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In the area are 10,000 acres of unreclaimed mined land. This amount is in scattered areas throughout the mountains. They are areas stripped of their earth cover of coal beds and then left, bare and often eroding. This is the land of the jokes about people and their livestock having short legs so they can walk around the mountains.
I don't really know where the figure of 30,000 acres comes from. It could not have come from aerial surveys because the area is too big. Satellite capability was only getting started when 30,000 was being used as an impressive number to get public interest up, thus congressional interest, thus money to flow. There are similar magic numbers around; they take on truth as a function of the frequency of use.
I don't doubt that there are that many acres. Old records may be correct but many of the areas have been re-mined and the abandoned lands are now no longer abandoned and fall under the later rules, regulations, and laws. If you had to visit each acre for only one day each to get an idea of its condition, it would take about 150 years. It is hard to believe that there are only about 200 working days in a year. It is equally hard to imaging either 150 years or that anything meaningful could be done for mapping, analyses, or comprehensive observations on one acre (208 feet by 208 feet or about one football field) in one day after subtracting travel time - which in that country is always great. "Up thar " on the mountain is a "fur piece " by road because roads are jeep trails and are frequently washed out by stream torrents and mudslides.
I became involved because I thought the reclamation process might include wildlife. Why must an area be returned to forests or brought to good grazing land? Bob Downing, then with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, suggested that some of the abandoned mine areas should not be reclaimed. In fact, he argued, some were already in good habitat. To bulldoze an area, level it, put in terraces, etc. would disturb it again and the end results may not be as good for wildlife as the changes that had taken place since the miners pulled out of the area. I suspected his hypothesis was true, but it seemed that criteria were needed for deciding when to let an area alone and when to do costly reclamation. Leaving it alone had current wildlife and low costs on its side. Reclamation work had long-term water and erosion control and new forests or grazing land in its side. A long-term monetary justification might pay for the high costs of on-site work.
We had a team of graduate students working on the orphaned-mine-land analysis. They had studied fish, birds, and mammals on old mine sites. I never really knew where the data would be used. They were interesting and the students gained, but the results never put together, plugged in. It was like conventional three-prong electric plugs that are not useable in houses with the two-prong receptacles. Everything is logical, it "works ", but it really cannot be used. My arguments for computer-based design, or comprehensive systems that allows all observations to be used and that point to specific data needs before going afield was poorly communicated again. The field work proceeded simultaneously with computer work, not in sequence. There were wastes on both ends. Nevertheless, I developed the concept of a computer-aided prescription system. It had an analogy with Aldo Leopold's concept of a science of land health (in Land Country Almanac). Just as doctors get a comprehensive work-up on a patient after blood and urine samples are taken, I imagined (and Ned Okie (now a Ph.D.) and I and others) developed a prototype analysis system for a mine. The mine site, some gouged-out hillside (Figure 18.3), is seen as the patient. A technician visit the site (the bigger the site the better because there are so many acres and so little time and money). Data forms are completed or a hand-held microcomputer asks questions and data are entered. A computer produces a book, a prescription, telling a great deal about the area because of equations, central data (such as climate and geology) and gives recommendations about what to do to achieve objectives.
It was a good idea. The prototype was criticized because it was not validated (in science you can only invalidate something), was not complete, and not as valuable as I once believed it might be because of two almost unpredictable events. One was that the price of coal popped up greatly - thus some abandoned sites were re-worked. The coal left far back in the hill became economical to dig out. Thus, these abandoned mines were re-worked and now their reclamation was required under new laws. Second, the federal administration drastically cut back on efforts to reclaim mines and even inspect lands that were currently being mined. The computer-aided reclamation concept came at an inappropriate time. It is still a good idea and I've expanded and transformed it as a general concept, with prescriptions in problem areas, not only to mines but forests, wildlife areas, watersheds, rangelands, even backyards.
I made the contacts with a major coal company in the region, did the preliminary proposals, and got a long-term project started with the university and the company. Then I began field work, computer programming with students, computer mapping, and writing of a large report, one of those now dusty on the shelf. The report was the very thing newer computer-based dynamic planning and knowledge-base ideas are designed to counter. A planning report needs to be like a newspaper - a throwaway. The system is the thing that lives. Any change can be made and then a new computer run made ... perhaps just on a monitor, but at least on paper ... to be tossed out later, having gathered no dust.
