Frodeman (2003) - Geo-logic

GEO-LOGIC

SUNY series in Environmental Philosophy and EthicsJ. Baird Callicott and John van Buren, Editors

GEO-LOGIC

BREAKING GROUND BETWEEN

PHILOSOPHY AND THE EARTH SCIENCES

ROBERT FRODEMAN

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Published byState University of New York Press, Albany

2003 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Frodeman, Robert.Geo-logic : breaking ground between philosophy and the earth

sciences / Robert Frodeman.p. cm. (SUNY series in environmental philosophy and ethics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-7914-5601-3 (acid-free paper) ISBN 0-7914-5602-1

(pbk. : acid-free paper)1. Earth sciencesPhilosophy. I. Title. II. Series.

QE6 .F76 2003550'.1dc21 2002030205

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For De

yanuladaThis page intentionally left blank.

CONTENTS

Preface / ix

Acknowledgments / xi

Chapter 1. Introduction / 1

Chapter 2. Acid Mine Philosophy / 19

Chapter 3. Corrosive Effects: Environmental Ethicsand the Metaphysics of Acid Mine Drainage / 37

Chapter 4. The Places of Science:The Heavens, the Lab, the Field, and the Screen / 59

Chapter 5. Earth Stories / 77

Chapter 6. The Philosophy of (Field) Science / 95

Chapter 7. Being and Geologic Time:The Meeting of Metaphysics and Politics / 117

Chapter 8. Science and the Public Self / 135

Chapter 9. Conclusion / 155

Notes / 161

Index / 181

vii

PREFACE

Geo-Logic is an essay in environmental philosophy. It ap-proaches its subject through a curiously neglected field: the philoso-phy of geology. Philosophy and geology (or the Earth sciences) caneach make crucial contributions to contemporary environmental con-cerns, but neither discipline will fulfill its potential until it refashionsitself by engaging the other. Geo-Logic seeks to redraw the bound-aries between the two fields, humanizing geology and bringing phi-losophy into the field.

I approach these issues from the perspective of training in bothphilosophy (a Ph.D.) and geology (a masters). This combination hasalso been leavened by experience in public policy. My time spent as aconsultant with the U.S. Geological Survey has served as a check onboth the conceptual rigor of my claims and their relevance to currentdebates concerning the role of science in society. Finally, my partici-pation in a number of educational experiments (the Grand CanyonSemesters I & II; the Southwest Earth Studies Program; and cur-rently, the Global Climate Change and Society Program, New Direc-tions in the Earth Sciences and the Humanities, and the FlatironsOutdoor Classroom Project) has provided me with opportunities totest these ideas in the field.1

I have written Geo-Logic with four audiences in mind: the philo-sophic community; Earth scientists in academia and government; re-searchers and actors in political science and public policy; andinterested members of the public. A central thesis of this work is that,in working on todays environmental problems, we must draw uponthe combined skills of all these perspectives. Geo-Logic offers philoso-phers examples of how to relate environmental philosophy to science,public policy, and real-world problems. It shows earth/environmentalscientists what is epistemologically distinctive about their work and

ix

how to respond to the cultural dynamics that are pulling them intothe public sphere. It also suggests how workers in the public spherecan use the insights of the sciences and the humanities to better ad-dress the needs of communities. Finally, this book hopes to attract areadership among those members of the general public who are con-cerned with environmental matters. Geo-Logic thus continues thework in Earth Matters in seeking to create interdisciplinary commu-nities for addressing our environmental problems.2

Geo-Logic has a website: http://geologic.colorado.edu. The web-site has figures and photographs illustrating each of the chapters.It also has links to sites concerned with questions of environmentalphilosophy, the Earth sciences, science policy, and interdisciplinaryapproaches to knowledge. Throughout this book, citings markedGL:CH1 refer to the website, where illustrations are organized ona chapter by chapter basis.

x Preface

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many have served as midwife to this essay: Tom Aldrich, MarkBullock, Chris Buczinsky, Bruce Foltz, Trish Glazebrook, IreneKlaver, James Lough, Carl Mitcham, Jared Morrow, Dugald Owen,Dan Sarewitz, John Van Buren, and Win Wright. I also owe a debt toChuck Barnes and Erle Kauffman (who instructed me in the art ofreading rocks), and Al Lingis, Jim Marsh, Stanley Rosen, and JackZammito (who marked trails across the history of philosophy). Thefollowing institutions have offered support over the years: the Nat-ural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado; the U.S.Geological Survey; the University of Tennessee; and the HennebachProfessorship in the Humanities at the Colorado School of Mines. Asalways, none of the above should be held responsible for the opinionsexpressed herein. Thanks as well to my editor, Jane Bunker, who hasskillfully guided this project to completion, and John Van Buren,whose sagacious advice helped me to draw together the threads ofthis argument. Finally, I have been sustained by the support of myfamily: Lee Frodeman, Barbara Frodeman, and Annie, Maya, andDenise.

xi

1INTRODUCTION

I.

I live in Colorado, in the shade of the Rocky Mountains, at amile in elevation. And I sleep each night on an ancient ocean bot-tom. Six-foot-wide clams once filter-fed here; ammonites, curled intheir spiral shells, sailed through the water column; and ple-siosaurs, carnivorous underwater reptiles, paddled the murkydepths of an inland ocean that extended from the Gulf of Mexico tothe Arctic. Just south of here you can find ancient shorelines wheredinosaurs traveled in herds: the sandstone ridges containing thefootprints of their passage and the bones of their dead survive totell the tale. Far to the west a string of volcanoes once rumbled: theash from those eruptions turns our dirt roads into a tire-grabbinggumbo after a rain (GL:CH1).

Stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon and let your eye fall uponthe Supai Formation, a brick-red, sparsely vegetated set of cliffs overfive hundred feet thick. The Supai is made up of cross-bedded sand-stones, red shales, and lenses of limestone. In the geologists eye,these kiln-dry cliffs become near-shore mudflats baking under a trop-ical sun, crisscrossed by lazy, meandering rivers. Nor are such won-ders limited to exotic locales. Go to Chicago and watch the Cubs playat Wrigley. While sitting in the bleachers, consider: eighteen thou-sand years ago what is now Wrigley Field lay beneath a sheet of icetwo miles thick. This is geologydisciplined visions of past worldsdrawn from the rocky palimpsest of the Earth.

This is also geology: not far from my home, in the offices of theUnited States Geological Survey in Lakewood, Colorado, teams ofEarth scientists analyze data to help lawmakers and communitiesaddress questions of environmental policy. USGS scientists researchthe likelihood of natural hazards: when will the Mississippi River

1

seek out a new channel, abandoning the port of New Orleans? Howwill the next major earthquake affect Los Angeles or the San Fran-cisco Bay Area? Other scientists investigate energy or mineral re-sources, questions of water quality and quantity, and global climatechange. Will declining mineral or energy reserves force the UnitedStates into questionable foreign policy decisions? How much longerwill farmers in the High Plains be able to draw upon the Ogallalaaquifer? This is geology in the public interest, traversing the bound-aries between science and politics.

Finally, this too is geology: it is June 1997, the first summer ofthe Southwest Earth Studies Program. Ten undergraduates, halfeach in the sciences and the humanities, have come to study acidmine drainage in Colorados San Juan Mountains. The drainage fromabandoned mines is the American Wests greatest single water qual-ity problem. We attend a three-day conference on acid mine drainagethat claims to make a special effort to speak to the concerns of localcitizens. But the first two days of the conference are anything butcommunity-orientedwe are inundated in graphs and statistics. Day3, consisting of a field trip to old mine sites and damaged streams,consists of more of the same. We watch as the scientists place instru-ments into pools of rust-colored water, generating numbers expressedin obscure codes. The students look dubious. One turns to his friendand comments: It just looks like sin up here.

Geopoetry, geopolitics, and geotheology are three loci of our re-lation to the Earth. Each of these sites disrupt the categories thathave governed western culture since the birth of the modern age. Ac-cepting the disciplinary boundaries of the academy, we proceed byontological dogmaassuming that science, politics, economics, reli-gion, and aesthetics are essentially discrete activities that can beexamined in isolation from one another.1

The divergence between this parsing of knowledge and the chal-lenges we face is becoming visible everywhere, but it is especially ev-ident within geology. A complex set of forcespopulation growth,shifting cultural consciousness, advances in science and technology,and ever more pressing environmental issueshave made geologya prime site for the challenging of our accustomed categories ofthought. Defying categories, geologic insights today often functionsimultaneously as scientific statements, political truths, and poeticand metaphysical incantations.

Geo-Logic explores this disruption of the categories of our intel-lectual and institutional lives. It is an ontological investigation withpractical import. The problems facing society today require us to

2 Geo-Logic

question the intellectual taxonomy that has trained us to think evermore deeply within the same old ruts. Reordering the categories ofour thinking and our institutionseven more, learning to thinkacross categorieswill help us create new conceptual and socialspaces for addressing our environmental challenges.

