Defining and implementing sustainable agriculture. Kansas Sustainable Agriculture Series, Paper #1, Kansas State University, Kansas Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

Beatley, T. (2010). Biophilic cities: Integrating nature into urban design and planning. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Berke, P. R. (2002). Does sustainable development offer a new direction for planning? Challenges for the 21st Century. Journal of Planning Literature, 17(1), 21-36.

Campbell, S. (1996). Green cities, growing cities, just cities? Urban planning and the contradictions of sustainable development. Journal of the American Planning Association, 62(3), 296-312.

Catton, W. and Dunlap, R. (1978). Environmental sociology: A new paradigm. American Sociologist, 13(1), 41-49.

Catton, W. and Dunlap, R. (1980). A new ecological paradigm for post-exuberant sociology. American Behavioral Scientist, 24(1), 15-47.

Clark, W. C., and Dickson, N. M. (2003). Sustainability science: The emerging research program. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 100(14), 8059-8061.

Cobb, C. (2000). Measurement tools and the quality of life. San Francisco: Redefining Progress. Retrieved October 28, 2011, from http://www.econ.tuwien.ac.at/hanappi/lehre/pee/measure_qol_Cobb.pdf

Cohen, B. (2004). Urban growth in developing countries: A review of current trends and a caution regarding existing forecasts. World Development, 32(1), 23-51. Retrieved October 30, 2011, from http://www.iussp.org/Activities/wgc-urb/cohen.pdf

Daily, G. C. (1997). Nature’s services: Societal dependence on natural ecosystems. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Davidoff, P. (1965). Advocacy and pluralism in planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 31(4), 331-338.

De Geus, A. P. (1988). Planning as learning. Harvard Business Review, 66(2), 70-74.

Folke, C., Jansson, Å., Larsson, J., and Costanza, R. (1997). Ecosystem appropriation by cities. Ambio, 26(3), 167-172.

Fowke, R., and Prasad, D. (1996). Sustainable development, cities, and local government. Australian Planner, 33(2), pp 61-66.

Godschalk, D. R., and Parker, F. (1975). Carrying capacity: A tool to environmental planning. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, 30(4), 160-165.

Hall, C. A. S. (2004). The Myth of Sustainable Development: Personal reflections on energy, its relation to neoclassical economics, and Stanley Jevons. Journal of Energy Resources Technology, 126(2), 85-89.

Hoffman, A. J. (2011a). Talking past each other? Cultural framing of skeptical and convinced logics in the climate change debate. Organization & Environment, 24(1), 3-33.

Hoffman, A. J. (2011b). The culture and discourse of climate skepticism. Strategic Organization, 9(1), 77-84.

Hopwood, B., Mellor, M., and O’Brien, G. (2005). Sustainable development: Mapping different approaches. Sustainable Development, 13(1), 38-52. Retrieved September 12, 2011, from http://upenn-envs667660.webs.com/Readings/Sustainable%20Development%20-%20Mapping%20Different%20Approaches%20-%202009.pdf.

Innes, J. E., & Booher, D. E. (2000). Indicators for sustainable communities: A strategy building on complexity theory and distributed intelligence. Planning Theory and Practice, 1(2), 173-186.

Jansson, Å., Folke, C., Rockström, J., Gordon, L., and Falkenmark, M. (1999). Linking freshwater flows and ecosystem services appropriated by people: The case of the Baltic Sea drainage basin. Ecosystem, 2(4), 351-366.

Kates, R. W., Clark, W. C., Corell, R., Hall, J. M., Jaeger, C. C., Lowe, I., McCarthy, J. J., Schellnhuber, H. J., Bolin, B., Dickson, N. M., Faucheux, S., Gallopin, G. C., Grübler, A., Huntley, B., Jäger, J., Jodha, N. S., Kasperson, R. E., Mabogunje, A., Matson, P., Mooney, H., Moore III, B., O’Riordan, T., and Svedin, U. (2001). Sustainability science. Science, 292(5517), 641-642.

McHarg, I. (1969). Design with nature. Garden City, New York: Natural History Press for the American Museum of Natural History.

Parkin, S., Sommer, F., and Uren, S. (2003). Sustainable development: Understanding the conceptual and practical challenge. Engineering Sustainability, 156(3), 19-26.

Pirages, D.C., and Ehrlich, P.R. (1974). Ark II: Social response to environmental imperatives. New York: Viking Press.

Phillips, R. (2003). Community Indicators. Planning Advisory Service Report #517. Chicago: American Planning Association.

Rabalais, N. N., Diaz, R. J., Levin, L. A., Turner, R. E., Gilbert, D., and Zhang, J. (2010). Dynamics and distribution of natural and human-caused coastal hypoxia. Biogeosciences, 7(2), 585-619.

Rees, W. E. (1997). Is ‘sustainable city’ an oxymoron? Local Environment, 2(3), 303-310.

Rees, W., and Wackernagel, M. (1996). Urban ecological footprints: Why cities cannot be sustainable — And why they are a key to sustainability. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 16(4-6), pp. 223-248.

