Saving Mineral King

 

Exploited by miners in the 19th Century, the awe-inspiring valleys of Mineral King came very close to becoming Disney-fied -- literally. Walt Disney wanted to build a ski resort up there. It was a very popular idea at the time, but the Sierra Club came out against it and won a victory in the US Supreme Court that was important not just for preserving the valley, but also for winning the right of citizens to sue the federal government to protect the common good.

"Just as important as the protection of a lovely valley was the precedent set through the lawsuit. The case confirmed the right of citizens to seek the help of the federal judiciary when any public resource -- land, air, water, wildlife -- came under threat. It established that Americans don't have to have an economic interest to have the legal right to get involved in protecting special places or stopping pollution; we all have an interest in keeping open space open, or in breathing clean air." --Tom Turner in High Country News

Which sort of explains why industry doesn't want to be regulated under the Clean Air Act for carbon dioxide emissions. Not that industry wants to be regulated at all, for anything, and who can blame them? When the miners dug out what they wanted from Mineral King, they left all their crap behind. And still, that's pretty much the way we roll. People tend to be very short-sighted. 

Some grown-ups, even now, choose to believe that the universe was created a few thousand years ago, and specifically for humans to boot. Geologists tell us that the Earth has been around so long that if you extend your arms out left and right to indicate the full span of time, the period that humans have existed is so tiny you could shave it off your fingernail with the single pass of a nail file. 

You can see why some people don't want to accept that. It would mean letting go of the fairy tale and embracing the truth, which by the way, is much more miraculous and interesting, and is based on reason rather than imagination.

The photos in this post were shot in September 2009. The photo below is from a Mineral King web cam image I snagged today (which apparently hasn't been updated since Friday).

Whether you wanted Mineral King to be a ski area or a natural area is almost beside the point if this is the kind of nightmare the future holds. I'm sure Mineral King will be beautiful again when the smoke clears, but for how long? A chart on Wikipedia shows that 17 of the 20 largest fires in California's history (and all of the Top 10) occurred just in this century.

Back around 1990 I drove across the country on my way to spend the summer on an island called Manhattan. On the way I stopped in Bozeman, Montana, and got to talking with someone who said I really shouldn't miss seeing Glacier National Park. Unfortunately, I was too impecunious to be able to make the side trip. 

There's nothing I could have done, but I do regret having to pass it up. I suspect now that whatever I could have seen back then is already considerably less amazing. Throw in the trophic cascades associated with the ecological benefits of the glaciers, and the bummer of losing them becomes even worse.

“We have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.” – Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, 2006

Extreme weather: check; 

floods: check; 

droughts: check; 

epidemics: check; and 

killer heat waves: check.

Ten years after Gore's warning, atmospheric CO2 cracked 400 ppm. Unfortunately, it kinda seems like we won’t know with absolutely certainty whether we’re just in a wobble of turbulence, or an actual tailspin, until it’s too late to pull out of it. 

Of course, for people who've already suffered losses on those five checkpoints, it already is too late. For the rest of us, we'll have a good clue that the end is near when insurance companies stop selling coverage for the five checkpoints.

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