mining - The Environment Report

Mining the Minerals That Power Your Gadgets

Molycorp's rare-earth mining pit in Mountain Pass, California. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
To cut water use, Molycorp's installed new waste water ponds and recycling equipment. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Beneath this 60-acre spot are 100 feet of mine tailings, which include salts and other mining by-products. The site's being remediated and capped with vegetation, to ensure water doesn't move contaminants underground. It's part of Molycorp's plan to recover from waste water leaks during the 1990s. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Politicians like to show off pictures of wind turbines, hybrid cars, and other green hi-tech.
The idea is to get more of that in America, and maybe even make more of it here. Shawn
Allee found there’s a chance all of this could be complicated by the supply of key green-
tech ingredients:

Transcript

I don’t know about you, but there’re a whole bunch of minerals I completely ignored in
high school chemistry.

Jack Lifton knows them by heart.

“… lanthenum, serium, neodymium…”

Lifton’s a market expert on these so-called ‘rare-earth’ minerals. And he says, even if you
haven’t heard of them, you might have them – even in your pocket.

“Without rare earths, we probably would not have portable computers and you
certainly wouldn’t have display screens today on anything – television or computer,
iPod, or iPhone, whatever.”

Rare earths make electronics light and they don’t need much power: just what wind
turbines and electric hybrid cars need.

There’s a problem in the rare-earth market, though. China’s the big supplier, but Lifton
says it might keep it’s rare-earth supplies for itself.

“In the next three or four years, you cannot make a device with a rare earth unless
it’s made in China and then the Chinese have made it very clear that their priorities
are to manufacture goods for their own consumer economy and keep the Chinese
employed.”

So, is the US gonna be left dry when it comes to green high tech? Well, there is a rare
earth mine in America, but it’s had some environmental problems.

The mine is trying to turn that around now.

Honan: “On the left is the overburden stock pile. Once you’ve seen one of those,
you’ve seen them all.”

Allee: “Big pile of rocks.”

Honan: “Big pile of rock.”

Mine manager Scott Honan’s driving me around the top of a mine in the middle of the
California desert.

He manages the mine for Molycorp. Honan’s showing me the mine’s waste water
ponds.

Honan: “Those two are fresh water.”

Allee: “Basically, you’re trying to recycle as much of this water as you can. Why is
that?”

Honan: “We have to confine all of our water activities on the site. We have to be
very efficient when we use water, we can’t afford to waste it.”

Gotta admit, this is not very sexy stuff, but Molycorp is crossing its fingers that
expensive water recycling and treatment investments pay off.

Molycorp uses water to process the rare-earth ore, and back in the 90s, the mining and
processing stopped for a while due to waste water leaks.

It’s desert, after all – and regulators didn’t want what little water there is contaminated by
a slurry of salts and mining byproducts.

Allee: “So where’re we heading, here?”

Honan: “The pit.”

Allee: “Is that what everyone calls it? ‘The Pit?’”

Honan: “Yeah. It’s about 55 acres if you look at the perimeter. From the top of the
high wall over there to the bottom, it’s about 500 feet.”

Honan says Molycorp will expand the mine in a few years – just in time for when China
might stop exporting rare-earths.

The company might be jumping a tad – regulators might clamp down on the operation if
Molycorp repeats some of its past water pollution mistakes.

Still…

“I think a lot of us at the mine have a big stake in the success of this operation going
forward. A lot of us feel it’s important for our country. What we produce here is
going to drive a lot of this energy efficient technology that people are anxious about.
It’s cool to be a part of that.”

And for Honan, what’s even cooler is that someone’s talking about building a wind farm
not too far from his mine.

