5,000 Years of Pollution

In southwest Spain, near Huelva, there is a mine in operation for nearly 5,000 years.

Copper was extracted first, later silver also.

The so-called "metal ages" are not distinct, with, for instance, bronze (copper-tin) fading in- and out-of-use with the availability of tin. The Iron Age was concurrent in some areas, was sole in others, and non-existent in, for instance, North America.

The Riotinto Mine has a long pollution record. A 1.9 mile ice core sample from Greenland showed "unequivocal evidence"of massive pollution from mining around )BC/AD, with 70% of the lead with a signature composition from Riotinto. A site near the mine found heavy metal and sulfide deposits dating back 4800 years.

Two rivers that drain the area are void of life. No assessment of the intertidal and ocean water quality, but it can't be good.

The Romans ran the mine from 206 BC until the Visgoths had enough of them. During their time, the Romans used silver denarii as coin of the realm. Then the Mauri of North Africa invaded Spain in the late second century, closing the mine to Rome. The percentage of silver in the denarii was reduced from 97% to around 40%, causing outsized inflation. Rome went to a gold standard, which the Visgoths would have enjoyed.

The mine was closed in 1991, but has a new owner, who plans to reopen it in 2011.

To view the mine, go to Google maps, enter Minas de Riotinto, Spain, and there you are.

So what's this all about?

In "Empire of the Summer Moon" (#8 on the NYT Best sellers list) S. c. Gwynne points out that when the illegal aliens began arriving from Europe, the American Indians, all, were Stone Age people. While the Eastern Tribes did some farming, the Western Tribes were hunter-gatherers, not known in Europe for thousands of years.

Maybe all my brilliant readers were aware of this, but in nearly 40 years of intermittent studies of the American Indians, that they were Stone Age peoples.

This is one very large shock to me, and I still haven't recouched my understanding of Indians in this light.

Last week, along a road I don't usually travel, there was a big red tail girl on a power pole cross-bar with her back to me. And Friday I heard a persistent call of a red tail on the wing. Not enough sky to see him. If I was a birder I could chalk him up. What bullshit.

There were three kestrels working fresh cut beans in about a quarter mile stretch, and a rather stoic mourning dove, the only non-flyer of the bunch, even after being shot at for nearly three weeks.

When I visited Gettysburg, we were en route from Amherst, Mass to Lancaster PA. There wasn't a lot of time. I did some crawling around in Devil's Den. Odd, that from amongst the rocks it seems impregnable, but the only chance Lee had in the fighting was overpower the very light defenses there and roll up the Union line along Cemetery Ridge. As it was, Manny, Moe, Jack, Larry, Darryl, Darryl, Larry, Moe, and Curly held the position and the field.

I had never even heard of Antietam when I spent the day there with a couple from the neighborhood. It was totally overwhelming.You cannot go 500 yards in any direction without coming on another location where 2,000, 3,000, 5000 men were killed or wounded. There are something like eight points where the tide of battle turned. In one day.

Spotsylvania Courthouse. I walked the entire battlefield in about twenty minutes. From a church tower, you would have seen it all. And it was totally pointless. 3,000 killed, 20,000 wounded (about 3,000, average, died from those wounds) and the place looks like "Look at yonder enemy. Let's kill them fuckers!"

Later that same day I went to The Wilderness/Chancellorsville. I didn't understand any of it. I did see where Stonewall Jackson was fatally wounded. I was deeply moved. General Jackson was among the master battlefield generals of all time, along with Crazy Horse, Subutai, and a mere handful of others. But the battlefields are not easily distinguishable, certainly they weren't by me, and after reading a book about Chancellorsville, I'm still in the wilderness.

I got to Fredricksburg late in the afternoon, and walked around in the gloaming. There is a big hill from the river to the town ("The Heights") and General Burnside sent one brigade after another up the hill into withering fire from entrenched Confederates, with 12,000 ensuing casualties. What a total dumb ass. Lee would give you a fight: pick another spot.

What's So Civil About War, Anyway?

My timing has been poor of late. Not many birds about when I am. Happens.

Several American kestrels recently. Always a pleasure to see our smallest falcon, overstuffed with a heart outsized and unmatched courage, enough for a small plane.

No red tails lately, a remonstrance against loving too much...

