#Austyn Gaffney, "From the Ashes," Sierra, March/April, 2021. - "Since the United States began burning coal on an industrial scale in the 19th century, upwards of 35 percent of the material has fallen to the bottoms of boilers as ash. That ash has been removed, mixed with water, and placed in ponds and landfills. Over 3 billion tons of it now occupy more than 1,400 sites across the United States." "Because of a dubious system engineered by industry groups, coal ash isn't regulated as hazardous waste."
"Rare earths coexist with other elements throughout the earth's crust, but unlike coal, they're more dispersed and difficult to separate from surrounding ore." "Between 1966 and 2017, coal-mining companies and utilities dumped more than 4 billion tons of coal ash across the United States. Since the 1970s, approximately 1.5 billion tons of coal ash has been put to 'beneficial use.' This EPA-approved form of waste recycling -- reusing coal ash as a replacement for Portland cement in concrete dams and bridges -- is called encapulation." These practices of reusing coal ash waste went unregulated for decades until 2015, when the EPA under the Obama administration, finalized the first ever federal regulation of coal ash." "Of the EPA's 158 reports of coal ash contamination with high pollutant releases at least 22 of the cases were caused by fill."
#Rebecca Solnit, "Unfinished Business," Sierra, March/April 2021. - ""Native Americans, hunter gatherers, agriculturists, and horticulturists, users of fire as a land-management technique, and makers of routes across the continent, played a profound role in creating the magnificent North American landscape, that the Europeans invaded."
"The recent fires across the West are most of all a result of climate change --but more than a century of fire suppression by a society that could only imagine fire as destructive, contributed meaningfully." "It took the pervasiveness of radioactive fallout in the 1950s and pesticides in the 1960s to wake conservationists up to the fact that nothing is separate, and you can't protect a place by setting it apart."
"The Sierra Club literally held space, preventing forests from being cut down, canyons from being dammed, mountainscapes from being developed, wetlands from being drained, species from going extinct."
#Kate Morgan, "Once Upon a Tree," Sierra, March/April 2021. - "Between 1904 and 1940, some 3.5 billion American chestnut trees, the giants of the Appalachian hardwood forest, succumbed to a fungal blight called 'Chyphonectria parasitis.' The loss was stunning -- not just for sprawling ecosystems across much of the eastern United States, where the tree was a keystone species -- but also for the Appalachian way of life. At the dawn of the 20th century, hundreds of millions of chestnut board feet were milled annually, fueling a multibillion-dollar timber industry (as measured in today's dollars)." "By some estimates, a million or more acres of Appalachian forest were denuded, and then converted in the name of reclamation, into pasture areas with low or nonexistent biodiversity."
#Gerald Horne, "A Poisonous Legacy," The Nation, 3.8-15.2021. - "Even though the Atlantic slave trade had been officially outlawed in the United States, it persisted despite this fact, which meant that millions of captives still departed Africa for a hellish enslavement in the Americas. Indeed. [John Harris, author of 'New York and the End of the Middle Passage' (Yale University Press) ], writes that: 'almost four million captives left African shores between the beginning of the century and the closure of the traffic in the 1860s, around a third of all captives who ever crossed the Atlantic.' "
"From 1851 to 1860, 159 individuals were prosecuted under US slave trade laws in the republic..." a number of which "were acquitted, encountered a dead-locked jury, or were otherwise ordered released."
'Unsurprisingly, the mass struggle for an 8-hour workday, and the liftoff of unions, more generally, occurred after the abolition of slavery. Correspondingly, no more dramatic example of class struggle can be found then that of tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people fighting with arms in hand in order to terminate slavery and remain 'forever free.' "
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