Honan says it’d be awefully nice if his rare-earths are in those turbines.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Government Looks to Clean Up Coal

Energy Secretary Steven Chu says coal will have to be a part of the energy mix in the future, so the government is committing money to clean it up. (Photo courtesy of the USDOE)

President Obama’s Energy Secretary is talking about building a facility to find ways to burn coal more cleanly. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

President Obama’s Energy Secretary is talking about building a facility to find ways to burn coal more cleanly. Lester Graham reports:

Burning coal pollutes – acid rain, toxic mercury, soot. And lately the big concern – carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas contributing to global warming.

The Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu told Members of Congress, despite the concerns about pollution, we still depend on coal for half of our electricity.

“So, it’s very important that we develop the technology that captures and also that safely sequesters carbon from coal plants.”

The technology does not exist today.

Chu says three-point-four-billion dollars in government stimulus money is now available to find a way to clean up coal.

An experimental plant called Futuregen was supposed to find ways to burn coal more cleanly and do something about carbon dioxide emissions. But the Bush administration killed funding.

Secretary Chu says the Obama administration is now negotiating with Futuregen partners again.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Mountaintop Removal Continues

In his last days, President Bush changed rules that made it easier to blow off the tops of mountains to mine for coal. (Photo by Sandra Sleight-Brennan)

The Obama Administration has
approved handing out as many
as 42 new permits to mining
companies for mountaintop
removal coal mining. Lester
Graham reports a lot of people
expected the Environmental
Protection Agency to block
new mountaintop removal mining
in Appalachia:

Transcript

Environmentalists say this is the most environmentally destructive kind of coal mining there is. It blows off the tops of mountains, fills in valleys, pollutes creeks and water supplies.

But the EPA does not have the authority to block it with no reason. The agency has to follow the permitting process in place.

Oliver Bernstein is with the environmental group the Sierra Club.

“They are operating under a fundamentally flawed legal framework around mountaintop removal and so the Obama Administration will need to take the bold steps to enact the rule-makings that will help to end this process completely.”

Environmentalists are calling for the White House Council on Environmental Quality to step in and do whatever is necessary to stop the mountaintop removal coal mining.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Coal Ash Controversy

A broken dam caused this cement-like sludge to spill into the Emory River in East Tennessee. The coal ash sludge could dry out, putting toxic dust into the air. (Photo by Matt Shafer Powell)

This past December a sludge of coal ash broke out of an impoundment at a power plant in
Tennessee. It destroyed homes. It devastated a section of river. And it set off a firestorm
about the problem of coal ash disposal. Now two US Senators and a bunch of environmental
groups are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate coal ash. Tamara
Keith has the story:

Transcript

Coal ash is byproduct produced by coal burning power plants and it’s stored at more than 500
sites around the country.

Anti-coal activist Dave Cooper signed onto a letter this week with more than 100
environmental groups telling the EPA it’s time to get involved.

“What we want is for the EPA to regulate coal ash as a hazardous waste.”

But Dave Goss with the American Coal Ash Association says safe storage is an issue, but a
lot of the ash is actually recycled into things like concrete and wallboard.

“If you stigmatize it by giving it some sort of a classification such as hazardous, that’s going
to have a dramatic impact on the ability to re-use the materials.”

The EPA has been studying this issue for years, and hasn’t responded to the latest calls for
regulation.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Mountaintop Mining (Part One)

In his last days, President Bush changed rules that made it easier to blow off the tops of mountains to mine for coal. (Photo by Sandra Sleight-Brennan)

One of the last things the Bush administration did was change a rule to allow coal mining companies to dump debris into streams. That means one mining company will be able to remove one of the last mountaintops in a West Virginia county. Sandra Sleight-Brennan reports:

Transcript

Gary Anderson takes me out on his back porch and all you can see is Coal River Mountain. Even on a cold, gray winter day, it’s beautiful.

“All of that mountain range of there, that is Coal River Mountain– that mountain runs for about 3 miles up there.”

When he retired, Gary and his wife Barbara moved from Connecticut back to her family home in Colcord, West Virginia.