I was reading "The Lakotas and the Black Hills", by Jeffrey Ostler. The book is an examination of the Lakotas' claim to the Black Hills (South Dakota), based on the Treaty of 1868.

The first half of the book is Lakota history through Little Big Horn (June 24, 1876).

My eye isn't comfortable with the writing, but that's my problem.

One of the book's problems is that the Treaty of 1868 isn't included. References are cherry-picked, helter-skelter, incongruous.

For instance Article 12 of the 1868 pact is reported to contain the stipulation that any changes to the treaty would require 75% agreement from all adult male Sioux. But only 10% of said satisfied Congress, and in February 1877 they assumed ownership of the Black Hills.

The book would have benefited from an editor who actually read it, but Kevin Doughten maybe wanted to see his name in the acknowledgements for sitting around with his thumb up his ass.

It would seem both of Custer's forays into Lakota country, a reconnoiter of the Black Hills in search of minerals, primarily, and the attack on the massed camps along Greasy Grass Creek, the Little Big Horn, were in violation of that 1868 Treaty.

I have a special place, not in my heart but in my bowels, for Custer, and no matter my exertions, cannot seem to void him to the sewer where he belongs. More on this Vainglorious Ego Machine at another time.

What follows is all about the Civil War, focused on Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. If you are not interested, and that may be all of you, thanks for reading, and log off now.

With the problems I encountered in the much-anticipated book about the Lakotas, I dug out an old friend, Stephen W. Sears' "Landscape Turned Red", the Battle of Antietam.

Bruce Catton was an immensely popular and best-selling author of Civil War chronicles in the mid-20th Century. I never read any of them. I have read three books by Sears, on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. There are new materials accessed by Sears, unavailable to Catton, and I tend to currency.

Gettysburg. Antietam. Spotsylvania Courthouse. The Wilderness. Chancellorsville. Fredricksburg. Manassas.

These are the some of the bloodiest battlefields in American history. The Civil War accounted for more casualties - 1,094,453, and more deaths (by far) - 623,026 - than any other conflict in our short, bellicose history. The mortality rate was horrific. In Viet Nahm, 1 in 120 subsequently died of battlefield wounds. In WW II, 1 in 50. In the Civil War 1 in 7 wounds later proved fatal.

And these battles: Antietam, 22,728 casualties on September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day in US history. The 108th anniversary is Friday: fly your flags at half-mast, or burn them. For a tragedy like this, with everyone to blame, it's the same thing.

Second Manassas (Bull Run): 23,659 casualties in three days. This was a battle no one in Washington or the Union Army seems to have been aware of. There were 10, 100 Federal Troops who paid for a bona-fide FUBAR with their lives.

Chancellorsville, May 1 - 4, 1863. I can not at this moment recall what separates this battle from the Wilderness, as in my touring they seemed conjoined.

The Wilderness, May 5 & 6, 1863. Both sides stopped stumbling around lost long enough to inflict 25, 416 casualties.

The real mystery is that the two armies found each other, 10 miles west of Fredricksburg, with the only feature in the area, Chancellorsville, a large house, and still kill and wound 55,516 in five days.

And the granddaddy of mayhem, Gettysburg, with 51,112 casualties in 3 days.

The battle was done early, with Lee failing to realize that any Union weakness lay to the south and east.

The straight up (Pickett's Charge) attack was doomed before the advance order was issued.

Lee was totally out-of-sorts, with J.E.B. Stuart off God-knows-where. (In actuality, Stuart was engaged in his usual work, spreading havoc, fear and destruction on the Union supply line.)

Longstreet failed the General's order to advance, keeping his own counsel, and abetting the slaughter of tens of thousands, for with his refusal the day, in deep jeopardy, was surely lost.

My interest in these battlefields is not in the carnage.

Rather, these are battlefields I have visited: Gettysburg. Antietam. Spotsylvania Courthouse. The Wilderness. Chancellorsville. Bull Run (Manassas).

Only at Manassas did I spend the time to study the battles, tracing and retracing, walking the fields, reading and rereading the signs and the guide pamphlets.

There is an unfinished (then and now) railroad grade, with an approximately six foot bank, about 300 yards across a wheatfield from the road. I walked through the field to the grade.