Reheis, M. C. Dust deposition downwind of Owens (dry) Lake, 1991-1994: Preliminary findings. (1997). Journal of Geophysical Research, 102(D22), p. 25999-26008.

Spirn, A. W. (1984). The granite garden: Urban nature and human design. New York: Basic Books (Perseus Books Group).

Tilman, D. (1999). Global environmental impacts of agricultural expansion: The need for sustainable and efficient practices. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 96(11), 5995-6000. Retrieved November 9, 2011, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34218/

United Nations. (1987). Our common future, from one Earth to one world, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, General Assembly Resolution 42/187, 11 December 1987. Retrieved 9-12-11 from http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-ov.htm#1.2

United Nations. (2005). World Summit Outcome, Resolution A/60/1, adopted by the General Assembly on September, 15, 2005. Retrieved 9-13-2011 from http://data.unaids.org/Topics/UniversalAccess/worldsummitoutcome_resolution_24oct2005_en.pdf.

U.S. Energy Information Administration. Annual Energy Review 2009, (Release Date: August 19, 2010). Retrieved 9-13-11 from http://205.254.135.24/totalenergy/data/annual/index.cfm

Villaraigosa, A. R. (2008). Securing L.A.’s water supply. Los Angeles: City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Wackernagel, M. (1994). Ecological footprint and appropriated carrying capacity: A tool for planning toward sustainability (PhD dissertation). Vancouver, Canada: School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia.

Wheeler, S. M. (2004). Planning for sustainability: Creating livable, equitable, and ecological communities. New York: Routledge (Psychology Press).

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[1] http://www.planning.org/policy/guides/adopted/sustainability.htm

[2] See IBM web site: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/index.html and the Siemens web site: http://www.usa.siemens.com/sustainable-cities/?stc=usccc025099

Re-Developing North Side St. Louis

A close friend sent me an intemperate e-mail several days ago about the move to revitalize what he called St. Louis’s “burned out” neighborhoods. His message was inspired by the report that McEagle Properties was trying to purchase 1,233 parcels of city-owned land as part of an $8 billion, two-square-mile redevelopment project. His e-mail raged against what he thought of as the insanity of improving those neighborhoods without enacting programs that would positively affect the school district, protect existing residents, disrupt drug use, reverse the horrific employment situation, and address the always vexing challenges race plays in St. Louis. Many of us, no matter where we live or what our backgrounds may be, could sympathize with his helplessness and frustration.

After spending a few hours during the next several days mulling over his concerns, I’ve concluded that St. Louisans cannot expect a developer to address society-wide problems that for more than 60 years defied government-sponsored solutions. Everyone who has visited the North Side in the past decade has seen the devastation, abandonment, the heart-breaking landscape of vanished dreams and aspirations. What few of us seem to know is how to reverse the massive devastation brought by decades of disinvestment and abandonment. Since President Reagan, the federal government has washed its hands of anything remotely resembling urban renewal. The State, with its rural-dominated legislature, has no interest in helping the City find a way out of its difficulties.

If federal and state governments are indifferent to the problems demonstrated so powerfully by the North Side, where can citizens look for solutions? Forget the City. It has neither the resources nor the ambition to tackle those persistent economic and social challenges. Local developers have tried for decades to turn individual neighborhoods around and have achieved some success with infill housing and store-front offices. But they are working at a small-scale and have no hope of addressing the larger issues of disinvestment and abandonment that characterize much of North St. Louis. So, what then?

Then you have to examine what people like Paul McKee and McEagle Properties have proposed. It’s easy to find reasons not to like their proposed development. You may object to their high-handed treatment of people living in the North Side. Perhaps you dislike the inevitable gentrification their project will bring. Perhaps it’s the vagueness of the plan that upsets you. Perhaps, like my friend, you think McEagle’s scheme will not result in “regeneration” but rather displacement.

In any case, the McEagle plan is the only one that attempts large-scale revitalization of the North Side. My advice with regard to that plan is to consider a number of options. You can turn your back, walk away, and let the chips fall where they may. You can jump on the opposition bandwagon and work to defeat it. Or you can form groups of like-minded citizens and work to guide the plan in directions you think appropriate.

If the famous organizer Saul Alinsky were alive he would tell residents of the North Side to organize and engage in appropriate actions that would get them a place at the decision-making table. But Alinsky is long gone and McKee is here, brandishing his plan like a preacher thumps his Bible.

The option I advocate is to become part of the process to ensure citizen concerns are not only heard but are incorporated into the plan. That requires hard work and dedication, both of which McKee has demonstrated. The challenge for average citizens is to follow that example, whether you agree with his plan or not.

Please note that this essay was published on April 25 in the St. Louis Suburban Journal West County edition as an Opinion Shaper column.

Who Can You Trust?

Trusting people in leadership positions today is difficult. After all, everyone knows about the horrific pederasty scandal that has infected hundreds of ministers and especially Catholic priests, the widespread failure of national politicians to be committed to anyone except their deep pocketed financial supporters or the “Base,” the endless greed of Wall Street and the Big Banks, and the abject failure of the U.S. Justice Department to be able to understand what the word “justice” means. And hey, don’t forget George W. lied shamelessly to the nation about Saddam Hussein supporting Al Qaida and Obama lied equally shamelessly about being a liberal Democrat who wanted to “change” Washington.