My work in the coal field took me to many sites. I began thinking that highwalls were beautiful. They were like the massive stone layers of Arizona. They were beautiful in their order, layers, and form. The maroon rocks against gray layers were as if harmonized. Elsewhere, every shade of beige was present and often different in the evening from those colors seen in the morning. In the morning, we would go out to the bench to look at erosion or grassed areas or wildlife habitat.
The miners were perplexed. Why can't we leave highwalls when they are left along every highway cut in the state? They probably could have been if they had gotten together and formed a coalition and had been willing to do some trading. Independence has survival value in the old coal field. Getting together was not their style. The strip mined areas were abandoned. Highwalls ran for miles. Eroding benches and piles of acid shale were left. Streams once having trout ran rust-orange and acid, not a creature in sight. Eventually, in the late 1960's, people got fed up and in the "environmental era" laws were passed requiring reclamation. Reclamation has an historical connotation. Return the land to past conditions, which implicitly must have been good.
I contend that I can grow anything anywhere ... given enough money. This "given " seems unfair. Yes, I can grow bananas outside of Buchanan or grapes in Grundy, but the costs are too high. Too high as compared to what? "Reclamation " is a concept that has gotten completely out of control. Do we want to claim land for quality human existence or restore it to its original, steep, erosive, low-site-index shaley condition? Do we want to cover it with grass, trees or what? What are the criteria? We can certainly create beautiful terraced landscapes equivalent to those of China, Bolivia, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Why is the original contour perfect? We can recharge aquifers, reduce erosion, stabilize stream banks, and retain waters for long-term bio-geo-chemical reduction-oxidation processes in a designed land surface.
Nature is assumed "good " but people need to ask: compared to what? My students want to "do good for wildlife ", but I ask: as compared to what? How can you tell? That which is good for foxes is bad for quail. Good for cardinals and song sparrows is bad for pileated woodpeckers. How can you tell? Wildlife is a resource. A resource, by definition, is a thing with associated human value. There is value applied everywhere. A rattlesnake on a mined-site flat rock is the same as a shiny blue skink (lizard)? Do we want any number of rattlesnakes and copperheads? Moths are pretty; they are nice; do we have no value associated with mosquitoes, gnats, and the little delta-winged bastards called "deer flies " that tell you they have visited you by leaving your blood to look at? (Evidently I have some preferences.) Wild animal life has relative value to people. Thus, it is a resource and thus can be and will be controlled and regulated. It needs to be better controlled, i.e., managed to improve net benefits - at least to keep them in the positive column.
Similarly, land is a resource. Land map area has value; its real shape shapes that value. Moving mountains is no longer the project or problem it once was. In the coal country, there are "mountain top removal" projects. People don't create highwalls, they remove the entire top of the mountain and remove the flat thick coal seam on which the top of the mountain once sat.
People ought to visit mines, at least mining conventions where they can see equipment. When you stand next to tires with radii twice your height, your world scale changes. There can be seen machines with scoops that can hold my entire house. The operator is very high off the ground, a very peculiar expression of scale. Trees and other human-scale items are not useful references to the surface miner.
For people in wildlife management, funds are limited, scale is farm-tractor size, and work is discussed in terms of pounds of fertilizer. These mining operations are of another world. It seems useful to me (and I think for other resource-related people) to shift scales, at least temporarily. One consequence of such a shift is to allow a question. Since I can move mountains, and there is no principle that says natural landform is best (or even good), and since in the future fossil fuel will be short and I may not get another chance to move mountains, "what is the optimum land surface configuration for the long-term future? " The question would have been silly years ago. Technology allows unthinkable questions to be thought and vented. The computer, in a similar fashion, allowed unthinkable questions to be asked like "on the day after the hunting season can we give a report on wildlife harvest to commissioners who must set the next year's season? " Some states still struggle with their data, reporting last year's results after the season has been set for next year. Absurd! Technology changes the scale of thought.
I contend that land is a resource, thus having the dimension of human value. Difficult to describe, at least value means having importance to several reasonable people, having relatively more importance then other things in life, less than others. It means that something is perceived to have actual or potential benefits to people. When I think of resource preservation, conservation, or use, I think of "... by people, for people. " Unless I do so, I am without criteria. There is no other functional basis for decision. I cannot tell what to do, what is best. I need criteria for goodness, for optimality, and these only come from people.