“That’s basically what brought us back. Is the mountains and the beauty. We grew up here and we came back to spend the rest of our days here. We thought were coming back to what we remember– the beautiful mountains. And really they just started doing the mountaintop removal over here in the past couple years.”

Other mountains in the area– Cherry Pond Mountinan and Kayford Mountain have been flattened so energy companies could get to the coal inside them.
Over one million acres in West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky have already been leveled to mine the thin vein of coal.

The mining companies dynamite the tops off to get to the coal underneath.

“Once in awhile you’ll see a big puff of dust go up in the air like a bomb has been dropped and in awhile it will settle down and then it will happen again the next day.”

Mountains are shorted and flattened–- often by 100’s of feet to get to a 14-inch seam of coal. What the dynamite loosens is dumped in the valleys. Thousands of miles of streams have been covered over and nature destroyed.

It’s pretty simple. They put dynamite in the mountain and blow it up.

Joe Lovett is the Executive Director of the Appalachian Center on the Economy and the Environment. He’s been fighting mountaintop removal for the past 10 years.

It’s like a layer cake. The mountain is like a layer cake and that coal is the icing. The dirt and rock in between is the cake. There is a lot more dirt and rock and mining waste than there is coal. And when they blow up the mountain the dirt and rock swell. So they have even a bigger problem because they have more material than they know what to do with. So, as they blow the mountain up they need to find something to do with the dirt and rock and they dump it into the streams and the valleys.

Dumping into streams was stopped. The Surface Mining Act’s Stream Buffer rule protected the streams. But the new Bush administration rule changes that.

Joe Lovett says that Coal River Mountain fair game for Massey Energy to blow the top off and fill the valleys.

“We have always believed that the rule prevented these fills, that and I guess so did the coal industry and the Office of Surface Mining because this has been the main thing that the coal industry has wanted from the Bush administration for a long time is that change in this rule.”

Lovett says its not good for the environment and it’s not good for the local economy.

“We are taking mountains that could support sustainable timber jobs for generations and, in a few short years, destroying them forever and mining them in such a way that those forests will never come back.”

The mining industry argues that we need this inexpensive energy source in order to be energy independent. But, says Lovett and other environmentalists, if valley fills were outlawed tomorrow the cost of coal for our electric rates would only go up by pennies.

I’ll also talk to an official of the mining industry about why this type of mining needs to continue. The fact it provides American energy and jobs and that West Virginia’s economy depends upon it.

Back at Gary Anderson’s home, he wonders how it came to this.

Who gave them the right to blow the tops of mountains off to get the coal? I mean, that’s what gets me. Where, back in time, did they get the permission to come in and just below the mountains up? It’s really unbelievable. You can’t go back and reconstruct a mountain that’s been here for hundreds of millions of years. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

But, the mining companies now have the legal right to level the top of Coal River Mountain and fill up the valleys and streams above Anderson’s home.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sandra Sleight-Brennan.

Mountaintop Mining (Part Two)

Gary Anderson in Front of Coal River Mountain (Photo by Sandra Sleight-Brennan)

Mountaintop removal coal mining blows off the tops of mountains to get to a thin layer of coal. Environmentalists say there’s a better way to extract energy from mountain tops. They want to put up wind turbines. Sandra Sleight-Brennan reports they believe it will mean more energy in the long term and less environmental destruction:

Transcript

Coal River Mountain is one of the last in Raleigh County West Virginia, and it’s next in line for mountaintop removal mining. A local group, the Coal River Wind Project, wants to build a wind farm along the mountain’s ridges.

Lorelei Scarbro has lived most of her life in the West Virginia coal fields. She’s the daughter, granddaughter and widow of coal miners. She knows her opposition to coal mining is seen by her neighbors as a direct threat to their jobs.

“It has been difficult. But people begin to understand that we’re not trying to take something away from them. You’re trying to add something to the area.”

She says mountaintop removal coal mining is short-term gain with long-term damage.