Now we are treated to the prospect of the Catholic hierarchy going after American nuns, intent on whipping them into submission for failing to march lockstep with the bishops, those paragons of virtue who purposefully hid priestly pederasts for decades. What an abject travesty that is.

So, who can YOU trust? What about your spouse? That suggestion makes me think of John Edwards or Eliot Spitzer or the young mother who killed herself after murdering her three children. What about your minister? Oh-oh, don't go there. What about the military academies? Not if you have daughters and don’t want to see them get raped by upperclassmen and then abused by the Academy administrators who lie about trying to stop the sexual attacks.

Can you trust your boss? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sorry, I nearly choked to death on that one. What about your colleagues, can you trust them? Now that one's complicated. The answer is: it depends on a lot of things, like circumstances, meaning what's at stake and if there were witnesses.

Do you trust Republicans more than you do Democrats? As far as I'm concerned they're all unconscionable liars and charlatans so it's six of one and a half dozen of the other. How about corporations? Anyone out there trust Goldman Sucks? Oops, I meant Goldman Sachs; don't know how I could have made that silly blunder. Or what about General Motors or maybe JP Morgan and Jaime Dimon?

Can you trust stuff your friends say via Facebook, Twitter, or email? If you do you are certifiably mad since people post or send ridiculous, incorrect, off-the-wall shit every day. Which is why Snopes.com exists.

As for me, I trust my wife and my kids. I also trust my doctors, three of whom I've been seeing for more than 20 years. I trust my close friends and certain relatives. I have to be careful here because some of the ones I don’t trust follow this blog; just kidding. That doesn't mean I've haven’t been disappointed by their choices and actions. But that’s life.

Finally, as a group I trust nuns as much as I distrust bishops, which is a whole lot since many of those guys are worse than the worst politicians, who after all are only looking to fill their pockets and reward their supporters whereas many bishops are pederast protectors, like Cardinal Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, who had the great luck to die before he was arrested, or Cardinal Law, who was whisked off to Rome and promoted to a plum job by the Pope after documents revealed he had covered up decades of sexual abuse committed by priests in the Boston archdiocese.

Oh yeah, I'll take the good nuns any day.

Justice American Style

Most Americans like to think that our system of justice is the best and fairest in the world. If you are in that group, prepare yourself for a rude awakening.

In 1995, Frederic Whitehurst (chemistry PhD from Duke University and attorney), a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI crime lab from 1986-1998, testified in the Department of Justice’s high-profile terrorism trial in New York City against Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheik” accused of plotting the first attack on the World Trade Center. Whitehurst at that time was officially rated by the FBI as the leading national and international expert in the science of explosives and explosives residue. The problem was that Whitehurst testified in court that he had been told by his FBI superiors to ignore scientific findings that did not support the prosecution’s theory of the bombing.

In his own words on the witness stand, Whitehurst told the presiding U.S. District Court judge: “There was a great deal of pressure put upon me to bias my interpretation.” That means the FBI wanted him to lie on the stand by misrepresenting forensic evidence to ensure that Omar Abdel Rahman would be convicted. Period.

It was soon revealed that over the years Whitehurst had written or passed to his supervisors scores of memos warning of a lack of impartiality and scientific standards at the FBI lab that did the forensic work after the World Trade Center attack and in hundreds and even thousands of other cases.

Shocking, but since those incidents happened more than 17 years ago, why should we care? Because they tie directly into a second disturbing and directly related issue.

In the last few days, an investigative team at the Washington Post reported in several articles (April 16 and 18) that after Whitehurst’s ever so public and embarrassing whistleblowing Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh launched a DoJ task force to review thousands of cases involving discredited FBI forensic reports to ensure that “no defendant’s right to a fair trial was jeopardized.” The problem is that the task force never publicly released its findings and did purposely not contact defendants or their attorneys to inform them that their convictions had been gained, at least in part, through reliance on faulty or flat out incompetent and incorrect lab work. Many of those convicted based on that improper forensic evidence continued serving long sentences after the DoJ discovered significant errors had been made at the FBI crime lab in their cases.

Recently, DoJ officials stated that they had met their legal and constitutional obligations when they learned of specific scientific errors by alerting prosecutors and were not required to share that information with defendants or their attorneys. No follow-up whatsoever was performed by the DoJ to determine whether prosecutors had notified defendants or their attorneys of the faulty or incorrect evidence and testimony and the strong possibility that those defendants may have been wrongly convicted.

I’m not sure what specific expectations people have in terms of this country’s leading Justice Department officials. But intentionally doing nothing after learning that the faulty and incorrect analysis of evidence by scientists at the FBI’s national crime lab may have led to false convictions of innocent defendants is in my eyes morally repulsive and an abomination and stands as a condemnation of a twisted and incredibly flawed justice system. That such a damning dereliction of duty can today be defended by the DoJ as meeting its legal and constitutional obligations is absolutely disgusting.

I highly recommend that everyone who was associated with this cover-up should be investigated by a special federal prosecutor to determine if federal laws were violated, starting with Janet Reno, Louis Freeh, and their directly involved associates. If you feel strongly about this miscarriage of justice, I hope you write your congressional representatives and demand an investigation.