Consider the term geology. Once identified exclusively withthe study of the solid Earth, the term today has lost ground toEarth sciences. The latter expression is meant to highlight theneed for an integrated study of air, water, soil, rock, ice, and biota. Ofcourse, few researchers in the Earth sciences address all of theseconcerns, but they all understand that the logic of their research re-quires them to go beyond the study of the solid Earth. Whether weare speaking of carbon cycles or the health of an estuary, the envi-ronment is an interrelated whole whose processes flow across disci-plinary boundaries. Life becomes lithic (e.g., limestone), whiletectonics influences patterns of evolution. To put the point differ-ently, the terms Earth sciences and environmental sciences todayrepresent a distinction without a difference. The fields have growntogethereven if the former term still carries the tinge of its histor-ical focus on resource exploitation. Our understanding of the Earthmust be holistic across both space and time.

Clearly we must welcome this new, larger, Earth-scientific senseof the discipline; but we should hold on to, rather than discard, theolder term. For geology remains the more fundamental expression.Our relationship to the Earth cannot be encompassed by sciencealone: geology opens up possibilities that an exclusively scientificapproach to the Earth closes off. In ancient Greek, G or Gaiaevoked the rich, earthy soil that sustains life; Mother Earth, thesheltering source and tomb of life; and ones patria or homeland. Ourenvironmental questions require an account of the Earth that ac-knowledges all of these dimensions, an integrated logos of Gaia, anaccount of the planet that is our home.2

The meaning of the three terms introduced abovegeopoetry,geopolitics, and geotheologywill become clearer as the argumentproceeds; but perhaps some confusion will be avoided if I offer a briefaccount here. Geopoetry underscores the claim that the reasoningprocess within field sciences like geology shares as many character-istics with the humanities as with the laboratory sciences.3 Geolo-gists are poet semioticians, treating rock formations as stony verse,conjuring past worlds from the layers of an outcrop.

By geopolitics I do not mean the fact that politics have be-come international in scope, but rather that geology today lies at

Introduction 3

the center of political concerns, whether the issue is climate change,endangered species, natural resources, or the siting of roads andlandfills. In response, Earth scientists are being drawn into new so-cial roles. Unsettling our traditional understanding of their respon-sibilities, scientists must develop skillful means for navigating therealms of politics and culture.

And by geotheology I wish to emphasize that while environ-mental ethics has dominated discussions of environmental value,our relation to the Earth involves much more than questions ofrights and obligations. Our response to nature includes the recogni-tion that nature makes claims upon us. Our attraction to nature isin many cases grounded in a sense of awe and reverence before thetremendous forces and mysterious processes that have formed ourworld. If we wish to fully describe our interests concerning nature,we must retrieve the marginalized language of metaphysics andtheology.

The Earth supports and sustains us, nourishes our children, re-ceives our dead, and is the source of all our productions. Under-standing our relationship to the Earth in all its facets is one ofhumanitys most basic challenges. Used in this more original sense,geology belongs as much to culture as to nature, and should be asdeeply rooted in the humanities and in our public lives as in the sci-ences. To effectively grapple with our environmental challenges wemust cross the boundaries that have separated the humanistic andscientific parts of geology; for while scientific facts concerning thestate of our environment are crucial, facts alone cannot motivate thecultural changes that need to occur. Our environmental crises arefundamentally philosophical and spiritual in nature, and are morelikely to be exacerbated than cured through the exclusive pursuit ofEarth science. Reordering geology in these ways will help us createthe social and political spaces where researchers and the largercommunity can come together to address the future habitability ofour planet.

II.

Geo-Logic does not only aim to redefine the conceptual space ofthe Earth sciences. This argument also seeks to redirect the human-ities by bringing philosophy and the humanities into the field.

To see the opportunity facing us, consider Kai N. Lees Compassand Gyroscope.4 Lee is concerned with helping society develop the

4 Geo-Logic

skills and institutions needed to reconcile economic growth, envi-ronmental justice, and ecological sustainability. Framing his discus-sion in terms of the close of the age of Columbus and the recognitionof natural limits to societys activities, Lees argument relies uponthe metaphors of compass and gyroscope. His compass highlightsthe role of the sciences in providing us with reliable knowledgeabout the environmental effects of public policy decisions. His gyro-scope emphasizes how democratic institutions stabilize society bylimiting conflicts within the confines of open political debate. ForLee, the compass of science and the gyroscope of democratic debateare the two navigational aids we need to chart an environmentallysustainable future.

We must, however, add a missing third term to this debatephilosophy, or more generally, the disciplines of the humanities.5 Leerightly emphasizes the fundamental roles of science and democraticdebate in mapping a sustainable future. But without the decisivecontributions of the humanities our other efforts will be abortive. Wecan see why by revisiting Lees metaphors. A compass can provide uswith a sense of orientation; but it cannot tell us what our directionshould be. Similarly, for open political debate to create the gyro-scopic balance needed for societal stability, it must be supplementedby the inculcation of public virtues. The humanities provide a con-text for understanding the facts of science, and order and deepenpublic conversation through their hard-won wisdom.

The humanities makeor at least, could makedecisive con-tributions to both science and society. Scientists do science; it is notthe task of scientistsat least, it is not their primary responsibil-ityto provide an epistemological and political analysis of whatthey have uncovered, or an account of the metaphysical implica-tions of their work. Understanding how lab results or computermodels play out in the endlessly complex, open-ended world we livein is (or should be) the work of philosophers, historians, and socialcritics. Philosophy in particular is well suited for uniting the in-sights of science with economic, political, ethical, aesthetic, andreligious perspectives.

A similar point applies to the gyroscope of political debate. Astable democracy requires a populace that is educated in demo-cratic virtuesopen-mindedness, respect for evidential reasoning,and a commitment to pluralismand that appreciates the meta-physical intuitions of different individuals. Statecraft requiressoulscraft: the traditional concern of the humanities with the culti-vation of the soulwhat the Germans call Bildung, the moral and

Introduction 5

aesthetic instruction that forms the basis of a mature individualis essential for tempering political debates. The point of public dis-course is not merely to proclaim ones views, but rather tounderstand and be educated by the views of others. The ancientsunderstood this conversational give-and-take, based in a commoncommitment to fair, free-spirited dialogue, as one of the centralways that rationality expresses itself in our lives.

Some will suggest that the roles I give to the humanities havealready been assignedto the social sciences. The social sciencescontribute a great deal to society, and to environmental questions inparticular, but the substitution of the social sciences for what are es-sentially humanistic concerns has also caused much mischief. As thename implies, the social sciences are based upon the assumptionthat we can take a scientificthat is, an objective, value-free, andquantitativeapproach to human affairs. And indeed we can. Butdoing so to the point of excluding the approaches of the humanitiesimpoverishes both our personal and political lives. The social sci-ences view values in the same way that economics treats consumerpreferences: as brute facts to be described, but not to be evaluated interms of their worthiness, or as liable to reformation through Bil-dung. But this dodges the essential point: some values are betterthan others.6 The upshot is that the social sciences have taught us totreat our metaphysical, aesthetic, and theological concerns as curi-ous cultural artifacts rather than as possibly true accounts of reality.

For an example of the contribution that the humanities canmake to societyand of the remarkable ways that geology and phi-losophy can play off of one anotherconsider Stephen Pynes Howthe Canyon Became Grand. Pyne recounts how Western culture ei-ther ignored the Grand Canyon, or saw it as a monstrosity, for hun-dreds of years after its discovery. Appreciation of the Grand Canyonemerged from the confluence of two nineteenth-century streams ofthought: the nascent science of geology and the aesthetics of the sub-lime. Moreover, Pyne notes that the creation of a geophilosophy wasthe work of members of the intelligentsiapolymaths such asClarence Dutton, who married geology, aesthetics, and natural phi-losophy in order to portray the wonders of the West, and John Wes-ley Powell, who understood that geology and politics must becombined if democracy was to flourish west of the one-hundredthmeridian. Taking works such as the paintings of Thomas Moran toheart, American culture awakened to a unique natural landscape.7

Lees appeal to compass and gyroscope expresses the modernpresumption that the solution to our problems lies in our devising

6 Geo-Logic

ever more artful tools. But rather than more instruments, the chal-lenges we face require reflection and a patient commitment to con-versation. Science concerns itself with facts rather than meanings;and (despite the libertarian biases of our culture) democratic de-bate must be tempered by the wisdom embodied within the hu-manities. We will grapple effectively with the challenges wefaceenvironmental or otherwiseonly by marrying the wisdomof the humanities to the insights of science and the deliberations ofdemocratic debate.

III.