“The pace we’re going; it will be nothing left. I have a five-year-old granddaughter, and I can’t imagine what the air and water will be like when she is at childbearing age if we continue at this pace, because they’re covering headwaters streams, they’re starving off the water supply, they are destroying the air.”

And the next mountain in Scarbro’s home area to be mined is likely Coal River Mountain.

That’s why Coal River Wind Project commissioned a study to see if wind turbines would work. It turns out, the mountain has industrial strength wind. Enough to power 164 turbines. The project would create 200 local jobs during construction, and 40 permanent jobs. Rory McIlmoir is the project coordinator.

“The wind farm would generate an average of $1.74 million a year for the first 20 years. In year one it would generate over three million dollars. That’s the property tax. Blowing up the mountain for coal, on the other hand, would only bring $36,000 back to the county.”

That’s just the property taxes. The wind farm would make about $1.75 million dollars a year in revenue according to the study.

But the wind project has hit a stumbling block. A recent Bush administration rule change allows mining waste to be dumped into streams. That’s cleared the way for the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection to approve a permit for Massey Energy to do mountaintop removal mining here. If the mining occurs, the mountains would be lowered by several hundred feet. That would scrap the wind turbine project.

Activist Lorelei Scarbro thinks the wind project is the one thing that can stop the destruction of Coal River Mountain and others targeted for mountain top removal coal mining.

“It will save the mountains, it will save the wildlife and the hardwood forests and the vegetation and the water. It’s something that is desperately needed. Of course, our biggest obstacle is the fact that that the land is leased to the coal company.”

But the people who own the land say, if coal mining were stopped by the government, they’d consider the wind farm. The wind farm project coordinator, Rory McIlmoir, says they’d benefit for a lot longer if they did.

“Because, if they can make a few million each year from royalties then they’re interested in that. But, the choice right now is easily coal.”

The Coal River Wind Project has presented the study to West Virginia’s Governor. And 10,000 people signed a petition asking the state to think beyond coal and think about the future of energy, the economy, the mountains and the people.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sandra Sleight-Brennan.

Mountaintop Mining (Part Three)

Christians for the Mountains field worker Robert "Sage" Russo standing on Kayford Mountain overlooking an MTR site in West Virginia (Photo courtesy of Christians for the Mountains)

Environmentalists have been fighting to stop mountain top removal coal mining for
decades. They say they want to preserve the mountains, the water that’s polluted by the
mining and the people. But many of the people don’t want the help. They want the jobs
provided by the mining operations. Sandra Sleight Brennan reports the struggle
between the two sides is complicated. Now churches and synagogues are introducing
religion into that struggle:

Transcript

The line drawn between environmentalists who want to stop mountain removal
coal mining and the coal miners who depend on it for jobs has always been
smudged.

Often the environmental activists had relatives and close friends who worked for
the mining companies. There aren’t a lot of jobs in the Appalachian Mountains.
Of the jobs that are there, the coal mining jobs pay the most.

In the small Appalachian towns in the coal fields, the God-fearing families who
depended on the mining jobs have often seen the environmentalists as people
who were out to destroy their way of life.

But lately some people are seeing things differently. More than a dozen churches
and synagogues have passed resolutions against mountaintop removal mining.

Allan Johnson is the co-founder of Christians for the Mountains, a group that’s
sided with the environmentalists.

“It’s a serious issue, ultimately it is a moral issue and, as a moral issue, we’re appealing
to the religious communities, the Christian communities. We’ve got to do right. We
cannot destroy God’s creation in order to have a temporal economy.”

And Johnson is getting help from other Christians. Rebekah Eppling is an
Ameri-Corps VISTA volunteer. She’s working with Christians for the Mountains.

“We present ourselves that we are a Christian organization and we are working for
Creation Care and we are following the Biblical mandate to take care of God’s planet – it
brings a different sense of what we’re doing to people. So a lot of people who
traditionally wouldn’t be interested all the sudden start to realize the different aspects of
it. It kind of hits a different spark for them.”