Ocean Acidification--Another Nail in the Sustainability Coffin

This weekend I read an article by Craig Welsh in the Seattle Times, (published April 11, 2012) about a scientific experiment conducted by chemical oceanographers at Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that determined ocean acidity in upwelling coastal currents was responsible killing oysters in the Pacific Northwest in 2009. After reading the article I checked out the published research (Alan Barton et al. 2012. The Pacific oyster, Crassostrea gigas, shows negative correlation to naturally elevated carbon dioxide levels: Implications for near-term ocean acidification effects. Limnology and Oceanography, 57(3), 698-710) and read the abstract since I had no access to the entire article. I returned to the Seattle Times, re-read Welsh’s article, and then looked over most of the comments from readers.

I have to say that reading those comments was an exercise in self-flagellation and depressing discouragement. When confronted by the wall of opposition to scientific research into natural events on the part of people who are absolutely convinced that all science they don’t agree with is agenda-driven and is not objective or even basically honest, it is impossible to believe that anything that smacks of sustainability, smart growth, green lifestyles, or global warming/climate change will produce any effective national policies or actions whose purpose is to affect our future positively. And that is a very real problem for us, our children, and grandchildren.

Let me count a few of the reasons for being discouraged. World population will likely grow from 7 billion today to over 9 billion by 2050, increasing pressures on natural resources that supply energy, shelter, clothing, and food. World GDP is projected to almost quadruple by 2050, despite the recent recession in the U.S. and Europe, using more and more resources, renewable and non-renewable. Cities are likely to absorb the total global population growth between 2010 and 2050, when about 70 percent of world population is projected to live in urban centers. Lastly, the latest projections of sea level rise for 2100 is somewhere around two meters; even more discouraging is the conclusion that even if the entire world stopped injecting CO2 into the atmosphere tomorrow, that sea level rise would occur due to the time it takes for greenhouse gases to work their way through the atmosphere. And who out there thinks we could stop injecting CO2 into the atmosphere within the next forty years, much less tomorrow? Hello.

That’s not all. According to David Orr (Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College), the following fascinating bits of information should be considered when discussing the environment: “If today is a typical day on planet Earth, humans will add fifteen million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, destroy 115 square miles of tropical rainforest, create seventy-two square miles of desert, eliminate between forty to one hundred species, erode seventy-one million tons of topsoil, add twenty-seven hundred tons of CFCs to the atmosphere, and increase their population by 263,000.” And that’s not considering what changes time will bring in our relentless march to 2050.

Political conservatives will be happy to tell you the market will respond to those pressures and we will all live better, more technologically fulfilled lives. Well, probably not hundreds of millions of poor bastards living marginal lives in what are euphemistically known as developing or Third-World nations.

But biologists suggest we should concentrate on what is actually happening today to our planet as a direct result of human actions and the widespread adoption of techno-culture. Here’s but one very small example. Current extinction rates for amphibians are most likely 136 to 2707 times greater than the expected background (natural or non-human induced) extinction rate. Those staggering rates of extinction are impossible to explain by natural processes. No previous extinction event in geological history approaches the amphibian extinction rate in effect since 1980. Despite the catastrophic rates at which amphibians are currently going extinct, those rates are dwarfed by expectations for the next 50 years. If information provided by many leading biologists is accurate, one-third of all living amphibians are in danger of extinction, which would be an extinction rate 25,000 to 45,000 times the expected background rate. And that is not good news either for amphibians or humans.

When it comes to the large-scale loss of habitats and consequent decline in biodiversity, we are not dealing with events technology can substitute for. After all, what can technology do after we have wiped out most the species that pollinate crops? Stop eating? Perhaps we should eat the conservative propaganda tracts that trumpet the glories of free market economics and technological breakthroughs. Or the conservation tracts that shout out the wonders of wilderness areas that use regulations to prevent as many people as possible from accessing them. That should get us through a week or two at the very least.

The object lesson of all the above is to forget sustainability or green anything. Driving a fuel-efficient car, or using LED bulbs, or conserving water, or recycling ain’t gonna make any real-world difference. It might make you feel better or even morally superior, thinking you’re doing the right thing. But individual efforts, no matter how well conceived or implemented, are futile and fundamentally ineffectual in the face of global indifference to anything but the mindless consumerism we know too well. After all, how many American their right minds would voluntarily and drastically reduce their energy consumption or comforting lifestyles so our little brown or yellow sisters and brothers in developing countries might live a little higher on the hog, so to speak? Pleeease. That ain’t gonna happen.

As far as I am concerned, it is far too late to do anything but determine as to how best mitigate the adverse effects of modern human culture on the environment. If that what is meant by sustainability then so be it, though even in that limited meaning the word is sense-less. But if we so chose to use it that way, let’s be honest about what is possible and what is not and what is sustainable and what is not.