As they are currently constituted, the humanities are ill-pre-pared to play a substantial role in society. A passage at the begin-ning of Kants Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) putsthe problem in a historical light:

All industries, crafts, and arts have gained by the division oflabor, viz., one man does not do everything, but each con-fines himself to a certain kind of work that is distinguishedfrom all other kinds by the treatment it requires, so that thework may be done with the highest perfection and the great-est ease. Where work is not so distinguished and divided,where everyone is a jack of all trades, there industry re-mains sunk in the greatest barbarism. Whether or not purephilosophy in all its parts requires its own special manmight well be in itself a subject worthy of consideration.Would not the whole of this learned industry be better off ifthose who are accustomed, as the public taste demands, topurvey a mixture of the empirical and the rational in allsorts of proportions unknown even to themselves and whostyle themselves independent thinkers, while giving thename of hair-splitters to those who apply themselves to thepurely rational part, were to be given warning about pursu-ing simultaneously two jobs which are quite different intheir technique, and each of which perhaps requires a spe-cial talent that when combined with the other talent pro-duces nothing but bungling?8

Kant expresses the vision that has dominated our intellectual laborssince the mid-nineteenth century: Knowledge, including philosophic

Introduction 7

and humanistic knowledge, consists of a series of domains best leftto specialists. Kant accomplished this shift in philosophy via histranscendental turn: rather than striving to identify the good, thetrue, and the beautiful, philosophy would now focus on the condi-tions of the possibility of moral, epistemological, or aesthetic claims.Thus in the Grundlegung, Kant did not investigate whether a givenact was moral, but rather sought to identify the proper criteria formoral judgments overall (i.e., the categorical imperative). Ratherthan a reflection upon the nature of the good life, philosophy becameprofessionalized, a domain governed by experts divorced from publicdiscourse.

This attitude has resulted in whole series of research pro-grams that have been in many ways quite remarkable. But it hasalso created the current chasms between humanities and society atlarge. As a consequence, society has lost the very vocabulary formaking reasoned judgments about the good, the true, and thebeautiful. Moreover, specialization within the humanities has ledto systematic intellectual incoherence: lacking anyone tasked withoffering a vision of the whole, we are left with experts unable tocommunicate with one another, or to frame their insights in wayspertinent to the public.

The aping of scientific methodology by the humanities hasbeen a critical error. The analytic research project of breakingeverything down to its smallest part, while reasonable within thesciences, has been toxic within the humanities. In form, the expec-tations surrounding a Ph.D. in philosophy today are no differentfrom those in the sciences: a narrow investigation adding anotherdiminutive brick to the tower forming the Babel of Knowledge.Such specialization contradicts the spirit of the humanities, disci-plines that by their very nature are synoptic and global in scope.There will always be room within the humanities for the special-ists monograph; but the heart of the humanities lies in the work ofthe inspired generalist who labors to make a useful synopsis of is-sues of broad concern.9

How are philosophy and the humanities linked to the lives ofour communities? Educators in business, engineering, and the sci-ences all have ready answers to the question of societal relevance,but the humanities rely on repeating traditional justifications oftheir place in the world. Humanists often reply with a question,asking whether everything in life must have a practical outcome.Or they cite the civilizing effect of great literature and the roleplayed by history and philosophy in cultivating the human spirit.

8 Geo-Logic

These answers point toward matters that are both true and impor-tant, but they do little to address the question of why society shouldsupport professors to engage in recondite research on Wordsworthor Kant.

This question can be answered, for the societal challenges weface today are fundamentally humanistic in character, involvingquestions of history, beauty, personal identity, the sacred, the em-plotting of scientific insights, and our response to the inevitablelimits of knowledge and planning. Is nature, for instance, bestunderstood as merely the raw material of our manufacturingprocesses? Are there reasons other than prudence for restrainingour constantly expanding consumer lifestyle? And how do we bal-ance the imperatives of expertise and democracy? The humanitieshave shown a laudable concern with such questions: the problemswe face are profound, and nuanced reflection is absolutely neces-sary. But the humanities are guilty of not complementing these in-vestigations with an account of their pertinence to our commonlives. Philosophy is, by its very nature, an exercise in abstraction.This fact should be praised rather than apologized for; the skill ofdiscerning the significant quality within a thousand details lies atthe heart of thinking. But even as it embraces the most far-flungabstraction, philosophy must simultaneously retain a regard for thepersonal or social forces that animate it.

At least since Descartess Discourse (1637), philosophy hasprided itself on examining every presumption and prejudice; butboth within and outside the academy we find an unquestioned con-sensus: philosophers spend their time teaching and writing in theuniversity. Whether coming from the analytic or continental schoolof philosophy, philosophers perform the same set of tasks: introduc-ing nonmajors to subjects such as ethics, and training majors in thetraditional disciplinary domains such as logic, the philosophy of sci-ence, and political philosophy. Most of these philosophy majors willmove on to other fields, often the law, but for those who go on tograduate school, their future is laid out before them: they willbecome the next generations professors of philosophy.

In addition to teaching, contemporary philosophers engage inresearch that issues in the production of articles and books. With theexception of a few textbooks, philosophical writings consist of pro-fessional productions written for experts in the various philosophicalsubfields of specialization. As for writings meant to reach the popu-lace, whether the general public or those in other parts of the knowl-edge industry, very few philosophers make the attempt. Books like

Introduction 9

Alasdair MacIntyres After Virtue are exceptions that prove the rule.Such works are viewed by academics, when they are considered atall, as a sign of a lack of philosophical seriousness.

The upshot of these efforts is a discipline that produces work ofgreat intellectual quality and little relevance to the larger world. Itdoes not seem to have occurred to many within either philosophy orsociety that philosophers could be doing something other than ex-plaining books and writing scholarly articles within the academy.But is this the onlyor bestway to do philosophy? Or can philoso-phers, as philosophers, participate in the political sphere, work ingovernment or business, build a cabin, or go on a hike? That is, canwe not merely apply the insights of philosophy to these activities,but engage in these activities as philosophy? Is philosophy necessar-ily tied to logos in the sense of words, as Aristotle claimed in under-standing truth as a function of language, residing in the truth orfalsity of statements about the world? Or might there be a form oflogos and truth that is incarnate, an embodied philosophy throughwhich one enacts philosophy within the community or the naturalworld? Could there be a philosophyand by extension, a humani-tiesthat, without becoming superficially pragmatic, takes on thejuxtaposition of Aristotle and climate change, or semiotic theory andgeologic fieldwork, in order to see what the effects are on both?

Geo-Logic treats philosophy (and by extension, the humanities)as a practice as well as a linguistic activity. Practice is here meantin the Buddhist sensethat wisdom cannot be wisdom if it only con-sists of a set of propositions. Wisdom must also be embodied, mani-festing itself personally and socially in a daily performance. Indeed,until philosophy becomes a practice we can have little confidence ina philosophers conclusions. Practicing philosophy means somethingmore than applying the established insights of philosophy to ourlives; we must approach philosophy as a yogaa disciplined and em-bodied way of being in the world that in turn influences our philo-sophical propositions. The point is not to dismiss philosophysdiscursive element, but to view the linguistic and the embodied, en-gaged aspects of philosophy as complementary. In this view of phi-losophy, philosophers would spend roughly equal amounts of timeout in the field and in teaching and writing. The preamble ofthought, the transition through which it passes from the uncon-scious to the conscious, is action.10

Consider the way that Buddhism and Hinduism treat thesequestions. For all their differences (e.g., on the nature of the self,

10 Geo-Logic

God, and the cosmos) Buddhist practice and Hindu yogic techniquesshare a vision largely missing from Western philosophy: both em-phasize the unity of our physical and contemplative lives and thepractical and embodied nature of wisdom. Buddhism eschews specu-lation for an insistence upon the lived aspects of wisdom. The Japa-nese tradition of Buddhism especially focuses on the relation toeveryday life through a set of do or Ways. Skills such as archery,flower arrangement, tea making, and fencing are all treated as occa-sions for gaining insight. Zen koans are based upon the belief thatreason is an inadequate vehicle for expressing truth: a koan can besolved only through inspiration or action. Possibly the most rigorousof the Ways is judo, which trains the entire body rather than focus-ing on a particular technique. But even household activities such aswashing the dishes and sweeping the floor are occasions for insight.If a Zen student is sufficiently alive, he can practice the Way in thesimplest activities of daily life.11

Similarly, yoga is a five-thousand-year-old Indian philosophical-religious system designed to unite the body, mind, and spirit. Likethe word religion, yoga means to tie or bind together: yoga isSanskrit for yoke or union. Westerners think of yoga in terms ofits physical aspect, hatha yoga, in which adepts practice a set ofasanas or postures. Within the Hindu tradition, however, physicaltraining and meditation are two aspects of one process. Traditionalyoga emphasizes an eightfold system of spiritual development in-cluding ethical disciplines (yama and niyama, restraints and obser-vances), postures, breathing exercises, control of the senses,concentration, meditation, and absorption.

To suggest that Western philosophy, and more generally thehumanities, be treated as a yoga implies that the theoretical andthe practical be yoked in both our personal and public lives. Ratherthan the scholars study, the native home of philosophy lies in thecrafts we master: violin, pottery, and dance; scientific fieldwork,salesmanship, and political deal making; and, yes, teaching, writ-ing, and research. Mindful of the practice and care needed to de-velop such skills, craftspeople of different skills are able torecognize one another. Great skill in any craft requires that wesubordinate our desires to the work before us. Dedicating oneself toa craft is the sine qua non of freedom. Such craft work is implicitphilosophy. Through practicing and eventually mastering suchcrafts, we create an experiential complement to philosophys lin-guistic aspect.

