Money versus Mother Nature

There is one thing we will continue to find strange about Alaska no matter how long we live here. There are roads, highways if you will, that cut through huge tracks of “wilderness.” Areas where to get off the road would make you think you were the only human alive. I put wilderness in quotes because so much of the road system here was put in to exploit Mother Nature. A “Haul Road” across the Brooks Range and North Slope to access the oil fields. The Steese Highway out to Circle, the major hub for transportation before the road system was created. Remote areas. Yet almost every drainage we have passed on this trip has been manipulated by humans in some grotesque way. Mining in most cases.

Mining … it seems like a noble occupation. Your hard work makes the pay off … sometimes. Most of the time miners probably work harder than others and have nothing from the Earth to show for it. It is just them and Mother Nature, away from city life and all the craziness that surrounds it. In some ways, it seems like a pretty self sufficient lifestyle. But when you’re exposed to mining full on in your face it is anything but pretty and far from sustainable. Along the Steese Highway, the Earth is literally being ripped apart in search of this precious commodity … gold … this universal currency. As much as we would like to think otherwise, it is money versus nature almost everywhere we look. Does Mother Nature even stand a chance?

But who are we to say anything? We have gold wedding bands (well … dave did before he lost his canoeing last summer). We drive a van and use a computer that both have some materials only available because of mining. But are these material processions enough to justify the destruction? It is a question we have been pondering more and more recently!

This is a photo looking off the highway towards a drainage with mining activitiy, Notice the big piles of gravel along the creek drainage. These are called tailings. It is the rock and other debris miners move out of the way while looking for gold. It is deposited next to the creek and and in some cases alters the stream flow.

This is a piece of old mining equipment donated to the mining museum in Central.