Let me end this brief essay with a question: So, who’s to blame for this wicked predicament? As the great cartoonist, Walt Kelly, said on Earth Day, February 26, 1971, through his marvelously droll creation, Pogo:

                                            “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Gold Mining and American Law

Gold has been mined by cultures throughout the world for many thousands of years. Closer to modern times, that extraordinarily attractive precious metal was the primary motive for the discovery, exploration, and subjugation of the New World by European nations desperate for economic and political power. But to bring us up to modern times, much of the gold remaining in the Earth today is in microscopic quantities and is being torn from rock at enormous environmental and social costs, often in some of the most isolated and least developed parts of the world.

Naturally, all types of mining are fraught with many kinds of hazards and risks, including economic, social, environmental, and safety. In the past century, a great deal of those challenges have been recognized and dealt with responsibly both by governments and mining companies. However, one of the notable exceptions to that generalization is modern day gold mining, both in the U.S. and in many other parts of the globe. Here in the U.S. the mining of precious metals (including gold) has been critically affected by one particular federal law that was adopted in the age of America’s expanding frontier, the General Mining Law of 1872 (hereinafter referred to as GML). That law has basically been unchanged since it was passed and is in force today as one of the major statutes that direct the use and management of over 270 million acres of federal lands. Those lands constitute almost one-fourth of all the land in the United States and two thirds of the lands the federal government holds in trust for all Americans.

Almost across the board, mining companies regard the GML with near universal glee and a state approaching euphoria. To coin a phrase, they absolutely love it. And why wouldn’t they? The Law encourages mining by permitting free access to individuals and corporations to prospect for minerals in public domain lands and to extract them without paying one cent in royalties. That specific GML provision is totally unlike other federal mining laws that regulate the extraction of coal, oil, or natural gas on public lands.

The GML not only gives away public minerals but as part of that process also sells public land for mining purposes for between $2.50 to $5 an acre, land costs that were current in 1872. Not surprisingly, owing to the express absence of environmental regulations in the GML, when mining companies go belly up, they frequently leave unsuspecting taxpayers to pay the tab for the millions of dollars that are required to clean up horrific environmental messes left behind.

Real World Example: The Zortman-Landusky Gold Mine, which was owned and operated by Pegasus Gold Corp., is located in the Little Rocky Mountains of north-central Montana at the edge of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. In the past decade that mine has become a glaring example of the GML’s regulatory inadequacies, demonstrating how both state and federal mining laws failed to protect the environment and local communities from the actions of careless and indifferent mining companies. By 1982, irresponsible management of cyanide solutions at the Zortman-Landusky Mine resulted in between six and twelve separate spills and leaks of cyanide contaminated groundwater and poisoned local drinking water sources. In 1996, a legal settlement was reached through a lawsuit filed against Pegasus Gold for $37 million to upgrade and expand the water-treatment facilities following one of the worst water quality violations in the State of Montana, including $2 million in civil penalties from the State and federal governments for illegal discharge of mine wastewaters. An additional $1.8 million was set aside to evaluate and monitor the potential human health effects. But in 1998, after granting key executives bonuses of $5 million each and selling off other financial assets, Pegasus Gold filed for bankruptcy, leaving Montana taxpayers with approximately $56 million in long-term land reclamation costs (of which $30 million will be paid by Pegasus). But that figure does not cover the long-term costs of water treatment that will be required for many, many decades since water pollution generated by sulfuric acid leachates produced by the mining operations are so extensive that water treatment systems will have to be operated far into the future to assure the safety of local drinking water, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 1872 the reasons for the passage of the GML were to promote mineral exploration and development on federal lands in the western United States, offer opportunities to obtain clear title to mines then being worked, and help settle the West. Well, guess what. The West has been settled for many decades, clear titles were obtained long ago, and mineral exploration and development on federal lands in the western United States have been going gang-busters ever since. So, why is the GML still in force? Despite the environmental focus of the author of this blog, the answers are not as easy as many environmentalists would have people believe. Of course, politics are involved but so are the inherent difficulties of extracting low concentrates of metallic ores from very large quantities of source rock.

Mining companies and their executives pour millions of dollars of legal campaign contributions into the pockets of eager federal Senators and Representatives, who then become blind, deaf, and totally dumb to serious environmental or social mining issues that are raised by the public. And what about the welfare of the American people or the health of the environment? Those vague considerations get kicked out the window when money and power are at stake, especially in Washington, DC, that haven for corrupt and venal politicians. Mark Twain hit the nail on the head when he said, “America is a nation without a distinct criminal class . . . with the possible exception of Congress.” That situation has not changed appreciably since Samuel Clemens went to his reward.

The question arises as to why Congress would continue to release national wealth to individuals and corporations by supposedly under-pricing minerals on federal lands (actually giving them away by charging truly minimal costs). One answer is that the people who make the decisions on selling federal land (Congressmen) do not themselves own the property rights in the land or in minerals under the surface. Therefore, the wealth that is given up through under-pricing would not have accrued to them in the first place. But Congress can and does give the right to mine under-priced minerals to their friends and associates, meaning to those who have powerful interests in donating millions of dollars to political campaigns, and here you better be thinking mining companies and their executives.