Introduction 11

IV.

In addition to the projects of rethinking the nature and roles ofgeology and philosophy in society, a third point needs emphasis here:Geo-Logic is an essay in topical thinking.

Topical thinking begins from both natural and geographical lo-cationsplaces in the literal sense of the wordand from per-sonal and social circumstances, the metaphorical sense of placeimplicit when we ask someone, Tell me where youre comingfrom. Imagine you are on a trip to Morocco. Turning a corner inMarrakech, you glimpse a picturesque gathering of Muslimwomen. You lift the camera to capture the scene, and the group ex-plodes: heads duck, backs turn, and hands raise before faces. Topi-cal thinking begins from places like this, launched from a personalanecdote or a telling example, and acknowledging the circum-stances that motivate thinking. From such beginnings, topicalthinking follows a nomadic path that traces the implicit logic of aproblem wherever it leads: perhaps from politics to sociology, thento economics, ethics, aesthetics, and theology, and finally backagain to politics. From the experience of picture taking in Morocco,for instance, one might be led to ask how cameras enframe and ob-jectify others, or to investigate the politics of gender, or to interro-gate the role of tourism in intercultural communicationor fromone to another of these problems.

Topical thinking organizes knowledge differently from the ap-proach that governs academia, where research is structured interms of the logical space of disciplines (chemistry, history, and thelike). Topical thinking does not, however, abandon the disciplinarystructure that defines knowledge today. A disciplinary approach toknowledge is not unreasonable, but it is partial. It needs to be com-plemented by an approach that remembers that our problems arealways extra-disciplinary in nature. Amedical patient, for instance,consists of something more than a series of disciplines (or sys-tems: cardiac, pulmonary, digestive, and so on) worked on by med-ical professionals. As necessary as an understanding of thesedifferent systems is for treating a patient, medical practice sufferswhen it loses sight of the fact that it is a transdisciplinary entity(namely, a person) that is being treated. Likewise, our environmen-tal problems resist simple division into the categories of environ-mental science, economics, and ethics. To confront these problemseffectively we must understand how these categories relate andflow into one another at a particular location. Topical thinking is a

12 Geo-Logic

means for tracing the ontological disruptions that occur when weattend closely to a problem.

Granted, it makes sense to divide a complex issue into parts,simplifying a problem in order to get a better hold of it. But if wenever aim for a sense of the whole, seeking to understand the rela-tion between and across the disciplines, we will be left with system-atic incoherence: experts misunderstanding one another, and none ofthese experts able to converse with the public. For example, theUnited States government has spent more than a decade, and over4 billion dollars, in a site characterization of Yucca Mountain,Nevada, in order to certify it as a safe repository for seventy thou-sand tons of the nations civilian nuclear waste. Congress has man-dated that the site must be confirmed safe for the next ten thousandyears. Visit Yucca Mountain (a hundred miles north of Las Vegas)and climb down into Trench 14, a place notorious for the controver-sies it has generated. Are the calcite deposits found in Trench 14 me-teoric, the result of rainwater percolating down from the surface? Orare they signs of hydraulic pumping, by which ground water hasbeen forced up from below? If the latter is true, then this locationhas been affected by wide fluctuations of the water table, raising thepossibility that the canisters of nuclear waste could be flooded, caus-ing the nuclear waste to explode.12 As one talks with governmenthydrologists, the terms of the debate begin to shift: from the intrica-cies of data interpretation, to competing hydrological models andcomputer techniques (each implying radically different accounts ofthe repositorys future), to the relation between the state of Nevadaand the federal government, to scientists ethical obligations to in-form the public, to our own responsibilities to future generations.The disciplines simplifyand falsifythe challenge of Yucca Moun-tain by beginning with the presumption that these questions can bedealt with independently of one another.

Over the last two decades the philosopher Alphonso Lingis hasbeen perhaps the foremost representative of a topical approach tothinking. In a series of works, Lingis has tested the bounds of ab-stract academic discourse, juxtaposing existential encounters withinsights mined from the history of philosophy.13 While Lingiss mainconcern has been the confrontation with foreign cultures rather thanwith the natural world, his work has emphasizedmore throughexample than argumentthat thinking must be seen as a responseto, rather than the delimiter of, experience. Like Lingisswork, Geo-Logic comes to these questions from the perspective of nineteenth-and twentieth-century continental philosophy, in particular the

Introduction 13

existential and hermeneutic perspectives of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Nonetheless, how I use these thinkers may be as foreign tocontinental philosophers as to those with an analytic background inphilosophy.

Given this topical approach, it is reasonable to offer a short ac-count of my own place that led to the present study. It was thephilosophic attractions of geology that led to my resigning a facultyposition in philosophy to return for a masters degree. The pointwas not to approach the Earth sciences as a subspecies of the phi-losophy of science. Rather, I hoped to develop a scientifically in-formed phenomenology of the Earth that united geologic knowledgewith philosophic insight to help us understand how to live on Earth.I had already spent some time in the field with geologists, and hadbeen struck by how their thinking was affected by walking the landand interpreting its signs. Despite their invariably positivistic de-scriptions of the reasoning process within geologic fieldwork, Ifound that geologists practiced a type of earthbound phenomenol-ogy rather than an activity best described by the covering laws ofthe philosophy of science.

My intentions, then, were focused on developing a phenomenol-ogy of geology. But I soon discovered that geology as a discipline anda social institution was in a state of flux. I also discovered that themotivations of my fellow graduate students were markedly differentfrom what I had imagined. Few of them pursued their course workfor financial reasonsa point obvious to anyone familiar with thejob market in the Earth sciences. And while I found the geopoetic as-pects of their science everywhere within their laborsimaginingworlds outside the compass of anyones experiencethis topic led adecidedly subterranean existence. Not only were the perspectives ofphilosophy and the humanities unfamiliar to them, they were alsohighly suspect. For a field suffering its own identity crisiscuts infunding and a fear that, in the words of the physicist Luis Alvarez,fields such as paleontology may be nothing more than a type ofstamp collectingthe last thing geologists needed was someone todraw out the connections between geology and the humanities.14

Better to emphasize the rigorous nature of the field, and geologysties to geochemistry and geophysics.

I found, however, that our interests intersected when they werereframed in terms of epistemology and politics. Scientists are peoplewho go to great lengths to make sense of things. This drive takes adistinctive form within the Earth sciences, where much of the evi-dence is lost, and what remains is bent, warped, baked, or dismem-

14 Geo-Logic

bered. To be a field geologist, one must positively delight in conun-drums, much as Sherlock Holmes enjoyed the complexities of hisprofession. Whats more, Earth scientists commonly combine theirfascination with epistemological puzzles with serious ethical and po-litical concerns. Typically individuals with a profound feeling for na-ture (although the forms of this feeling vary widely), they oftenchampion conservationist and/or preservationist stances toward thenatural world.

Under the influence of my new colleagues, I soon found myselffocusing upon the epistemological and institutional as well as thephenomenological and philosophical aspects of the Earth sciences.Indeed, a new thought came to the fore: we need to understand howall the domains of the humanitiesepistemology and ethics, aes-thetics and politics, metaphysics and theologymanifest themselvesin the study of the Earth. My goal at the outset was to develop a ge-ologically informed environmental ethics and a phenomenology ofthe Earth. But by the time I finished my degree, the goal had be-come to provide an ontology of the Earth sciences: to describe howthe various domains of knowledge (science, ethics, politics, aesthet-ics, metaphysics, and theology) are revealed within the discipline,and how these domains relate to one another in various environ-mental controversies.

This ontological reevaluation of geology is being driven by themost pragmatic of conditions. Both natural and cultural forces arechanging the role of the Earth/environmental sciences in society,forcing the discipline to take on political responsibilities markedlydifferent from those of its own earlier history, as well as from mostother sciences. Whatever might be a scientists private motivations,the overall role of science in culture has long been as an enablerincreasing the range of our power and control through the develop-ment of science-based technological development. This explains themassive federal support of science (in 2000, around 40 billion dollarsfor funding of non-defense-related science), and reflects our societysdesire for an ever expanding power over nature.

In its early years, geology fit within this frameworkif not en-tirely comfortably. As geology emerged as a separate discipline in theearly nineteenth-century, the field straddled two roles: its discoveryof the history of life profoundly affected how we understand ourplace in the cosmos, while it also served as a handmaiden to indus-trial development, providing raw materials for the industrial ma-chine.15 Certainly both of these roles continue todayalthough theformer, metaphysical issue is too often reduced to stale debates over

Introduction 15

scientific creationism. But I wish to emphasize a third role that iscoming to the fore: the Earth sciences as herald of local and plane-tary thresholds. The Earth sciences are becoming the sciences oflimit, adding a cautionary note to our plans and ambitions. It is asimple point, but one that has taken us a long time to acknowledge:the world is not infinite. It is foolhardy to assume that we can end-lessly exchange cultural for natural capital, escaping from everyproblem of scarcity or pollution via the development of new scientificand technological insights. Moreover, this question of scarcity is it-self a prime example of the transdisciplinary nature of the Earth/environmental sciences. The scarcity we are facing will not be a mat-ter of running up against purely physical boundaries. Scarcity in thetwenty-first century will combine physical limits with a complexrange of cultural factors such as economics, politics (i.e., questions ofjustice), aesthetics (quality-of-life issues), and theology (a sense ofthe sacred). In this third role, the Earth sciences will function as anearly warning system for geo-ecological calamitiesas the eyes andears of the body politic. This new role will put especially strong pres-sure upon the Earth sciences to become a bridge discipline spanningthe sciences and the humanities.