Creation Care is how some Evangelical Christians describe their brand of
environmentalism. One of the most prominent spokesman for Creation Care is
Richard Cizik. He’s a former Vice President of the National Association of
Evangelicals.

“We say Creation Care because first of all we believe the earth was created and
second of all we know from God’s word in Genesis that we are to care and protect
it. So, we call it Creation Care.”

The group, Christians for the Mountains, works with many different
denominations. They teach people who want to get involved about the issues
surrounding mining. They go into detail about how the short term benefit of the
destructive form of mining not only alters the mountains, but pollutes the streams
and ultimately the drinking water. They point out that once the coal fields are
mined, the jobs are gone and the communities are left to live with the damage to
the environment.

Volunteer Rebekah Eppling says there’s resistance to the message.

“The term environmentalist is kind of a dirty word in the coalfields region. Since we are a
religious organization that puts us in a unique spot.”

“We do get some pretty harsh criticism.”

Allen Johnson with Christians for the Mountains.

“We are concerned about people’s jobs. We want to have a healthy economy. And it is
not a healthy economy in that area. If you go down into the area with the mountaintop
removal is going on it in some of the impoverished areas in the country.”

Like the more traditional kinds of environmentalists, these Creation Care
environmentalists have ties to the community. Eppling says her family comes
from an area that’s targeted for coal mining in the near future.

“My family is very supportive of what I’m doing. Because they see the place where they
used to live are now being destroyed. The mountain very close to where my
grandmother and father grew up its being blasted away. My father and his family are
from Boone County – which is one of the big coal producing areas. Coal River runs right
behind his house where he grew up.”

The Christians for the Mountains know the families that depend on the coal
mining don’t always understand why anyone would want to stop one of the very
few industries that offer good paying jobs in the region. But Rebekah Eppling
says there has to be a better way than blowing up the tops of the mountains and
filling the valleys with rubble.

“It’s not just environmentalist versus workers. It’s a very complex. It’s not just about
stopping coal – it’s about bringing in more options for people.”

And some of those options include preserving the environment by finding alternatives for
the region – such as wind energy, tourism, and not letting the mining companies decide
the fate of the Appalachian Mountains and the people who live there.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sandra Sleight-Brennan.

Coal: The Comeback Kid

Memorials to miners and past mining disasters dot the public spaces in rural parts of southern Illinois. This granite obelisk is in honor of mining near West Frankfort, which is in the heart of Illinois coal country, and close to several operating mines. In 1980, Illinois had 18,000 coal miners - now, the workforce is less than 4,000. Mining experts say new digging permits, new hires and new investment in Illinois coal signals a comeback, though it's unclear mining employment will reach former heights. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
John Mead directs the Center for Clean Coal Research at Southern Illinois University. Mead says the probable comeback of Illinois' coal industry hasn't fully materialized yet, but he agrees with industry experts who say cleaner-burning coal-fired power plants are creating a new market for the state's high-energy resource. By the way, the coal nugget in his palm is the only coal he could find in his office. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
The exit at an operating mine near Galatia, Illinois. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
This coal fired power plant sits at the corner of the SIU campus in Carbondale, Illinois. It's built sulfur scrubbers and other technology that allow it to use Illinois coal. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

America has a love-hate relationship
with coal. We burn coal to make half our
electricity, but we’re always fighting coal’s
air pollution. Some regulations decimated
the coal industry in one key state. Shawn
Allee reports miners there are caught
between a slow comeback and another round of
regulation:

Transcript

Coal was once king of the Southern Illinois economy, but no longer.

Nathan Threewitt lives in the area. He explains mining jobs evaporated.

Nathan Threewitt: “Eighteen years ago, give or take a couple, people went from
making a nice, upper-class living to nothing at all. Couldn’t find work, everybody
had to move.”