The concept of an optimum land surface or topology was difficult because there are metaphysical aspects to land. God, or at least nature, shapes land. Part of the difficulties in mining and other land use is the godly and personified nature of land. The phrases are "Mother Nature ", "rape of the land ", "running sores" (referring to erosion gullies), "the thin topsoil skin " and others. Wilderness and naturalness are given the category of "good " without realizing that reasonable people need for that assignment a list of criteria. What are the criteria of goodness? By what standards is the natural landform good? Best?
When I remove coal or reshape the land for any purpose - a shopping center, other minerals, transportation corridors - what should be the final surface configuration?
The long-term future is at least 2,000 years, a brief tick in Earth-time. I do not know what the details of that future will be, so the solution must be very generalized. There will be other changes (like digging a basement or placing a road) but the surface must have some overall, general best configuration, probably not a 100 percent slope (a 100 percent slope, by convention, is land surface at a 45 degree angle to the horizon).
To formulate the objective and the criteria of optimality is the most difficult work of the systems person. There is risk; it is easy to solve perfectly an invalid problem.
My quest has been to design an optimum land surface shape. What was to be planted, what would grow, how would top soil develop, what uses would be made? These might all change over 2,000 years and probably would several times. The task was to "hold what you got " retaining soil nutrients in place, for supplies of several nutrients, particularly phosphorus, are limited, energy costs of transportation are high (and will not be used to haul fertilizer in a fossil-energy short world!), and energy costs of producing nitrogen are exorbitant. We need to retain water and recharge aquifers for evident reasons. Most importantly, in an energy-dependent world that will become fossil-energy short, we need energy for society. As plants over the eons have done, we must capture energy. I suspect technology will find a way to reproduce some of the energy collecting processes in plant leaves. It will be inefficient, costing as much energy to get it as the amount gotten. (Not bad, though, in an energy-short world.) I'm not willing to gamble on this being low-cost or massively successful. The new land form (only, mind you, where land is being re-shaped anyway) is one that is a maximum energy fixing surface, a surface covered with plants. Perhaps later, there will be high-tech collectors like the current fields of wind machines and glass and mirror systems. I prefer not to discuss them for they are very, very high in costs of energy to produce them. My concern is for areas for plants, the natural collectors. Type of plant is not specified. Today's garden is tomorrow's forest, which is tomorrow's garden.
I call the concept seterrain, system engineering terrain. I do not yet have the computer programs that do the work. I work on them slowly; other people are much more facile programmers. Interest in big, futuristic ideas are very difficult to sustain. Creative-work-time is usurped by idea-defending-time. Ideas are like infants. They best be cared for, nourished, cleaned, protected. An adolescent idea, as big and healthy as it may appear, is a very fragile thing. It too needs nurture. In academic circles, modern professors seem to be trained to attack ideas. Criticism is good, needed, and required but within the community there is real need for family-like cooperation, mutual tending, kindly critique, not that which is vicious and destructive. There is a need to move good ideas to a state of maturity where they can then display their toughness under attack.
I am not alone with seterrain or its premises. Dubos (1976:460) observed that the magnificence of the English parks "... symbolizes that human interventions into nature can be creative and indeed can improve on nature, provided that they are based on ecological understanding of natural systems and of their potentialities for evolution as they are transformed into humanized landscapes." Schaefer et al. (1979) presented a paper on "Sculpturing Reclaimed Land to Decrease Erosion." They observed that natural watershed and slopes are relatively fixed. The forces that give rise to developing watersheds and the stream channels achieve a type of equilibrium with the forces that resist such development. When this occurs, erosion from the channel becomes very small.
They said a designed drainage system could be developed with equations relating:
They suggested reclamation including a way "... to sculpture the land into a shape that approximates what would be a natural surface in dynamic equilibrium with its environment. " W.D. Klimstra said that massive land disturbance permits innovations in land-use planning and W.C. Ashby criticized the implementation of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (1977) as looking backwards rather than building for the future. He said that the potential for using total excavation of a landscape to build a better, more productive world, used so successfully in Germany and elsewhere, has not been fulfilled. He also believed that the potential productivity of the land has often been degraded to meet short-term cosmetic standards.
I do not assume the task will be easy, but it is not a Manhattan Project - more on the order of one or two Ph.D. studies with continual improvements with use and discoveries being included.