V.

To chart this ontological disruption, Geo-Logic begins from threeplaces or topoi: (1) the political controversies surrounding acid minedrainage (chapters 2 and 3); (2) the nature of scientific research as itis conducted in the field (chapters 4, 5, and 6); and (3) the challengesfacing public Earth scientists as they seek to serve the needs of com-munities (chapters 7 and 8). In each of these locations I explore howreconfiguring the disciplines of the Earth sciences and philosophycasts new light on our environmental challenges. My claim isstraightforward: we are not making good use of our intellectual re-sources, in large part because of the disciplinary presumptions thatdominate the production of knowledge today. Addressing societalproblems will require a type of transdisciplinarity that moves bothhorizontally (across the disciplines) and vertically (between intellec-tual culture and society at large). To gain a purchase on our envi-ronmental problems requires that we break down the divideseparating the natural and cultural aspects of geology, and that wemake philosophy into a cultural practice as well as a linguisticevent. Rewriting the disciplines of the Earth/environmental sciences

16 Geo-Logic

and philosophy will provide communities with new resources forcreating an environmentally sustainable future.

Geo-Logic starts with a hike in the San Juan Mountains ofsouthwest Colorado. Reconceiving the Earth sciences and philoso-phy begins at ten thousand feet, with the problem of acid minedrainage. Hard rock minings legacy is deeply ambiguous, leaving uswith, on the one hand, picturesque mine works, and, on the other,dead streams and a scarred landscape. The controversy over acidmine drainage is labyrinthine. It leads us to questions that are atturns scientific, political, metaphysical, aesthetic, and even theolog-ical in nature. But we shall find our way out of our environmentalproblems only by exploring each of these passages in all their multi-disciplinary variety.

The argument then turns to an investigation of geologys dis-tinctive epistemological status. Epistemologyi.e., the theory ofknowledgeseems an arcane subject; but our sense of what countsas real knowledge circumscribes our social and political conversa-tions. The absence of anything like a philosophy of field science istelling, for field-based sciences such as geology offer a better accountthan do the laboratory sciences of both the power and limits of sci-ence for addressing societal problems. Scientific reasoning is still toooften seen as a mechanical process that provides us with authorita-tive, even infallible answersa misrepresentation that damagesboth science and society. Indeed, with the rise of computer simula-tions, the positivist spirit, once thought slain, is again in ascen-dance. In contrast, the reasoning process typified by scientificfieldwork offers an account of reasoning that is more applicable tolifes uncertainties. Seldom possessing all the knowledge we wouldlike, we fill in the gaps in our knowledge with interpretation andreasonable assumptions that we hope will someday be confirmed.Field-based sciences exemplify this process, mirroring the complexi-ties we face in our personal and political lives.

Third, Geo-Logic moves into the halls and offices of publicEarth-science agencies in search of a political philosophy of science.The philosophy of science and political theory have long been con-sidered disjunct domains. Public science agencies challenge this di-vorce, for they exist to serve the common good, to further societalvalues such as freedom, justice, and community. Agencies such asthe U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the National Aeronautics andSpace Administration (NASA), and the Geological Survey ofCanada (GSC) inhabit a space that is at once scientific and political.Yet there is, to date, no political philosophy of public science.

Introduction 17

The USGS and the GSC are organizations in transition: much oftheir traditional work (e.g., geologic and topographic mapping) isending, and critics ask why private industry cannot take over thefunctions that remain.16 This question itself reveals the gap in ourcultures thinking about the nature of the public realm, for publicscience agencies have a critical role to play in an era of environmen-tal limits. Nevertheless, realizing this opportunity will require thatagencies such as the USGS and the GSC embrace a wider definitionof scientific responsibilityone that charges them with the task ofunderstanding and responding to community values in addition totheir traditional commitment to scientific excellence. Exploring thepublic or political responsibilities of these institutions provides uswith a powerful example of how we can create new conceptual andpolitical spaces, freeing both science and society from epistemologi-cal prejudices that have stymied our cultures conversation.

We begin by turning to a place where the full range of our geo-logical concerns is manifest: the controversies surrounding acidmine drainage.

18 Geo-Logic

2ACID MINE PHILOSOPHY

I.

The San Juans are possibly the most beautiful mountains in Col-orado. To see for yourself, take the trail up to Ice Lakes Basin. Bluespruce and quaking aspen cover the flanks of the mountains that riseto snow-topped peaks. Naturally occurring mineral oxides paint therocky slopes above tree line yellow and red, while the trees them-selves sprout from pale limestones, ruddy sandstones, ancient lavaflows, and beds of welded volcanic ash. Ridge lines stand jaggedagainst the sky: rather than eroding like granite, which peels like thelayers of an onion, the sedimentary rocks of the San Juans breakalong or across bedding planes, all edges and sharp angles. Ancientglaciers have also left their mark: eighteen thousand years ago, thestreams of ice reached deep down the valleys of the San Juans, carv-ing grand, U-shaped troughs along the Animas, the San Juan, andthe San Miguel Rivers. Still relatively unvisited, these mountainstoday contain three wilderness areas. If they were an hour from Den-ver the San Juans would be a national park.

Its all the more striking, then, when the trail turns and you findan awful mess. Dilapidated mine works, rotten timbers askew, blockpart of a gaping black portal. Jumbled masses of waste rock dumpedfrom the mine entrance have slid down the mountainside to IceLakes Creek. Abandoned motors, twisted pipes, and corrugated sheetmetal rust in the sun. Thick rivulets of orange gunk leak from themine and run downhill to the creek, contaminating rainwater andsnowmelt with sulfuric acid and a variety of heavy metalszinc, cop-per, cadmium, lead, iron, aluminum. In many of the streams of theSan Juans, low pH and toxic metals have killed all the fish, both di-rectly by their toxicity and indirectly by destroying the habitats ofinsects that they feed upon (GL:CH2).

19

The problem is called acid mine drainageshorthand for con-cerns with abandoned mine lands and the streams that run acrossthem. Like many of our environmental problems, acid mine drainagehas sparked intense debate. In towns like Silverton, Colorado, thecontroversy is over whether these areas should be restored. But towhat standard, and at whose cost? The debate rages in national andglobal venues, but perhaps most fiercely in the American West,where acid mine drainage is the single greatest water quality prob-lem. It is a debate with a wide range of interested parties. Stake-holders in this dispute include landowners and local officials,environmental organizations and mining companies, federal agenciesand lawyers, scientists, tourists, and local businessmen.

There is, of course, a standard way to settle such disputesthrough the artful combination of science and public policy. Scienceprovides the facts needed for decision-making, and the law repre-sents the will of the people: Lees compass and gyroscope. But to ad-equately address our environmental problems we need more thangood science and democratic policy. We also need philosophy.

For many, the word philosophy summons up an image ofRodins Thinker: a naked man, fist to chin, turning in upon himselfin rapt reflection. Or perhaps of Socrates in a toga, distracting peo-ple from their daily tasks by asking a series of pointless questions.But philosophy worthy of its name (philos-sophia, the love of wis-dom) begins on the ground, scrambling over scree, poking around injust such unsightly holes as the abandoned mines in the San Juans.In its best dress, philosophy wears hiking boots and carries a walk-ing stick. It wanders nature trails that lead into the heart of ourcultural wildernesses and the deeper, psychic sources of our envi-ronmental problems.

Philosophy can play two critical roles in environmental contro-versies like acid mine drainage. First, it can provide an account ofthe specifically philosophic aspects of our environmental problems,the ethical, aesthetic, epistemological, metaphysical, and theologicaldimensions that we must acknowledge before we can solve. These di-mensions are more central to our concerns with the environmentthan we often acknowledge: in many cases, the law and scientificdata are stalking horses disguising the fundamentally philosophicnature of our concerns.

