Pebble Mine exploration camp

“You’re not against progress, are you?” asked Carl in the Lake Iliamna village of Pedro Bay.

“No, but…” Hig started to reply.

In the course of his life, our host had gone from delivering mail once a month by dogsled to running a post office supplied several times weekly by plane. For our part, nearly all of the 50 pounds of gear we carried between us was made of high-tech backpacking fabrics that didn’t exist in his dogsledding days: urethane-coated nylon, siliconized nylon, powerstretch fleece, dermizax, momentum, climashield, eVent…

But backpacking gear wasn’t the kind of progress he was referring to.

Scattered forest near Pebble site

He wanted to know what we thought about oil drilling proposals in Bristol Bay. We’d just finished explaining our concerns about the proposed Pebble Mine – the biggest issue in the region. Clearly, having qualms about oil drilling as well as qualms about a mine would brand us as hopeless luddites and tree-huggers.

We explained, truthfully, that we felt, on average, new oil drilling prospects were significantly less risky than large-scale mining in sulfide rock (as proposed for Pebble). But in the interest of harmonious interaction, we glossed over whether or not we actually thought new drilling was a good idea.

Fossil fuel extraction

Alyeska oil terminal at Valdez

Our modern world runs on the fossilized remains of ancient life. Coal, oil, natural gas, maybe methane clathrates in the future. Ever since we discovered this vault of ancient sunlight stored by long-dead photosynthesizers, we’ve been drawing down the account as fast as we can. Our rapid spending of this inherited energy wealth is what drove the industrial revolution. It’s what brought about the advancements our modern lifestyles are built on.

But this spending is not without its costs. Oil spills poison bays. Coal mining strips off mountains and pollutes the downstream rivers. And even if these accidents can be avoided, there’s the inevitable fact that on the other end, these fossil fuels get burned. Spewing carbon dioxide (and often other pollutants as well) into the air, our fossil fuel habit is rapidly changing our climate into something we’ll be much less comfortable with. Natural gas is cleaner than oil, which is cleaner than coal – but they all share problems.

Prince William Sound

And there’s no escaping that burning the accumulated energy of hundreds of millions of years in a few generations is fundamentally unsustainable. One drill hole more or less, it will still run out. We’ll have to move away from oil and natural gas… sometime later coal will run out as well.

In Bristol Bay, you have the rich marine life to protect, and the big storms and shifting sea ice to protect against. Combined with the fundamental problems of fossil fuel… I still think it’s probably less risky than a mine, but it’d be hard for me to come out in favor of that particular “progress”

Metal mining

So what about mining? We’ve long had concerns about the Pebble Mine, and strongly oppose its development. The combination of an enormous project, the poor track record of this type of mining, and a uniquely vulnerable area makes me pretty convinced that this one’s too risky.

Pebble Mine prospect drill rig

But surely we can’t object to all new mines? That would be silly.

The gold nuggets and the grizzled prospectors seeking them are both long gone. As we exhaust the richest resources, big mining companies are turning to lower and lower grade ores. Much of what’s left is in sulfide rocks – posing a high risk of acid drainage into nearby waters. I’m not sure whether it’s a problem of technology, regulation, or just slipping under the public radar – but the mining industry, both old and modern, has a terrible track record at protecting the waters around it.

Metals are a non-renewable resource, so some must be mined if we want to continue to use them up. But much of what we drag out of the ground is frivolously or wastefully used (I find it hard to stomach so much pollution for the sake of gold used in jewelry or stuck in vaults for investment, for example), and we don’t do nearly a good enough job recycling and reusing the rest of it.

The metals in the ground will still be there to be dug up later. And for a lot of projects, it seems like the mining industry needs to show that it can meet the commitments it makes before I’d feel comfortable getting behind that “progress.”

Logging

Icy Bay clearcut

What about trees? We need wood, and they regrow, right?

In some places, plantations of trees are grown and cut, and grown and cut again – farming wood. In fewer places, this is even done sustainably. Not here.

At least on the coast, Alaska sits at the northern edge of the rainforest ecosystem. Soil drainage, and topography make large trees rare. Climate makes them grow too slowly for a patch of forest to be loggable more than once since logging started here in the 1800s. Timber mining has rarely been economical without subsidies, incomprehensible loss-selling accounting practices, or at least near-giveaways of the trees.

Revillagigedo Island logging

A note on loss selling: “Native corporate logging in the 1980s was heavily subsidized by a unique tax break which cost U.S. Taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost federal revenue. Net operating losses (NOLs) are a loss of taxable income as recognized by the Internal Revenue Service. During the early 1980s, all corporations that lost money on business ventures were allowed to sell their NOLs to other corporations looking for tax write-offs. After 1986, Alaska Native corporations were the only ones in America allowed to sell NOLs, leading to a huge premium on the value of NOL “sales.” Some Native corporations in the rainforest region responded to the opportunity by selling their timber to a partially-owned subsidiary at a loss, selling the tax loss to other corporate buyers, and then reaping windfall profits when the subsidiary cut the undervalued timber.” – from http://forests.org/archive/america/privloga.htm

Sometimes, like in Icy Bay, wasteful dumping of all but the very best trees is the only thing that drives logging into the black. (We’re currently building our yurt platform out of 30 year old lost lumber salvaged from that Icy Bay operation).

And on the use end, Americans live in bigger houses than they need, and print on reams of paper that could be more efficiently made from some faster-growing crop.

Southeast Alaska rainforest

Even in the forests we walked through, small scale logging for local use could be sustainable. It’s the exporting of our last big old-growth forests dirt cheap that seems ridiculous.

Against progress

We don’t really disagree with everything. Each of these resource extraction projects has its own set of cost/benefit calculations. Some are a lot worse than others. Some we agree with. But on average, I’d have a hard time getting behind most new fossil fuel extraction projects, most new large mining projects (with current technology), and most new large scale logging of uncut forests.

So maybe we are against “progress.” But ‘d like the chance to redefine the term.

What is progress?

What’s progressive about large-scale resource extraction projects? Mining, drilling, logging… Bigger holes, bigger cuts, bigger pipes… More, more, more, as long as we can find just one more chunk of cash for the developers. That isn’t progressive. That’s the old-school way of doing things that has been destroying environments for centuries, and is pushing us up against the wall of a resource crunch.

Cottonwood sunset

Realistically, we can’t get rid of our dependence on all of these projects tomorrow. All those high-tech backpacking fabrics I mentioned at the beginning of this post are made of oil. The building I’m typing this in is made of wood. The computer I’m typing this on contains bits of copper and gold. Without simply disappearing, we can’t eliminate our footprint on this earth. But forging ahead with the unsustainable ways of the past is hardly progress.

Progress is a new way of doing things that is better than the old.

How about designing our manufactured goods to more easily extract and reuse those precious resources we usually throw away? (see Cradle to Cradle) Replacing our coal and oil with renewable energy? Designing our homes and lives and businesses to use fewer resources in the first place? Pushing humanity closer to sustainability in whatever way we can?

Those kinds of projects are progress.

6 Comments - Click to Read and Comment »