Consequently, the flow of political donations from mining companies into the coffers of political re-election campaigns continues unabated and is perfectly legal if not possessed with the stink of legitimized corruption. And those amenable politicians bend over backwards to protect their friends and associates by fending off proposals from environmentalists to modify the GML by screaming at the tops of their lungs about all the jobs and taxes they are producing in their respective states. Somehow the subject of persistent, horrifically expensive adverse consequences and taxpayer-borne costs of that mining never comes up. There's a shock.

However, rhetoric and emotion aside, another reason for the GML may reflect the inherent uncertainties that have always characterized hard rock mining. Prospecting for gold, silver, copper, or a variety of other metallic ores is not the fairly precise science that characterizes oil well drilling or even coal mining. Predicting the yield of a metallic mineral deposit disseminated throughout a large volume of economically worthless host rock is fraught with difficulties since the ore concentration may not be as rich as was first estimated and the extensive initial investment in mining operations may never be recouped. And even if it is, the resultant profit stream is typically low when compared with the profits earned by oil, natural gas, or coal companies. Actually, about half of all hard rock mines are unproductive and unprofitable. As a result, many mining firms have less capital reserves with which to pay for complex environmental clean-up after the ore has been extracted.

The question that should be asked is whether it is better for mining companies to despoil the American environment in order to extract whatever precious metal they are seeking and then in many, if not most instances, leave the horrifically expensive clean-up bills for the taxpayers rather than go to other countries and do their dirty work there? What has happened in the U.S. is that natural resource companies have spent their money where they know it will do the most good: by investing in political election campaign donations and huge lobbyist fees so that most meaningful clean-up provisions are removed from environmental legislation well before they are passed into law. Don’t forget, weak environmental regulations directly translate into profits and more campaign contributions flowing to the politicians. But that issue is one for the American public to decide. Does the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack care if mountains in West Virginia are being blasted into pieces that are then dumped into adjacent streams until those valleys are buried under as much as two hundred feet of waste? Or that the precious fossil water resources in Arizona and Nevada are being used to process gold ore can never be returned to aquifers for more productive human uses? Serious questions, but just don’t ask employees of natural resource firms in those states for answers or you may wind up with a black eye and a fat lip or in a hospital bed. And that's no joke.

Author’s Note: Interpretations of mining laws and regulations are naturally colored by a person’s overall political philosophy, especially in terms of how government is defined, the roles government should play, the nature of property rights, whether environmental ethics actually exist, whether government has a stewardship responsibility for land-environment, whether sustainability is possible or should be attempted, etc. Those political foundations are far reaching with respect to informing individual understanding of such things as land management and development, conservation, pollution, etc., and are too complex to be addressed in this blog post.

Readers interested in mining sources that are relatively objective and dispassionate should consult the following:

• Congressional Research Service, Report IB89130: “Mining on Federal Lands,” May 3, 2001, online source: http://ncseonline.org/NLE/CRSreports/Mining/mine-1.cfm?&CFID=8492224&CFTOKEN=29386060
• National Research Council (Committee on Hardrock Mining on Federal Lands, Committee on Earth Resources, Board on Geosciences and Resources, Commission on Geosciences, Environment, and Resources), Hardrock Mining on Federal Lands, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1999, online source: http://books.nap.edu/html/hardrock_fed_lands/;
• John Dragonetti, “The General Mining Law of 1872 Perpetually Revisited — But Still Intact,” The Professional Geologist; March 2000; online source: http://www.agiweb.org/gap/legis106/tpg_mining.html

Readers with conservative points of view should see the following materials:

• Richard Gordon and Peter VanDoren, “Two Cheers For The 1872 Mining Law,” Cato Policy Analysis No. 300; April 9, 1998; online source: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-300.html
• Testimony of Richard L. Gordon, Adjunct Scholar, Cato Institute, Emeritus Professor of Mineral Economics, The Pennsylvania State University, before the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, Committee on Resources, U.S. House of Representatives: Reforming the 1872 Mining Law; August 3, 1999, online source: http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-rg080399.html
• Andrew P. Morriss, Roger E. Meiners, and Andrew Dorchak, “Homesteading Rock: A Defense of Free Access under the General Mining Law of 1872.” Case Research Paper Series in Legal Studies, Working Paper 04-2; April, 2004. Available online at: Social Science Research Network http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=530124

Readers with liberal-environmental points of view may want to consult the following materials:

• Sierra Club, http://www.sierraclub.org/wildlands/monuments/threats.asp
• Westerners for Responsible Mining, http://www.bettermines.org/cmc_1872.cfm
• National Resources Defense Council http://www.nrdc.org/legislation/record/chap3.asp
• http://www.earthworksaction.org/1872.cfm also https://www.earthworksaction.org/pubs/MPCfs_1872onePager.pdf

Readers of all political stripes interested in finding out the straight scoop on the country’s leading toxic polluters—based on pollution levels reported by the industry itself—should consult the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) Program that was established in 1986 by the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) and administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). TRI requires industrial facilities to disclose to the public annually the amount of pollutants they have discharged into the air, water, and land or transferred to other sites for incineration, recycling, and disposal. All interested readers have to do to find out the real situation is to go to EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) Program web site (http://www.epa.gov/tri/) and check the data for themselves. It should come as no surprise to find that hardrock mining companies are way out in front of the pack, a dubious distinction at best.