Second, philosophy can offer a synopsis of how the various disci-plines relate within a given problem. Questions such as acid minedrainage refuse to follow strict disciplinary boundaries. They requirea logic that is willing to track an argument across all the domains of

20 Geo-Logic

knowledge: hydrology, chemistry, public policy, politics, aesthetics,metaphysics, and theology. Neither is the relationship between thesedifferent domains static: when we consider a problem, there is aninner movement to the topic that drives our thinking from one disci-pline to the next. Hegel called this movement dialectic: thinking ad-vances through our recognition of the inadequacy of the currentformulation of a problem. For Hegel, these contradictions within ourthinking drive us toward a wider, richer, more synthetic under-standing of the problem. This movement of thought is at the sametime a movement in the world, for the challenges we faceenviron-mental or otherwiseoverflow every category. Since the logos of theworld is dynamic and embodied, our thinking must follow the inter-nal logic of the issue at hand.1

It is, of course, impossible to give a complete account of a prob-lem such as acid mine drainage. Indeed, it will become clear that weare unable to give a complete account of any part of controversiessuch as this onealthough the continued narrowing of academic dis-ciplines suggests that dreams of mastery through expertise live on.Rather than a complete account, the goal here is to provide a frac-tured narrative of the acid mine drainage controversy. Like a cubistpainting (e.g., Georges Braques Candlestick and Playing Cards on aTable, GL:CH2), our goal should be to show the same object simulta-neously from several points of view. But to a greater degree than insome cubist works, one hopes a recognizable picture emerges, madeup of sets of angles, none of which dominates all the others.

By addressing these two needs, philosophy can bring to our en-vironmental problems what we sorely lack: a sense of the whole.How do scientific truths relate to our lived experience of the world?Or the facts of economics with the less tangible but no less real con-cerns with community values and quality of life? By investigatingthe conceptual background of other disciplines the philosopher cangain high ground to survey them all. The philosopher may not pos-sess the scientific background to judge the robustness of a specifichydrological model, or the economic expertise needed to compute theper diem cost of running an abandoned mines water treatmentplant. But he or she should have the conceptual agility to help peo-ple understand the limits of mathematical models for understandingthe real world, and to contrast the cost of the treatment plantagainst the communitys political, recreational, aesthetic, and meta-physical interests.

It is precisely this role that has been missing from our environ-mental debates. In an information-rich age such as ours, when we

Acid Mine Philosophy 21

can find massive, seemingly infinite amounts of knowledge on al-most any subject, what we lackprecisely through of this glut of in-formationis a grasp of the whole. This sense of the whole waswhat logic originally meant. For the Greeks, logos did not simplymean the mechanical deduction of conclusions from premises, or thelinking of cause and effect. Rather, logos connoted the sense of ori-entation and placement that comes from knowing how things hangtogether. Our society, then, while having made a monumental effortin scientific and technical reasoning, has in this sense becomedeeply illogical.

II.

The veins may have played out, and the mines lie quietat least until the next jump in the metals market. But the legacy ofmining remains. A casual car-tour of the San Juans is enough toalert one to controversy. The San Juans contain more than fifteenhundred abandoned mines. Depending on ones opinions about aes-thetics, history, and nature, these old mines, buildings, mine dumps,and tailing ponds are either picturesque, an eyesore, or a sacrilege.What cannot be denied is that many of the streams of the upper An-imas run orange, their water, rocks, and banks stained red and cov-ered with a thick sludge. The lack of aquatic life in many stretcheshas raised concerns about how healthy it is to drink the water or eatthe fish that remainconcerns for the people of Silverton, for thosedownriver in Durango, Colorado, and Farmington, New Mexico, andfor the tourists who visit the area.

While not a household term, acid mine drainage is a problem ofwide effect. It is a serious issue in the eastern United States, wherethe source is usually coal rather than gold mining. Acid minedrainage has also caused substantial problems around the world, inplaces such as Spain, Eastern Europe, Peru, and Indonesia.2 TheAmerican West is home to several hundred thousand abandonedmines that have contaminated thousands of miles of streams. Sitesand streams needing attention may number in the thousands. TheMineral Policy Center estimates that the cleanup in the UnitedStates will total between 32 and 72 billion dollars.3

In the San Juans, questions concerning acid mine drainage cen-ter upon the upper Animas drainage in the high mountains and val-leys surrounding the town of Silverton. The confluence of threestreamsMineral Creek, Cement Creek, and the upper Animas

22 Geo-Logic

define the drainage (figure 2.1). The Animas is not commerciallynavigable, unless you count rubber rafts and kayaks.4 In its upperreaches it offers only a little fishing. It is mainly a source of beauty.The region is too high for crops, so there is no demand for irrigation;and while water quality remains a concern, Silverton has tradition-ally drawn its water supply from the Bear Creek drainage, an areathat has never been mined.


The miners came for the gold and silver, but the mountainsalso contained large amounts of base metals (e.g., iron, lead) lockedup with sulfur as sulfide compounds. Exposing the metal-bearingrock to air and water mobilizes these metals, releasing them aswell as sulfuric acid into the streams. The pH of the upper Animasis in many cases low enough to cause aquatic life to be deformed ordie. A low pH also allows the heavy metals to stay in solution, caus-ing the high concentrations of metals in the waterkilling moreaquatic life. The metals themselves have a wide variety of effectsupon the streams. Zinc, copper, and cadmium pass into the watercolumn and kill fish through their toxicity. Aluminum and iron set-tle on the stream bottom and disrupt the physical habitat of bot-tom-dwelling creatures (such as stone flies and caddis flies) thatthe fish depend upon, by filling in the spaces in the streambedwhere the creatures breed.

Despite (and in some cases, because of) all this, the San Juansare a magnet for hikers, backpackers, horseback-riders, four-wheelenthusiasts, and history buffs. The areas historical attractions in-clude a narrow-gauge railroad, ghost towns, and the old mines fromthe gold strike days. The centrally located townvillage, reallyofSilverton is ground zero for debates over the abandoned mine landsof the San Juans. Silverton rests at 9,300 feet in a deep valley wherethe sun sets early most of the year. In the winter, its populationnumbers around three hundred. Most of the shops are boarded up,with only the Avalanche Coffee Shop and the Miners Tavern regu-larly open. In the winter months avalanches sometimes close U.S.550, the only paved road into town; in 1993, Silverton had no mailservice for a week. Many of the winter inhabitants are ex-minersand people who still identify quite strongly with the mining ethos: apopular bumper sticker in town reads: Earth First. Well mine theother planets later. Silvertons population expands in the summerwith the arrival of absentee landowners and the owners of smallshops and galleries. For a few months the towns character liessomewhere between mining town and tourist trap, living off of thestream of tourists deposited daily by the Durango and SilvertonNarrow Gauge Railroad. Today the entire town is a National His-toric Landmark, the local economy surviving on its history and theareas natural beauty (GL:CH2).

Silvertons mining past remains a palpable presence. Beginningin 1871, over 9 million ounces of gold have been taken from themountains surrounding Silverton, the second-largest amount of anyregion in the state (the Cripple Creek district ranks first). Aban-

24 Geo-Logic

doned mine works are everywhere, a reminder of the glory dayswhen the town was something more than a tourist destination. Sincethe mid-1870s, Silverton has gone through a series of booms andbusts. The town is still recovering from the most recent downturn,caused by the closing of the areas last major minethe Sunnysidein 1991. Mining has always been an episodic business. Someonemakes a strike, setting off a free-for-all. Then consolidation sets inas the business is taken over by large interests. Sooner or later theore plays out, and the companies and the miners move on. Repeatedhundreds of times throughout the West, this cycle has left a legacy ofold mine works and water problems. If this cycle has now gone theway of other relicsitself a doubtful propositionit is because min-ing corporations today have largely moved offshore to countrieswhere the costs of land and labor and environmental regulations aresignificantly less than those in the United States.

The closing of the Sunnyside mine is emblematic of changesacross the entire U.S. mining industry. Like agriculture and log-ging, mining has become the domain of great corporations operatingon economies of scale; medium-sized operations like the Sunnyside,unable to compete, have fallen to the wayside. Tunnel mining hasalso given way to open pit techniques like cyanide heap leach min-ing, first developed in New Zealand around 1900. Cyanide heapleaching has made it possible to cheaply mine extraordinarilyminute quantities of precious metalsat the cost of grinding upentire mountains.

In cyanide heap leach mining, crushed rock is dumped on aplastic liner. Nozzles then spray a cyanide solution over the ore thatpulls the gold from the rock. The gold-cyanide solution drains to thebottom of the pad, where a series of drains and pipes collect it. Thegold is separated from the cyanide; the cyanide is then recycled. Ap-proximately 90 percent of the worlds gold currently comes frommines that use cyanide as their reagent (GL:CH2).

While cyanide (CNa combination of carbon and nitrogen)breaks down quickly under sunlight, cyanide heap leaching is notentirely benign. The historic Summitville mine in Colorados easternSan Juansforty miles from theAnimas drainagewas reopened in1986 as a cyanide heap leach operation. Five years later, GalacticResources, the company that ran the operation, declared bankruptcyand abandoned the site when it was discovered that the plastic padwas leaking cyanide. Summitville became an EPASuperfund site: asof 2001, U.S. taxpayers have spent 150 million dollars in attempts toremediate the area.5


III.