Yamamoto (19__) probably saw some of the answers as he asked basic questions in reclamation of:
He claimed that "unless the regional geomorphic trends and their ecological implications are understood, the mere back-filling and re-contouring of mixed disturbed lands, particularly in areas where major volumetric landscape alteration is expected, are mere cosmetic routines that lack scientific rationale. "
Jacob (1977:1164) made the distinction between engineering and tinkering. The former relates to having tools and materials that exactly meet his needs (implying a known end). Tinkering includes having a collection of leftovers and odds and ends and making something out of what he has. In one case, a project defines the tools and materials; the reverse determines the tinker's results.
My thoughts on seterrain go something like this. We need a surface at right angles to the sun's radiation, at least those elements of the spectrum useable by plants that can get through the polluted air. That angle is determined by the latitude of the work area. There is no one best shape; every site is likely to have a unique shape because its factors, in combination, are unique.
The angle changes during the day. High noon may be the criterion but I suggest the middle of the photosynthetic growth curve for the area (which is not noon) and is affected by local temperatures. A series of convex, dome-shaped ridges might work well. Rather than one general surface that is best at noon and suboptimal early and late in the day, the ridges may have a morning side, a noon crest, and an evening side or slope. Which is best? My guess is that they are both very close in ability to capture plant-growth sun rays. The computation is essential; a little wrong, suboptimal, over 2,000 years, is a lot wrong!
The computations are only made for the frost-free periods, or so-called "growing season. " At mid-latitudes, the slopes must be long and expansive facing the sun. One surface will not suffice; there has to be a back side, a cooler, shaded portion that "holds up " the upper end of the slope. See Figure 18.5. This can be minimized. The solution at a site is to maximize the ratio of front slope length to back slope length. From the front slope length must be subtracted the shading caused by the ridge. The surface needed is non-shaded. On this might be placed the plants, the collectors, or the living spaces of people for when they have no more cheap fossil energy; they will not want to live in the winter land shadows.
The solar surface is designed first, then adjustments are made to it. The ratio of actual surface to the unadjusted surface can be useful in comparing sites, perhaps in actually designing the surface. Adjustments in the shape will likely be made due to soil characteristics, geological formations, and esthetic and historic phenomena. Of course, managing water is the major topic after solar radiation. Designs are for site-specific, three-in-sequence maximum rainfalls since these are the relevant hydrologic variables affecting land forms. Sheet erosion will be present. It is interesting, but ponderous and follows the leader, the recurring big storm. These events that come shortly one after the other, are not single events. The recurring storm is the event. One is a function of the previous one like "function " is one word but "...tion" only has specific meaning when preceded by "func... " It is one thing. Sequential phenomena are critical. A freeze will change the water that enters the ground. After a hard freeze, a 2-inch rain may only result in 0.5 inches infiltrating the soil. Should the rainfall be read as 2 inches or 0.5 inches? Downstream, the volume for the engineer is that related to 1.5 inches; for the ecologist interested in plants, it is 0.5. Two inches, as reported from the rain gauge, is almost meaningless.
Long solar slopes are slopes that can carry water. The longer, the more soil the water can carry. Major contour terraces are probably going to be a part of the land design. Evapotranspiration rarely exceeds rainfall, so water storage - either underground or in impoundments - will be needed (the aquifers concept hardly applies; only relevant is gross water in the inter-spaces of rocks and soil particles). All are designed for an irrigation role. As implied by Schaefer and his colleagues, the careful design of drainages to deal effectively with the occasional surplus water will be required. Figure 18.5. A preliminary idea of how an area undergoing formation as seterrain may appear.
There will be other constraints and adjustments. Field projects never go exactly according to plan. A threatening landowner, a peculiar water source, impassable clays, and temporary equipment failures all cause shifts and improvisations. I compare it to wood carving. The perfect form hidden in a piece of wood needs only to be removed, but a knot, a slip of the knife, a twist of the grain - anything can cause modifications and a new concept will emerge for the wood carver. I suspect that seterrain may never exist. If and when the programs are run, it will probably grind for hours and then say "do it like the Chinese" who have worked it out over the centuries. "Make terraces as wide as possible on the south-facing side of the mountain. Make them narrow, so they can be safely traveled or worked, on the north-facing slopes." I cannot tell which is correct. It is very easy to make suboptimal decisions. Often they are best for the day and then the chance to re-think the solution for the long-run is foregone. Surface mining gives people a chance to re-think the decision. It will be too bad if we do not use the results of that thought. We might miss a good buy to assure our future.
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