During its last days in office, the Clinton administration and Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt changed mining regulations contained in 43 CFR 3809 Surface Management Rules for Hardrock Mines on BLM-Administered Lands. After George W. Bush was sworn in as President, those rules were immediately challenged in court by two industry plaintiffs, the State of Nevada, and several environmental public interest organizations. In early 2001, then Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton suspended the 3809 regulations and reopened the rulemaking process. The Bush administration published final 3809 rules on Oct. 30, 2001, which can be found at 66 Fed. Reg. 54834 (hereinafter called “the Norton 3809 regulations”).

The Norton 3809 regulations retain many of the elements of the Babbitt 3809 regulations and reinstate a few elements of the original 3809 rules enacted in 1980. The Norton regulations also retain the acid rock drainage and cyanide leaching performance standards set in the Babbitt 3809 rules. Nearly everyone involved in the 3809 rulemaking dialogue agreed that BLM should require a reclamation bond for all mining activities that disturb the surface, especially since the need to expand reclamation bonding requirements was a key finding in the NRC Report cited above. The final Norton 3809 regulations require a reclamation bond that covers one hundred percent of the anticipated costs of reclamation for all surface-disturbing activities that are greater than casual use. The new 3809 rules also eliminate the possible use of corporate guarantees as an acceptable form of financial assurance.

Proponents claim that the final 3809 rules strengthen environmental regulations for hardrock mining, thereby addressing many of the environmental issues raised in past legislative debates about amending the GML. Naturally, the view of opponents is that significant progress to ensuring that mining companies meet environmental standards is yet to be achieved. However, no matter what your viewpoint, significant progress has been made towards achieving President Clinton’s goal of amending the GML through the 3809 rulemaking process. That said, three critical GML policy issues remain to be resolved: 1) whether patenting should be abolished, modified, or preserved; 2) whether payment of federal royalties based on the value of minerals extracted should be required; and 3) whether a fund to clean up abandoned mines should be established.

Substantive changes to the General Mining Law of 1872 were proposed in two separate but similar bills, the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Bills of 2007 and 2009. In both cases, those bills suffered slow, painful deaths in Congress. In the poisoned political atmosphere of 2012 (when this post was written) the chances of getting similar legislation passed seem as likely as Sarah Palin having a sex change operation and then turning into a flaming liberal who supports LGBT rights. In other words, don’t hold your breath.

Fossils Part 2

Fossilization (Taphonomy)

Critical part of the process known as taphonomy, or the study of remains of organisms after they die (the word was derived from the Greek taphos, meaning grave-burial, and nomos, meaning law). The concept was introduced to paleontology in 1940 by the prominent Russian paleontologist and science fiction author Ivan Efremov (also spelled Yefremov) to describe the study of the transition of organic remains, including entire intact bodies, dissembled parts or products, from the biosphere to the lithosphere, meaning the eventual conversion of living organisms to fossil assemblages.

The motivation behind the study of taphonomy is to better understand biases present in the fossil record. Although fossils may seem to some to be ubiquitous in sedimentary rocks, they are actually somewhat rare. Paleontologists cannot draw the most accurate conclusions about the lives and ecology of the fossilized organisms without identifying and understanding the processes involved in their fossilization. Therefore, taphonomy includes the organism’s life-history, type-location of death, decomposition, post-mortem transport (if any), burial, compaction, and other chemical, biologic, or physical activities that affect the remains of an organism. Recognition of taphonomic processes that have taken place leads to a more complete understanding of paleoecology and even the life-history of a once-living organism.

Since most of those who study geoscience know that the world is very old and that many billions of animals have lived and died between the time when plants and animals first appeared, why is the environment not simply awash in fossils? Here’s the answer in a nutshell: because for organisms death is guaranteed while preservation is not.

To understand that answer we have to focus on the underlying problem: how does anything become fossilized? And that’s where taphonomy comes in, by elucidating critical elements in the taphonomic process: life—death—preservation—survival—discovery. The fossilization process starts with life (as many young student observers of tenured university faculty and administrators approaching retirement will readily attest) because the way an organism lives provides a bias with respect to its potential for preservation.

Organisms living in or in close proximity to lacustrine or tidal marsh environments have much greater chances of having their remains rapidly covered with sediments and fossilized than do condors or mountain goats living in a desert far from most sources of rapid burial and sedimentation. As an example of a life having high fossilization potential, imagine a shore bird falling dead in a near-shore environment where its feathers are weighed down with clay-rich water and that night and the next many nights it is covered with an inch or more of sand, silt or mud until it is buried under several yards of moist, heavy materials. Moreover, an animal’s position in the food web also affects its fossilization potential since organisms at the bottom of the web are far more numerous than the top predators.

Real World Examples of animals whose lives and deaths and preservation contributed to very high fossilization potentials are those so remarkably preserved in the Burgess Shale and the recently discovered nearly complete fossil skeleton of an ancient aquatic bird in the Gansu area of China, Gansus yumenensis.[1] How and where an organism dies also affects its fossilization potential. For example, a zebra dying on the South African veldt stands next to no chance of being preserved since either predators or scavengers (including those that crush and eat the bones) would clean up its remains like hungry teenagers disappearing a fast-food meal. But the chances of fossilization of a clam or a crab dying at the beach are considerably greater.