We began with a hikers experience of abandoned mines and aciddrainage. But the areas mining history can inspire as well as repel:

But time has passed, the sounds have faded. The men aregone. Empty buildings stand against the weather. An unse-cured door bangs mindlessly against the wooden side of abuilding once full of working machines run by men earnestlypursuing their dreams. Now, the countryside is quiet. Arras-tra Creek, its gentle flow broken by mining debris, no longertells its tales to passing miners. To be sure, an occasionallessee may come into the gulch and for a while a mine willrun. But the boom is gonethe glory years are over.6

Seeing the conditions of the upper Animas as a problem, rather thanas picturesque, requires a certain perspective, one not shared by allparties, and especially not by many of the locals. By what criteriondoes acid mine drainage count as a problem? What should count as asolution? Who decides who is responsible, and who should bear thecosts of correcting these problems?

In the thousands of pages of material on acid mine drainage, onefinds very little sustained reflection on these questions. Somehow wehave slipped from fundamental (if devilishly difficult) questions to is-sues that are more easily answered. Like the man looking for hiskeys beneath the streetlamp because thats where he can see, our cul-ture turns to science to deliver us from conflicting perspectives.

Make no mistake: a great deal of worthy scientific research onacid mine drainage has been and is being done. Science has identi-fied the sources of pH and heavy metal contamination, the toxicity ofpH and heavy metals in different species of fish and at differentstages in their life cycle, and the natural background conditions ofthese streams before mining began. But few have considered thequestion: to what degree is acid mine drainage a scientific issuerather than an economic, ethical, aesthetic, or theological one? Cer-tainly, part of the reason for this is that we know how to conduct sci-entific research and economic analysesnot to minimize thedifficulty of such workwhile our culture has largely given up onthinking through the ethical, aesthetic, and theological aspects of so-cietal controversies like acid mine drainage. It has been drummedinto our heads that these latter topics are not susceptible to rationaltreatment.

26 Geo-Logic

In fact, it is not possible to point to any one particular law, oneset of facts, one individual, or one group as having triggered the lastten years of controversy in the San Juans. Like the river itself,events flow together, combining in unpredictable ways. Issues of lawand public policy play off of individual personalities, tradition andprecedent pair off against scientific data, and supposedly objectivescientific data are found to include value judgments and assump-tions. Surrounding all this are the economic realities and primordialhuman responses to a landscape that embodies the history andideals of the people who live within and care for these mountains.Every account frames the story differently, emphasizing one per-spective while casting the others into shadow.

In the minds of many, it was the Federal Clean Water Act (CWA)that drove the acid mine controversy in the San Juans. The CWAdoes provide a useful framework for this debate, determining muchof what happens on the level of policy. Even here, however, mattersbecome sticky. Some of the locals claim that the Clean Water Actonly became applicable after a local county commissioner and othersbackpacked fish into parts of the upper Animas drainage able to sup-port fish. (Certain parts of the Clean Water Act are operative only ifa stream contains fish.) It is notable that no national and local envi-ronmental organizations demanded an investigation into acid minedrainage. Neither did the citizens of Durango and Silverton, the twotowns most likely to be affected by water problems, raise the alarm.In fact, local participation, in the form of the Animas River Stake-holders Group, was first organized by an outside organization, theState of Colorado. By their own account, local citizens and officials atfirst rejected attempts at organization. They overcame their reluc-tance only out of the fear that if they did not, state and federal agen-cies would dictate solutions from afar.

In 1972, Congress enacted the Federal Water Pollution ControlAct. The Clean Water Act supplemented this statute in 1977. Bothacts, with subsequent amendments in 1981, 1987, and 1993, areknown as the Clean Water Act or CWA.7 The Clean Water Actseeks to protect the nations navigable waters by setting water qual-ity standards for surface waters.8 It also regulates discharges intothese waters throughout the United States. The Clean Water Actcalls for the restoring and maintaining of the chemical, physical,and biological integrity of the nations waters.9 (The debate thusturns in part on how to interpret the humanistic term integrity ina given situation.) To achieve this, it requires states to establishwater quality standards for every river basin in the United States.


The CWA also establishes a permit system to regulate point-sourcedischarges (a point-source of pollution is a discrete, identifiablesource of discharge: a pipe or a ditch, for instance; non-point sourceslack a single identifiable location, for instance, agricultural andstreet runoff). Polluters are issued NPDES (National Pollutant Dis-charge Elimination System) permits that describe the stream-spe-cific water quality standards that their effluents must meet.

The Environmental Protection Agency has the final jurisdictionto enforce the Clean Water Act. However, as a matter of policy, theEPA grants states or tribal authorities primacy over the applicationand enforcement of the Clean Water Act to meet its federal stan-dards. The EPA still retains overall responsibility under the act. Itapproves all state rules and regulations, and oversees state enforce-ment. The EPA may also take independent action when it believesthat a states programs do not adequately meet federal standards.This presents a potential dilemma for companies and municipalities.Even if they satisfy state requirements, the EPA may still step inand raise the bar. More commonly, however, the EPA arm-twists bythreatening to take over a program until the state issues the rulesand regulations that the EPA wants.10

The 1972 Act called for the nation to establish interim waterquality goals by 1983. In response, the State of Colorado began mov-ing toward controlling the Animas drainage in 1979, when the Col-orado Water Quality Control Commission (the WQCC) establisheduse classifications and water standards for theAnimas. At that time,the WQCC did not even try to classify the upper reaches of the Ani-mas, because so much of it was devoid of fish and macro-inverte-brates. As noted, this changed in 1985, when locals started stockingthe local streams and lakes. Whether these streams contained fishprior to mining is a historical question difficult to answer.

In 1991 the Colorado Water Quality Control Division (a differ-ent group from the WQCC; part of the Colorado Department ofPublic Health and Environment, the CDPHE) started collectingwater quality data in the upper Animas, a program it continuedthrough 1993. According to the Colorado Center for EnvironmentalManagement (CCEM), a nonprofit organization formed by Col-orados governor Roy Romer to identify solutions to environmentalmanagement problems, this monitoring was prompted by a long-term need to better understand mine-related problems in the areaand impacts across the Basin.11 One might surmise that the ham-mer of the Clean Water Act also played a role in the decision tomonitor the streams.

28 Geo-Logic

In 1991, however, the slow grind of the bureaucratic machinerysurrounding the Clean Water Act began to intersect with a secondset of events. In that year the Sunnyside Gold Mine ceased opera-tions. Echo Bay Mines, Inc., had bought the Sunnyside Mine in1986, but after five years of losses Echo Bay closed the operation.Gold production had never reached the expected levels, and with thecontinued low price of gold, the company decided to cut its losses.12

Sunnyside Gold Corporation (now a subsidiary of Echo Bay) had areclamation plan for the mine, which called for the removal of min-ing buildings, the consolidation and revegetation of waste rock andmine tailings, and the diversion of surface water flowing from themine. But final closure required that Sunnyside submit its reclama-tion plan to the Colorado Division of Minerals and Geology.

The Colorado Division of Minerals and Geology approved theoverall reclamation plan. But Sunnyside also needed the Depart-ment of Public Health and Environment to release them from theirNPDES permit for the water that was leaving the site. The flowfrom the mine, which averaged two thousand gallons per minute,was only mildly acidic, but it did contain high levels of zinc and iron.Prior to the Clean Water Act, the water had flowed directly into Ce-ment Creek. In the 1970s, however, the previous mining operatorhad built a water treatment plant that operated under a NPDESwater discharge permit that had been issued by the CDPHE. By theearly 1990s, Sunnyside Gold was spending $500,000 dollars a yearto run this plant, which cleaned the mine water before it flowed intoCement Creek and eventually the Animas.13

As part of its mine closure plan, Sunnyside proposed to plug themine entrance (known as the American Tunnel) and discontinuetreating the water coming from the mine. Sunnyside claimed thatthe mine works would quickly fill with water, and the water withinthe tunnels and adits would reach a chemical equilibrium similar tonatural background conditions. The output from the mine portalwould stop, and any new springs that appeared across the mountainwould have the pH and metal loading natural to the region. Sunny-side would achieve its goalfinancial closure to its involvement atthe sitewith no negative effects upon the Animas drainage.

But matters did not end here. The CDPHE objected to Sunny-sides plan on two grounds. First, the treated water entering Ce-ment Creek from the mine actually improved the water quality ofthe creek, which had been affected by both natural and anthro-pogenic (human-caused) sources upstream of the mine. To plug theportal would therefore have the net effect of degrading the water


quality of Cement Creek. Second, the CDPHE had doubts aboutSunnysides plans for controlling the waters within the mine. Thenatural conditions of the mountain had been irretrievably changed:over the years, continued dynamiting had fractured and hollowedout whole sections of the mountain. Furthermore, the production ofacid drainage is greatly accelerated by exposing rocks to a mixtureof water and air. Driving hundreds of adits and tunnels into themountain had created the perfect combination of air and water toproduce acid drainage. Sunnyside Golds plan was to keep the siteentirely wet, thus turning off the production of excess aciddrainage. The CDPHE, however, was far from sure that the floodedmine would equilibrate to natural background, doubts based uponcomplex geochemical and structural considerations.14 It thereforerefused to let Sunnyside out from under its water discharge permitobligations, claiming that any new seeps that developed in the sur-rounding mountains after they plugged the American Tunnel wouldbe subject to NPDES regulations. Sunnysides response was to suein state court.

