Wild Hope: On the Front Lines of Conservation Success by Andrew Balmford

Author:Andrew Balmford [Balmford, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: science, General, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences, nature, Environmental Conservation & Protection
ISBN: 9780226036007
Google: nJPh-4ct6aUC
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-06-07T00:27:38.905551+00:00

THE GREENING OF A GIANT

So how far can efforts to link conservation to mainstream economic activity go? Is big business getting involved, and if so, why? In the unique jarrah forest of southwestern Australia I find out how and why the largest aluminum mine in the world has also become the greenest, carrying out cutting-edge research in rare plant propagation and partnering government in a statewide fox and cat eradication program involving a locally derived poison, an Italian sausage machine, and precision bombing with chipolatas. Why all this effort, way in excess of legal obligations? Because the company believes that, regardless of formal contracts, their real license to operate a highly profitable concession into the future depends on long-term public approval.

For a moment it’s as though I’m living out a nightmare. Barren red earth stretches hundreds of meters in every direction. The engine roar from the biggest vehicle I’ve ever seen competes with red dust to fill the hot, dry summer air. In the far distance I can make out the abrupt wall of the mine pit, as tall as a house, and just above it, the fragile, olive-green edge of a unique forest, called jarrah, that only a few months ago reached all the way to where I’m standing. It’s an ecological Armageddon. And now a wiry bloke with a biker’s handlebar mustache and the body language of an extra from a Hollywood bar brawl is clambering down from his 110-tonne bulldozer to have a word with me . . .

But here in the largest bauxite mine on the planet—Alcoa’s operation in Huntly, Western Australia—things are not quite what they seem, and Bradley “Buzzard” Ambrosius is not exactly your ordinary miner.

Shock and Ore

Geology dictates that there is no way of extracting bauxite—the raw material for making aluminum—without digging a very large hole in the ground. In the low-lying Darling Range an hour’s drive southeast of Perth, the bauxite lies in a shallow layer 50 centimeters to 5 meters below ground, and open-cast mining starts with pilot drilling to find suitable ore bodies where the bauxite is concentrated. Miners then clear away the jarrah forest and the soil from an area up to half a kilometer across, blast through a concrete-like layer called caprock, and finally use excavators and trucks bigger than houses to dig up the bauxite and haul it off to a crushing plant, from where a conveyor belt transports it to a refinery 25 kilometers away. That’s when what most of us think of as mining is over. But it’s when Buzzard’s work begins.

That’s because he’s one of more than 80 people at the Huntly mine charged with trying to put things back how they were, on a massive scale: not just the soil, but the trees, the myriad other creatures of the jarrah system, and all the ecological threads that link them together. Buzzard and the other bulldozer operators begin the rehabilitation process. “The mining side of it is straight in, straight out, but the rehab side of it is phenomenal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.