Meteor Crater Caused by Humans: By Jimmy Petrol

Down the road a piece, on the slopes of the cute little mountains just south of Tucson, there is a patch of ground that has a little bit of copper mixed in with the rock.

The folks that have bought the mineral rights to these few square miles of rock and dirt call themselves Rosemont Copper, a tribute to the now vanished towns of Rosemont and New Rosemont, which used to serve as home to the hard-scrabble miners who worked the area in the last century. The marks of these multiple, basically unregulated mining digs are still highly visible on the slopes; scars of rubble, slag and barren dirt that such mining brought. There has been a lot of drilling in the area to determine the extent of the copper deposits and to plan their extraction; over three-hundred-thousand feet of drilling has been done over the last fifty-plus years. There is almost no sign of this modern intrusion; certainly, the modern miners have made a much better effort to cause less visible damage.

Now, after all this drilling, a bunch of wild-catters out of Canada have quit their day jobs and formed a company, bought the mineral rights to this little spot near the Old Pueblo and are spending tons of money to get the copper out and onto rail cars headed to a smelter. Of course, there are other deposits elsewhere. The trouble with mining is in the work; the farther away from roads, rail, towns...the more work (and by this I mean effort and money it takes to get it out. There are deposits far away from towns and people, which would not disturb views or lives.....but nobody wants to pay to have it shipped out of the mine by rocket or helicopter....or build roads hundreds of miles long through the wilderness.

Oddly, Americans over the last century have begun to use more copper while resisting any efforts to get that copper from American soil. It is a lot like the oil tankers that bring Americans the gas for cars; when the tankers get old, Americans do not allow them to be dismantled on American soil; too dirty! Instead of cleaning up the mess we make transporting our gasoline, we insist it be done somewhere else. What happens is that these tankers are driven up onto the beach in India, where they are cut up with torches by Indians hanging from ropes. The pieces, the sludge, the poisons all then fall into Indian water and onto Indian soil. The workers that grow ill from the work die in India.

So it is with Mining. While we all want copper wires in our walls, fans and electronics, we want it to come from somewhere else, so we don't have to see the damage to the environment, put up with the noise or pay for the reclamation of the land. Just get that copper from somewhere else. I went on down to Rosemont Copper and met with the mining boss; he has been putting mines on line for a long time and has come home to Tucson, happily, to run this last mine. It is his opus. I took the nickle tour with him; you could too, if you wanted to see what they plan to do.

But you don't want to. Besides JP, there were just a couple older men from Green Valley and a middle-aged couple from Tucson. Everybody had fire in there eyes and were there to find out what lies Rosemont was telling. Now I don't know if you know it, but to tell lies effectively, you need a PR firm. These are the guys that the President uses when he wants to get us scared enough to allow....well, you know. Without PR, all you can do is tell people what you know. The fellow that Rosemont has giving the public tours is the same guy they have hired to direct the whole thing; he is a miner. What he knows is how to get stuff out of the ground. He also is pretty good at following environmental rules and working it so his bosses don't go to jail for the myriad of crimes that can be committed when digging giant holes in the earth to provide people with the minerals they demand.

In short, he doesn't know enough to lie. For that you need a degree in Public Relations; his is in mining. Of course, there is going to be another big hole in the earth, which will not be directly visible from the road (highway 83) but will be hidden behind a nice, neat pile of gravel and grass. The options are three:

Option one; follow the current American method and make the miners go dig in third-world countries, where the environmental restrictions are lesser. With this option, our backyard stays pristine(er), but the earth get dirtier overall.

Option two; dig the hole, get the copper for our new laptops and houses, pay attention to what our lifestyle does to the planet and think about it when we chose to consume. Have the effects in our face, and the mine right here where we can be sure it will be done cleanly.

Option three; mine the largest, purest copper deposit in the area; our houses. If you don't want to mine the earth for minerals, take your copper wires out of your walls, the ceiling fans and alternators and put them in a pile at the curb. If you don't want copper, you shouldn't be made to have any.