In May 1996, Sunnyside and the State of Colorado reached anout-of-court settlement. As part of this agreement, Sunnysidesigned a Consent Decree that stated that it would clean up an Alist of abandoned mined sites in the San Juans. The hope was thatin doing so, Sunnyside would remove zinc and iron dischargesroughly equal to the amounts coming from the American Tunnelprior to treatment. Sunnyside would continue to monitor zinc lev-els at a site known as A72 (on the Animas just downriver of Silver-ton) for five years after the cleanup was completed. If zinc loadingremained at or below an agreed-upon baseline level (approximately550 parts per million, ppm) over this period, the state would re-lease Sunnyside from its permit. Sunnyside could shut down itswater treatment plant and walk away, or turn the treatment plantover to someone else. If for some reason conditions did not improve,Sunnyside had a B list of abandoned sites in the San Juans thatcould be remediated.

By 1999, the remediation work on all of the orphaned sites onthe A list had been completed. To date, monitoring at A72 has notshown any improvement in zinc levels, despite the fact that Sunny-side continues to run its water treatment plant. These circum-stances have understandably left officials at Sunnyside Goldsearching for explanations.15

We will return later to the issues raised by this Consent De-cree. First, however, note how the terms of this debate have

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shifted. Acid mine drainage became a problem through legal defin-ition: the Clean Water Act drove the debate in the San Juans. Butthe terms of Sunnysides mine closure now turned, not only on thedetails and the interpretation of the Clean Water Act, but alsoupon our understanding of the chemistry, hydrology, and geology ofthe region. What would happen if the American Tunnel wasplugged? Why are there no effects from the cleanup of the Asites? We find ourselves at a site of ontological disruption, as theboundaries between our disciplinary categories begin to slip andgive way. The debate has moved from the interpretation of admin-istrative law to the interpretation of geologic facts and hydrologicalmodels. Let us, then, leave the Clean Water Act and focus our at-tention on the situation on the groundand beneath it.

IV.

Approaching the San Juan Mountains from the south, drivingup theAnimas River valley past the towns of Durango and Hermosa,one passes massive cliffs of red and buff-colored sedimentary stratathat dip to the south. Coming to the San Juans from the north pastthe towns of Ridgway and Ouray one faces a similar scene, but nowthe layers dip to the north. It is as if a titanic force had pushed thesedimentary beds from below, tilting the beds until it burst throughat what is now the center of the San Juans (GL:CH2).

This is roughly the account that geologists offer of the San JuanMountains. The sloping sedimentary strata all point upward towardthe center of the mountains, where one finds abundant evidence ofvolcanic activity: lava beds, welded ash flows, mineralized rocks, anddeeply offset faults. In the mid-Tertiary, some 35 million years ago,southwest Colorado became a volcanic landscape. The source of thelava and ash was a huge mass of magma, which was also the sourceof the minerals that someday would interest the miners. The vol-canics continued for 10 million years; from the volume of the de-posits it seems that many of the explosions dwarfed those of MountSt. Helen and Mt. Pinatubo.

Silverton itself lies in the midst of the San Juan volcanic field,at the edge of an area that geologists call the Silverton caldera. Acaldera is a volcano that has collapsed upon itself. After the explo-sive venting of its lava and ash the volcano gives way, leaving a con-cave depression. While the interpretation of the region is not childsplay, the signs suggest periodic volcanic eruptions, leaving multiple,


overlapping calderas in the region. (One estimate puts the numberat fifteen.) A series of faults runs along the calderas edge, and an-other set radiates from the volcanos center like the spokes of awheel. These fractures served as the plumbing system for theupward flow of mineral fluids that precipitated in veins.

Seeing the caldera requires a practiced eye. The volcanic lavasand welded tuffs (the latter formed from superheated volcanic ashthat falls like snow and welds together) are clear enough. So are thesigns of mineralization: Red Mountain, north of Silverton, gets itsname from the oxidized orange and red stains that cover its sides. Butthe geography has been transformed over the last 25 million years.Like a biblical parable, what was once high is now low, and vice versa:the land has become inverted. The faulted outside edge of the calderaallowed not only the passage of hydrothermal fluids from below, butalso snowmelt and rainwater filtering down from above. Erosion at-tacked the ring faults, especially during the last 2 million years ofglacial conditions. Thousands of feet of rock were removed, and thefault zones came to mark the paths of the river courses. Valleys werecut along the edge of the caldera as the area was elevated through up-lift. Today the river courses of Mineral Creek and the Animas Riverdefine the south and west sides of the caldera rim (see fig. 2.1).

Two points may be drawn from this account. First, this descrip-tion of astonishing events, evoking a landscape shaped by both fireand ice, functions simultaneously as a set of scientific, poetic, andtheological statements. Rather than being immune from a sense ofawe, the science of geology prompts and promotes our wonder. Sec-ond, note that long before the appearance of humans the region wasa naturally mineralized area subject to acid drainage and heavymetal contamination. After all, it was these naturally occurring con-ditions that drew the miners to the region in the first place. Acidmine drainage is but an accelerated form of the natural processes ofthe acid rock drainage native to the area. Acid rock drainage resultsfrom natural weathering processes, biologic activity, and the re-gional geology. The problem, then, becomes how to clearly distin-guish between acid mine and acid rock drainage. And it turns outthat separating natural background conditions from human-causedacid drainage is a difficult and contentious matter.

The production of acid drainage is a complex process involvingchemistry and biology as well as geology. Exposure of the sulfur-richrocks to air and water causes the sulfide minerals (e.g., pyrite,galena, and sphalerite, made up of sulfer and iron, lead, and zinc re-spectively) to oxidize. Take the example of pyrite (FeS2), also known

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as fools gold. Rainwater, snowmelt, and exposure to air break theiron sulfate compound into its constituent parts, ferrous iron andsulfur, at a relatively slow rate. The sulfate ions react with the waterto produce sulfuric acid, and the iron goes into the water as well. Byitself, however, this chemical reaction is not energetic enough toproduce very much acid drainage. But the reaction explodes with thepresence of sulfur-oxidizing bacteria such as those of the genusThiobacilli. Thiobacilli are chemolithotropes: they eat rocks. AndThiobacilli are ubiquitous in nature. They massively increase thechemical process, resulting in an immense expansion in the amountof acid drainage being produced.

The pH of a solution is a measure of its acidity, based upon a log-arithmic scale; going down the scale, each number represents a ten-fold increase in the amount of acidity. Thus the difference between apH of 7 and one of 3 is four orders of magnitude, giving you a solu-tion that is ten thousand times more acidic. The pH in streams of theupper Animas drops as low as 2 and 3 (lower than the pH of vinegar,and about the same as that of a car battery; trout die at pH valuesbelow 5.4). A low pH also allows the heavy metals to stay in solution,causing the high concentrations of metals in the water that lead tothe fish kills. If the pH is buffered (that is, raised, say by passingover limestone), the metals will come out of solution, leaving brightorange-red stains coating the rocks on the sides and at the bottom ofthe stream. As noted above, this also destroys the habitats for thebugs that the fish depend upon.

One of the basic goals of the scientific study of acid minedrainage is to clearly distinguish between natural and anthro-pogenic acid drainage. The idea is that if we can tell the differencebetween the two, we will have solid criteria for what should becleaned up. But distinguishing between natural and anthropogenicacid drainage is tricky. Of course, an old mine works, with its tim-bers askew and a thick rivulet of red gunk issuing from its portal, isa poster child for acid mine runoff (GL:CH2). But it remains an openquestion how much of that discharge has been generated throughmining, and how much is simply the concentrated runoff that hadpreviously found its way to the surface through unknown naturalsprings across the mountain. The geologist offers an educated guess;in this case, the majority of the drainage would probably be human-caused. But such open conditions give rise to differing interpreta-tions and extended debates.

U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists have wrestled with thequestion of distinguishing between natural and anthropogenic acid


drainage throughout the region. One part of the Animas drainage,the Middle Fork of Mineral Creek, was found to contain seventy-three springs and seventeen mines.16 Of the mine sites, seven hadwater coming from their portals. Throughout the basin, hydrologistsface the challenge of determining whether seemingly natural seepsare truly natural, or are rather the surface expression of mining-caused drainage further upslope. Sometimes the evidence is conclu-sive, but often hydrologists must try to map the faults and the minesin an area to guess at the possible relation between an old mine siteand an apparently natural spring.

The fundamentally interpretive nature of fieldwork is typifiedby a spot known as Red Chemotroph Spring, in the Cement Creekdrainage (GL:CH2). My class and I visited the site in June 1997,with Win Wright, a USGS hydrologist who in later publications of-fered this as a classic example of a natural mineral-rich seep. As welistened to his account of Red Chemotroph as a natural spring, Iwandered upslope, and found two one-inch cables snaking down themountain. Win thought the cables were the remnants of an old minetramway that ran from Lark Mine to Cement Creek. Yes, there hadbeen mining in the area, upslope from Red Chemotroph, but Win be-lieved that it had had no influence upon either the existence or thedevelopmen

Frodeman (2003) - Geo-logic

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