Shawn Allee: “Did you have that happen in your own family?”

Threewitt: “Yep. My dad’s got ten brothers and sisters. They went from, everybody
had clothes for school, everybody had food to eat, to, we don’t know how the hell it
was gonna happen.”

Even though Threewitt has a tough history with coal – he’s actually trying to get into the
industry.

In fact, I find him while he’s taking a break from a coal mining training class at Rend
Lake College.

I know at one time, classes like these had been canceled.

I track down instructor David Colombo to see what’s changed.

David Colombo: “This room is where I train miners for the most part.”

Shawn Allee: “What’s this?”

Colombo: “Ugh. This is a high voltage cable.”

Allee: “This is almost as thick as your arm.”

Colombo: “This isn’t the biggest of the bigs, either.”

Right now, only about four thousand Illinois miners need to be familiar with equipment
like this.

But Colombo gets calls from mining companies in the area who need trained workers.
So, his school’s growing to keep up.

Shawn Allee: “Why have faith that you’re going to need space for miners to be
trained?”

David Colombo: “With the mining permitting that’s going on, is the highest it’s been
in thirty years.”

Colombo: “Gentlemen in this afternoon’s class will start sinking a mine within the
next week or two. Right now it just employs ten people, but in a year from now, that
same mine’s probably going to employ a hundred and ten people.”

People use words like rebound and comeback when they describe the Illinois coal
industry. To understand what happened, you have to dial back a little.

“It was really the effect of Clean Air Act amendments of 1990.”

This is John Mead. He heads coal research at Southern Illinois University.

He says Illinois coal is blessed with high energy, but it’s cursed with sulfur that caused
acid rain and lung disease. The amendments aimed to cut that.

“Most utilities were able to switch to lower-sulfur coal, and that’s just what they
did.”

In fact, utilities opened new mines out West where the coal has less sulfur.

As for an Illinois coal turn-around?

“Today, sulfur and other materials in the coal can be controlled pretty effectively
with technology.”

So, now Illinois coal can better compete with lower-sulpher coal.

But here’s the thing. There could be another pollution clamp-down in the works.

You know about global-warming, right? Well, carbon dioxide’s a big cause, and coal
produces carbon dioxide in spades.

Scientists say cutting coal emissions would be a quick way to cut carbon.

So, miners in Southern Illinois get mixed messages – the country wants their coal again,
but maybe not for long.

Miner-to-be Nathan Threewitt says he’s thought this through.

Nathan Threewitt: “Well, if anybody looked at the economics of it, it’s gonna go
back. Coal used to be fifteen dollars a ton, it’s now 65 dollars a ton. You’re gonna
have these coal companies with coal left in the ground, it used to not be worth it to
get the money out, now it’s worth it.”

Shawn Allee: “You like those odds.”

Threewitt: “Yeah, I do. I’m rolling the dice on it.”

Threewitt figures, he’s got time to build a career from coal, while America makes up its
mind just how clean it wants its coal-fired electricity.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Energy Rush Threatens Sage Grouse

There is concern that new noises from energy research will disrupt the sage grouse's mating patterns (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

The push is on to find more energy in
western states. And wildlife experts are trying
to figure out how some rare birds will react to
the increase in mining and gas exploration. Bob
Beck reports biologists studying sage grouse are
introducing new sounds into their research:

Transcript

Gail Patricelli is a researcher from the University of California at Davis. She studies the
mating habits of birds. And she says the habits of the sage grouse are the most
interesting. The males gather each spring on their traditional mating grounds,
known as a lek.

“The males gather during the spring, puff up and strut around. The females come
down to the leks during their breeding season, to pick
a mate. So they basically comparision shop. You will see females move along the lek,
sometimes by themselves, sometimes with big groups of females. But then they pick who they are
gonna mate with, they mate with them, and then they leave. And that’s the end of their
relationship.”

