Industrial exploitation, destruction and pollution

[paul m]

Over hundreds or thousands of years my local area has been quarried extensively for various minerals or just for building stone. Many of the old quarries have returned to nature and, indeed, many form very useful nature reserves.

So nothing new in the continued quarrying except, perhaps its scale:


However, at least in this case, the company (Tarmac) tries to ameliorate the damage in several ways: firstly by not creating too much of a blot on the landscape - from most viewpoints you can't actually see the two quarries on either side of this dale!

Another thing is that when they have finished extracting a face, they blow it up and round off the rubble - to match the shape of the surrounding area! Then they leave it to nature.

[Emmanuel70]

Over hundreds or thousands of years my local area has been quarried extensively for various minerals or just for building stone. Many of the old quarries have returned to nature and, indeed, many form very useful nature reserves.

This location must be quite rich in minerals, Paul, for quarrying to continue intermittently for that long. I suppose the current miners are better than most with their initiative to clear up the rubble and help nature heal itself quickly. Some places are not as lucky.

[paul m]

It's the Carboniferous Period (Pennsylvanian in America, I think) when the rocks were laid down in a warm sea. The geology determines not only the shape of the landscape and the plants growing on it but human history as well. Going from north-east to south-west we have the coal levels, iron-stone strata and then the grit measures (hard sandstone used for grinding). Then you get to the limestone which was/is itself used for building but also for making cement and fertiliser but within the limestone there are deposits of lead, copper, barium and strontium salts, 'blue john' and other silica compounds, fluorspar .... The Romans were the first to mine lead up here so that takes us back two thousand years!

Yes, as you say, some companies take no interest in what they're doing to the landscape and the environment: some of the quarrying in South America is particularly appalling.

A grim blog at: quot | Sprol

Originally Posted by Emmanuel70

This location must be quite rich in minerals, Paul, for quarrying to continue intermittently for that long. I suppose the current miners are better than most with their initiative to clear up the rubble and help nature heal itself quickly. Some places are not as lucky.

[paul m]

My objection to a lot of mining is not the abstraction of rocks from the ground but the size of the operation, the distances over which rocks are transported, the techniques by which metal are extracted etc..

One item that can be fairly harmless is extraction of sand and gravel: it has fairly low energy usage and can result in wetlands which are exremely useful to wildlife. There are hundreds of hectares of ponds in the Thames Valley which have resulted from gravel/sand abstraction - some in Epping Forest, such as


Absolutely unnatural, of course (some are on the tops of hills), but still serving a useful conservation purpose for wildlife.

[paul m]

Trivial facts: aggregate from Ballidon was used in the building of the new Wembley stadium:

Although I can't see anything other than glass and metal

More importantly - the plan to 're-naturalise' the pits will start soon:
Minerals

Originally Posted by paul m

Over hundreds or thousands of years my local area has been quarried extensively for various minerals or just for building stone. Many of the old quarries have returned to nature and, indeed, many form very useful nature reserves.

So nothing new in the continued quarrying except, perhaps its scale:


However, at least in this case, the company (Tarmac) tries to ameliorate the damage in several ways: firstly by not creating too much of a blot on the landscape - from most viewpoints you can't actually see the two quarries on either side of this dale!

Another thing is that when they have finished extracting a face, they blow it up and round off the rubble - to match the shape of the surrounding area! Then they leave it to nature.

[paul m]

It looks as if Burning Bush might be going to have another last attempt at making life easier for oil drillers and others:
BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Bush 'seeks to ease wildlife law'