Preservation encompasses ways an organism’s remains survive after death and its transition into a fossil. Rapid burial is the best method to ensure transition into the preservation stage and is a common process at the Earth’s surface that occurs on a regular basis (again, the Burgess Shale is a wonderful example). Floods, mass wasting episodes, storms, and volcanic eruptions can deposit sediments over periods of time ranging from minutes to days. A well-known historical example is the sudden volcanic ash fall that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Fun Stuff: Actual examples of what might humorously be called “fossil” graffiti preserved on the walls of the two Roman cities include:

“Atimetus got me pregnant.”

“I fucked a lot of girls here.”

“Phileros is a eunuch.”

“Once you are dead, you are nothing.”

“May I always and everywhere be as potent with women as I was here.”

Back to more serious stuff. Not all types of landscapes are preserved equally in the geological record, leading to a heavy bias towards shallow, near-shore marine and lacustrine environments. In addition, not all periods of geological history are preserved equally, witness the paucity of fossils from periods earlier than the Cambrian. Recent Earth history is far better preserved if only because not as much time has elapsed during which erosion or destruction via heat and pressure can occur. Burial also protects the dead organism from being consumed by higher or lower food chain organisms and from mechanical (abrasion and break-up) and chemical (decay and disintegration) processes. Although in the vast majority of cases decay is an inevitable part of death, organisms with hard parts (shell, bone, claws, teeth) have a much higher preservation potential than organisms that are entirely soft-bodied or that possess fragile hard parts.

Preservation comes in various types. An unaltered state is the rarest form of preservation in the far greater majority of the geologic record in which fossils are found but is more frequent in recently formed sedimentary environments. Types of unaltered preservation where even the soft body parts are preserved include: mummification, encasement in tar or other hydrocarbons (as can be seen at the Rancho La Brea Pits in Los Angeles), encasement in amber (such as frogs, insects, or leaves), encasement in sediment, and freezing, as in the case of an 18,000-year-old frozen Siberian woolly mammoth that was on display at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan. However, most commonly only the hard skeletal materials are preserved after decomposition of soft body parts.

Preservation by means of molds and casts entails creation of a type of replica of the organism’s hard parts. In general, a mold is an impression of a bone or shell in lithified sediment, forming a mirror image of the original part. Molds can be internal, an impression of the inside surface of skeletal hard parts, or external, an impression of the outside surface. A cast is formed when a mold is filled with fine sediment and is therefore a true replica not a mirror image of the original hard part.

A common form of preservation involves dissolution and replacement or recrystallization (alteration) of original hard materials by chemical or physical means. Replacement, sometimes on a molecule by molecule basis, most often occurs when various minerals, typically contained in percolating groundwater, fill in voids after dissolution of original skeletal material. Common secondary replacement minerals include silica (SiO₂) and pyrite (FeS₂). The process of the physical re-arrangement of crystalline structure of skeletal material is known as recrystallization, which is a common phenomenon in shells that were originally aragonite or calcite (both forms of calcium carbonate—CaCO₃).

Carbonization or the formation of carbon films is another type of fossilization and is typical for such organisms as plants and insects. After an organism (most typically a plant) dies, internal volatile organic compounds disperse and leave behind residues that form a coal-like black carbon film that preserves the outline and sometimes considerable organic details. Those thin films of carbon are often found on planes of sandstone or shale.

Permineralization or petrifaction is a type of preservation in which the soft tissue of the organism has decomposed and the remaining hard parts are flooded with groundwater saturated with secondary minerals, especially calcium carbonate (calcite) or silicate that precipitates out and fills the gaps/pores/interstitial spaces of the dead organism but does not replace existing material. Minute details are often well preserved, even down to the cellular level. Cementation occurs with time and pressure as secondary minerals lithify to form a rock (fossil) in the place of the original bone, teeth, shell, or wood, preserving an amazing amount of detail. Real World Example: A great and very popular illustration of this form of fossilization is petrified wood, as can be seen in the Petrified Forest National Park in northern Arizona. Vietnam produces the largest commercial quantities of black and brown petrified wood sold globally as well as some of the largest individual pieces. For example, in 2002 a 6.7 meter long rock with a diameter of 40-50 cm, was found in Hon Khoi, Vietnam, which is located about 50 miles north of Cam Ranh Bay.

Author’s Note: The celebrated mystery author Patricia Cornwell brought worldwide attention to human taphonomy in her best-selling 1994 novel, The Body Farm, in which she discussed the very real Anthropological Research Facility at the University of Tennessee—Knoxville, which is engaged in an effort to apply principles of physical anthropology to the study of human decomposition, or what is called forensic taphonomy. Check out the book, it contains a fictional but well-written account of the work of William Bass, founder of the decay research facility.

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[1] Hai-lu You, et al. 2006. Nearly Modern Amphibious Bird from the Early Cretaceous of Northwestern China, Science 312(5780): 1640-1643.