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Continue reading →: Goal: Harness Energy Without Losing Air, Soil, and Water Quality
Energy extraction, including drilling and mining, is one sector of our economy that’s has been especially damaging to soils, like those near the oil sands operations in Alberta shown in the above photo. As a soil scientist, I’m interested in sustainable land use that recognizes the life-supporting services of healthy…
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Continue reading →: Economic and Ecological Benefits of Perennial Wheat
The Wheat Field, Sunset by Vincent van Gogh (1890). Researchers at Michigan State University, Washington State University and The Land Institute at Kansas State University have been running trials on “perennial wheat.” Perennial wheat gets planted once and is harvested several times, unlike conventional wheat that requires tilling and seeding…
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Continue reading →: Kingston Coal Sludge Cleanup: The Road Show Returns
Following the December 22, 2008 breach of a containment dike surrounding an 84-acre coal ash disposal pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, TN, the immediate response focused on limiting and containing impacts to the Emory and Clinch Rivers, which were hit hard by…
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Continue reading →: The Persistent Trouble with Coal Ash
504-acre ash disposal ponds in Lake Erie, near Bay View Power Plant, Toledo. While a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire over twenty years ago, I attended an evening lecture by a hydrologist visiting from what was then still the Soviet Union. Early in his talk about groundwater,…
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Continue reading →: High Risk Coal Ash Impoundment: Pleasants Power Station
Pleasants Power Station, near Belmont, WV. Not to pick on this power plant, which is owned by Allegheny Energy Supply Company, but it is a good example of this type of facility. Coal-fired power plants need a lot of cooling water, so they are located on large bodies of water,…
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Continue reading →: Unversity of Texas Oil Production and Land Degradation
Image: Texon Oilfield west of Big Lake, TX. NAIP air photo, 2005. There’s more to extracting oil than drilling a neat hole in the ground. An Austin American-Statesman article by Ralph Haurwitz, makes clear the tremendous wealth the University of Texas has aquired from oil extracted from its property, as…
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Continue reading →: Land Requirements of Coal Ash Ponds
The ash ponds inventoried so far take up 31,643 acres of area, or about 51 square miles. During 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent out information requests to utilites in an effort to build a descriptive database of coal ash impoundments and similar facilities. The EPA will use the…
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Continue reading →: Eaarth: Bill McKibben's New Book
I’ve been enjoying Bill McKibben’s new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. At one point he writes this about soil and farming: “We need to stop thinking of farming in abstract terms, as a “low rung on the ladder of economic development,” and remember again what…
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