Drought could last until 2030; activities that promote mindfulness; using DNA to catch animal poachers
| | Tuesday, February 15, 2022 | | | | |
| In today’s newsletter, the drought that could last until 2030; activities that promote mindfulness; using DNA to catch animal poachers; and … saving the desert’s skin. | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREA GJESTVANG | |
By Robert Kunzig, Executive Editor, Environment
The world needs copper. Humans were shaping it into spearpoints as long as 9,500 years ago. But demand really started soaring at the turn of the last century, after we discovered how well copper conducts electricity. Now we need it more than ever: It’s essential to transitioning off fossil fuels and toward renewable sources of electricity. “The shift to a clean energy system is set to drive a huge increase in the requirements” for copper, the International Energy Agency reported last year.
So where should we get the stuff?
Not from Bristol Bay, Alaska, where the long-delayed Pebble Mine is awaiting another decision this year from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The mine and the transportation corridor required to get its copper out to the world would threaten the rich salmon fishery in Bristol Bay and impinge on “one of the United States’ richest and most unique remaining stretches of wilderness,” my colleague Douglas Main wrote a couple of years ago.
Not from Oak Flat, Arizona, where, as Main wrote last year, plans to mine “one of the largest untapped reserves in North America” would create a massive crater on a site sacred to the Apache people.
And not from the proposed Nussir Mine on the northern coast of Norway, according to the environmentalists and Indigenous Sámi fishers and reindeer herders whom Brett Simpson and photographer Andrea Gjestvang met for this week’s story on the controversy. The mine would pump two million tons a year of tailings into the Repparfjord (pictured above). The company says it will use a chemical flocculant to bind the powdery tailings and confine them to a small area on the bottom of the fjord. Independent scientists are unconvinced, to say nothing of the activists (shown below at a protest camp), some of whom were chaining themselves to Nussir’s excavators last summer. | | | |
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A few years ago, when I was reporting on the circular economy, I visited a plant in western Germany that belong to Aurubis, Europe’s leading copper smelter. That plant has been recycling copper since World War I, when copper was needed for artillery shells. It has gotten very good lately at extracting copper from such unlikely sources as municipal incinerator slag. Copper ends up there when people throw cell phones and other electronics into the trash.
Copper is valuable, and Aurubis is the world’s leading recycler. But two-thirds of its production still comes from mines, mostly in Chile and Peru. “Demand is growing,” deputy plant manager Detlev Laser told me. “You’ll never cover that with recycling.” Aurubis had signed a billion-dollar deal with Nussir to buy ore from the new mine—but after the protests last year the contract was canceled.
The IEA worries that underinvestment in mining—for copper but also for minerals such as lithium and cobalt that are needed to make batteries—could create bottlenecks that would slow the global energy transition. The average electric car requires 117 pounds of copper, it says, more than twice as much as a gasoline-burning one. A giant wind turbine may require more than 30 tons.
“This idea of leaving the metals in the ground doesn’t work,” Nussir CEO Øystein Rushfeldt told Simpson. “Then all of our hopes for handling the climate crisis are obviously lost and gone.”
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There are a lot of ways to mine copper badly, in ways that environmentalists, scientists, or people living near the mine will take legitimate exception to (pictured above, Per Jonny Skum inspects an old mine in his district in Norway). What does mining copper well, or at least acceptably, look like? I should know the answer to that question, but I don’t. Maybe there’s a story in that.
If you want to get this email each week, join us here and invite a friend. If you’d like to support our journalism, subscribe here. | | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY NOEL CELIS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES | | | How DNA snags animal poachers: When Singapore authorities discovered containers of smuggled elephant ivory and pangolin scales, they called Interpol. Then they called Samuel Wasser of the University of Washington, whose team pioneered a method of comparing DNA from trafficked elephant tusks to tissue from forest and savanna elephants. The groundbreaking technique can be critical in identifying illicit ivory movement from the point of poaching, along smuggling routes, and out of Africa. Now, the team is using the data to prosecute individual poachers, Nat Geo reports. (Pictured above, ivory cut from elephant tusks confiscated by Philippines law enforcement that will be sent for DNA analysis.) | | | |
Wildlife Watch is an investigative reporting project between National Geographic Society and National Geographic Partners focusing on wildlife crime and exploitation. Read more Wildlife Watch stories here.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY NEAL HERBERT, NPS | | | Saving the desert’s ‘skin’: Just like humans have an epidermis that protects our bodies from harmful chemicals and pathogens, plants have one too. But biocrusts, the thin living layer protecting the Earth’s driest places, are under attack from climate change and human recreation. This millimeter-thick layer of microbes and plants takes in carbon dioxide and releases oxygen, a haven of protection. That’s why scientists are growing biocrusts on large garden plots and transplanting them to dry areas in the U.S. Southwest, Nat Geo reports. (Pictured above, living "biocrusts" are composed of cyanobacteria, mosses, lichen, and fungi, all of which protect and fertilize desert soil so that it can host bigger plants, like this fish hook cactus.) | | | |
 | | We’re often working with communities that are vulnerable, that will become more vulnerable as climate change intensifies. There’s an obligation to contribute. | | | | Kristina Douglass | | Archaeologist, Nat Geo Explorer | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY CAVAN IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES | | | Nature to the rescue: For stressed-out kids, try to get them exploring hiking trails or paying attention to the smell of a flower or the sound of a bird. Some parents and psychologists suggest ecotherapy, combining the benefits of getting outside—everything from improving kids’ IQs to helping them de-stress—with activities that promote mindfulness, Nat Geo reports. (Pictured, a father and daughter dancing in a forest in Arizona.) | | | |
Correction: In yesterday’s newsletter, we incorrectly referred to the month in 2019 in which Notre Dame burned. It was April. Thanks to our readers for catching this right off the bat.
We hope you liked today’s Planet Possible newsletter. This was edited and curated by Monica Williams, Heather Kim, and David Beard. Have an idea or a link for us? Write david.beard@natgeo.com. Have a good week ahead! | | | |
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