Stonewall Jackson, a brilliant, driven military genius, had his entire division entrenched in the cut. To his left was withering, enfilading artillery fire 30 artillery pieces, paced by Lee.

There are markers in the field that record positions and quotations of Union survivors of that slaughter. The most moving is located barely 10 feet from the grade, where a soldier lay for "what seemed hours", too close to fire, to close to be fired upon, who, somehow, survived the uncoordinated, mass-stampede retreat of the few who survived this hell.

I was overawed.

Should anyone be interested, there will be more.

Coyotes and Vultures

There's a road I favor in the summer, wooded on either side, gravel, lightly travelled. It runs east-west, which is poor going in winter - too many cold Westerlies.

I have seen several, or maybe the same, does often, crossing in front of or behind me.

Another country heard from: a coyote walked into the road and stopped and watched, continuing only when my dogs started barking at air. They never saw The Trickster.

It baffles me these magnificent creatures are available for hunting.

Dogs and coyotes interbreed, which requires identical genes.

Shoot a coyote, shoot a dog.

Who would possibly sport hunt coyotes?

Alleged men with spider eggs for testicles, who must be critically challenged by roadmaps, toasters, and of course, condom instructions. Else, where do these cretins come from? As a "fellow" human, you would like to think from under a rock. Walt Kelley's "Pogo": "We have met the enemy, and he is us".

The "dove hunts" last weekend seemed to have been well-attended. The DNR plants sunflowers in dove management areas, then allow hunters to draw for entry on the official opener, to kill fifteen...

This is a "bag" limit. God knows how many are killed. Years and years ago, when I participated, shooters were much more interested in retrieving spent shells (for reloading) than downed birds.

Which might help explain the turkey vultures circling the road we were walking today, near the Bowman Dove Management Field. Although when I looked it seemed the field had been cut, and the corpse evidence gone with it, to prevent bleeding hearts like me from kicking through some brush and finding hordes of unfetched carcasses.

The vultures were circling low, about 40 feet. Maybe circling me. Be okay if they were a bit premature...

As mentioned here several times, these birds are amazing gliders, soaring and rising and swooping and traveling miles with the barest hint of wing movement.

They are largely ignored, disdained, and there must be many, like sport coyote killers, who would favor an open season.

Why? Because they are ugly? Everybody lose their mirrors?

They hurt nothing, no one, and please let me know if you are not familiar with the crucial role scavengers play, as nearly 7 billion people turn the planet into an orbiting shit pile.

Rhinos are cool. Not pretty. Sea turtles? Absolutely love 'em, ugly all. Same with our turtles. Toads? So neat, ugly as a wrinkled butt.

Since we've overfished the ocean, check out what you're eating. "Rough fish" in freshwater means carp, suckers, buffalo fish.

Even Orange Roughy have been all but fished out. You are eating the ultimate ocean rough fish now, stuff dredged off the bottom. None of it pretty. Look up monkfish, need some eye candy.

Want to see an ugly bird? How about that darling of us EarthLovers, the California Condor?

Could be kissing cousins with our turkey vultures.

Ugly stuff needs our help.

This idea originated with my most wonderful and beautiful friend Anne, who worries the media stars like whales, sea turtles, and wolves are getting the money while Montana fluvial Arctic grayling and the Ozark hellbender salamander slide unnoticed into oblivion.

But all of us have limited money to help (thanks to Bush, very limited).

And,again thanks in large part to the inane policies of the Boy Scion, about 4 billion of our brethren need help.

Spread your donations wisely. Check every charity with Charity Navigator (http://www.charitynavigator.com/). No exceptions. The groups who have maneuvered into the most appealing redistributors of your money are often the worst mismanagers of donations.

If I may...the Republicans in Congress are in love with continuing tax cuts for the wealthiest. This is Reaganomics, pure and simple, predicated on the Trickle Down Effect, an abysmal failure.

One of the architects of Reaganomics, David Stockman, wrote a book (Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed), in which he admitted the total failure of the economic strategy.

Republicans can't read, won't read, don't comprehend, or are fucking morons.

Trickle-Down didn't work, can't work, doesn't work, won't work. These people stay on the horse, long after it's dead.

I would love to stop bashing these poor idiots. Would that they let me...