Coal mining, in particular, strip mining has become the latest casualty of the growing green movement in the United States. What is strip mining? Encyclopædia Britannica Online defines strip mining as the removal of vegetation, soil, and rock above a layer of coal, followed by the removal of the coal itself (“strip”). Most Americans don’t realize the impact this material of biological origin that can be used as a source of energy (“fossil”), or fossil fuel, has on their everyday lives or the nation’s economy. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the mining industry directly employs some fifty thousand Americans with nearly half that number working in the more specific field of strip mining, or mountain top removal (“Average”). The Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change reports in their “Fourth Assessment Report” that coal derives half the electricity production in the U.S., with the U.S. exporting approximately six percent of the coal produced (Sims). Despite the positives, strip mining poses some serious consequences to the environment, portraying the industry in a negative light, some of which include deforestation and erosion, contamination of water, and wildlife poisoning and loss of habitat.
Deforestation and erosion are the most obvious effects of strip mining. In order to get to the minerals beneath the surface of the earth, miners must clear-cut the area in which they will be working. According to the EPA, mountain top removal will affect 6.8% of forested land in the Appalachians (United). Carl E. Zipper and co-writers, having affiliation with the Department of Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences, make it clear in their report, “Restoring Forests and Associated Ecosystem Services on Appa...
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...ed landscapes.” Conservation Biology 19(3):768-792. PDF file. University of Alaska Fairbanks. University of Alaska Fairbanks, June 2005. Web. 4 July 2011.
Sims, Ralph E.H. et al. “Chapter 4: Energy Supply.” Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. Cambridge and New York. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Web. 5 July 2011
"strip mining." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 04 Jul. 2011.
United States Environmental Protection Agency. United States Environmental Protection Agency, n.d. Web. 4 July 2011
Zipper, Carl E., et al. "Restoring Forests and Associated Ecosystem Services on Appalachian Coal Surface Mines." Environmental Management 47.5 (2011): 751+. Environmental Studies and Policy Collection. Web. 30 June 2011.
Plummer, C.C., McGeary, D., and Carlson, D.H., 2003, Physical geology (10th Ed.): McGraw-Hill, Boston, 580 p.
...fund Site. EPA Cooperative Agreement #V-006449-01-N. U Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 2006.
Removal of the mountaintops causes environmental impacts from blasting. The blasting has caused rocks to be deposited into valleys on the hillsides, burying almost 2,000 miles of streams which feed the Mississippi River. Slurry, the residue which is used to clean the coal can wash into groundwater and may contain arsenic, lead, manganese, iron, sodium, strontium, and sulfate. A recent research study is beginning to link these environmental impacts to the grave health concerns in the Appalachian communities. During most of the Mountaintop removal mining’s history coal industries have been able to obtain permits easily to operate, but once under the Obama administration Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) those permits now take more time to obtain. The permit process requires all applications to be reviewed before being given out to coal
Cavendish, M. (2011). North American Wildlife. (p. 109). New York: Marshall Cavendish Reference. DOI: www.marshallcavendish.us
US Enviromental Protection Agency. (2010, December 13). Retrieved January 20, 2011, from US EPA Human Health: http://cfpub.epa.gov/eroe/index.cfm?fuseaction=list.listByChapter&ch=49
Biodiversity is influenced by landscape fragmentation at various scales of space and time. The extinction of ecosystem types and component species may cause an increased patchiness of the landscape, resulting in lower population sizes and decreased connectivity. As a result, inhabitants may experience decreased dispersal abilities and lowered gene flows between populations.
Over the years, past resources have quickly dwindling. Since then conservation has broadened beyond the use of natural resources, and has become a movement. Many critics of conservation believed it would stifle industrial development, however, the conservation movement has increased development over the years because it forced the need to find an alternative source of power. One of the main concepts of conservation is that it should be used to benefit the many not for the profit of the few, like big business that destroy large areas of wilderness without care for what they are destroying. Preserving wilderness areas will help with the conservation of America’s resources that are quickly dwindling. The resources we had years ago is much less due to the supply and demand of society today. Preserving certain areas will allow us to...
Objectives • To evaluate the difficulty of mining and reclamation To calculate costs, expenses, income, and profit from a hands-on mining exercise. • To evaluate the effectiveness of reclamation and its added costs to mining. To describe the increasing rarity of some non-renewable mineral resources. Introduction Minerals play an important role in our day-to-day life, but we often do not contemplate how the minerals are obtained. Minerals are scattered all over the world, just like any other resource.
Coal has a very negative impact on the environment, one of the main impacts on the environment is the actual process of extracting the coal from the ground. The two ways that coal is mined, underground and surface, both have different effects on the environment. The first way that coal is mined is by digging tunnels and creating mineshafts underground and then removing the coal from th...
Instead, the once breathtaking forests are now sights to avert from. “The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation…” (Carson). The roadsides used to be lined with green forests, but as deforestation has taken its impact, the roadsides now have become barren and lacked the greenery. Deforestation has caused a harmful influence on the once beautiful Earth. Deforestation can be caused by “fires, clear-cutting for agriculture, ranching and development, unsustainable bagging for timber, and degradation… (WWL). Today, many organizations are working to find ways to resolve the issues established by it.
What comes to mind when you think of coal mining? If you're like me, coal mining means living in darkness and a cold hearted industry. Other words that come to mind are poverty and oppression. Coal mining is not a job that you dream about or get a degree for. People who are coal miners do not chose a life full of danger and repression, they get stuck with it. There are many dangers that come along with coal mining, not only for the workers, but for the environment. Coal mining and the coal industry have caused irreversible damage to our environment and has killed innocent miners.
Lins, C., & Horwitz, E. (2007). Sustainability in the Mining Sector. Retrieved November 6, 2017, from http://www.fbds.org.br/IMG/pdf/doc-295.pdf
Though it has had many negative impacts on the environment in the past, mining is a vital industry completely necessary to our economy and lives. Nearly every item we use or encounter in our day to day lives is mined or contains mined products. Without the excavation of such materials things like computers, televisions, large building structures, electricity, and cars would not be possible. Virtually every technological and medical advance uses minded materials, without which millions would suffer. Some examples of minerals in the home include the telephone which is made from as many as 42 different minerals, including aluminum, beryllium, coal, copper, gold, iron, silver, and talc. A television requires over 35 different minerals, and more than 30 minerals are needed to make a single personal computer. Without boron, copper, gold and quartz, your digital alarm clock would not work. Every American uses an average 47,000 pounds of newly mined materials each year, which is higher than all other countries with the exception of Japan, which is a staggering figure representative of our dependence and need for mined minerals. Coal makes up more than half of nation’s electricity, and will continue to be the largest electrical supplier into 2020 & accounting for some 95 percent of the nation's fossil energy reserves – nine of every ten short-tons of coal mined in the United States is used for electricity generation. As the population of the world grows more mineral resources must be exploited through mining in order to support the rising demand for such products. Though it may present a hazard to the environment and those physically located nears the mines, the materials extracted from mines...
As a result of this process, the mine sites "do not develop normal soil structure or support the establishment of a plant cover". Many mine sites have...
middle of paper ... ... g the Energy Revolution." Foreign Affairs. Nov/Dec 2010: 111. SIRS Issues Researcher.