Beck: “What’s odd about this, is this all sounds vaguely familiar.”

Patricelli: (laughs) “A lot of people say that, but humans are very different. It’s sort
of analogous to a singles bar where people are just going to hook up.”

(sage grouse sound)

Patricelli watches and listens to these birds at a mating ground in Wyoming. She’s
learning how males get the attention of females.

“They have some particularly cool behaviors where they produce a sound that
radiates from vocal sacks on their chests – which are very bizarre looking
structures. But the sound comes out of the vocal sack, so the male has to aim the
sound appropriately at the female in order to impress her to mate.

(sage grouse sound)

So it’s not just his ability to
have the biggest, loudest, flashiest signal, but also to actually aim it appropriately at the
female. He has to know how to put on a good show, but respond appropriately and
be sensitive to what the female is doing.”

But the search for more energy is bringing new gas drilling and big trucks closer to
sage grouse mating grounds. This is happening at the same time the birds’ numbers
are declining. Researchers’ fear is the noise from energy development is disrupting
the sage grouse’s ability to hear each other, which is critical.

(truck sounds)

To find out, Patricelli is introducing recordings of gas rigs and trucks into her
research. She wants to see if sage grouse can adapt to the noise.

“So, there’s things that a lot of animals do to deal with noise in the environment.
And sage grouse may or may not be able to do that. They are not the brightest
(laughs) birds in the world.”

Wildlife Biologist Stan Harter works for the Wyoming Game and Fish department.

He’s watching the research with interest. Biologists worry that the birds are leaving
their mating grounds, trying to get away from the noise. His fear is that if the birds
are relocating they might be putting themselves at risk.

“In my mind, the birds can maybe move over here and strut okay, but are they
getting good nesting conditions over there? Maybe not. Is there a way we can allow them to co-exist more friendly?”

Harter openly admits that the sage grouse has declined in the West to the point
where it could show up on the endangered species list. If that happens, it could shut
down major portions of the state’s important energy economy. Similar to how the
spotted owl shut down logging in the Northwest.

So, wildlife officials are trying to find ways to make the birds and energy
development co-exist. They’re hoping that Patricelli’s research will guide them, not
just in reducing the noise, but in developing a plan to protect the sage grouse
population into the future.

For The Environment Report, I’m Bob Beck.

Where the Wild Things Are…in Trouble

East Pioneers, MT (Photo courtesy of the Campaign for America's Wilderness)
Boulder-White Clouds, ID (Photo courtesy of the Campaign for America's Wilderness)
Tumacacori Highlands, AZ (Photo courtesy of the Campaign for America's Wilderness)

An environmental group is calling on Congress
to better protect some of the last wilderness areas of
the lower 48 states. Lester Graham reports the group
identifies ten wild spots it says are in trouble:

Transcript

The group, Campaign for America’s Wilderness, reports on pristine places that are
facing pressures from development and other actions the group sees as threatening.

Mike Matz heads up the environmental group. He says although there are some
restrictions on how the public lands are used, sometimes they’re not enough.

“The land managers often times need some additional tools to be able to prevent certain
damaging activities, whether it’s logging on national forests or mining on public lands.
And one of the most pervasive threats we see today is from off-road-vehicle
traffic that is rampant and unregulated.”

Off-road-vehicles are allowed on many of the sites, but Matz says the riders don’t
always stay on the trails and end up damaging areas. The group points out that
only 2.5% of the continental U.S. is protected as wilderness.

For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Tag: mining

Mining the Minerals That Power Your Gadgets

Transcript

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Government Looks to Clean Up Coal

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Mountaintop Removal Continues

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Coal Ash Controversy

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Mountaintop Mining (Part One)

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Mountaintop Mining (Part Two)

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Mountaintop Mining (Part Three)

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Coal: The Comeback Kid

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Energy Rush Threatens Sage Grouse

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Where the Wild Things Are…in Trouble

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