Click photo for larger version. Image courtesy of Kennecott Utah Copper.

The Colorado River spent 6 million years carving the Grand Canyon. It’s taken Utahans only a century to dig Kennecott’s Bingham Canyon Mine. Ok, so the Grand Canyon gets as deep as 6,000 feet and Bingham only reaches a bit past three-quarters of a mile. But consider this: The pit you see here used to be a mountain, which tacks on at least an extra 1,000 feet. We’re gaining on nature, and quickly.

In the latest issue of VIA magazine I’ve got a story on the open pit copper mine, which is the largest man-made excavation on Earth. Everything is oversize here, from the fleet of 80 haulage trucks taller than two-story houses and costing $2.8 million a piece to the 82 million gallons of water sprayed annually for dust control. And the mine runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Sound like a monumental waste? Take a look around you before you wish it closed—everything from fridge to phone works thanks to copper. Come to think of it, the story of copper mining, accelerating from the first urban electrification projects to today’s massive resource extractions, is the story of modern America. Perhaps that’s why this hole is a National Historic Landmark.

For more crazy details on just how big this operation is and to learn how it is we can turn a ton of rock into 13 pounds of copper sheeting, watch this video. Spoiler alert: it involves a five-mile conveyor belt.

I’m spending most of my time working as a contract editor at VIA these days, so my freelance writing has slowed down a bit and I haven’t had as much to report here. I’m enjoying seeing the other side of the writing game, though, and it’s giving me the opportunity to go after breathtaking travel destinations like this one.

See the red stuff on that rock? That’s a swarm of ladybugs. A few weekends ago some friends and I paid a visit to their winter home on Mount Diablo, near Clayton, California. It was almost scary how many there were. Here’s a closeup.

It seems they live down by the coast in the warm months, then move inland into the mountains when it gets cold. They can’t fly unless it’s warmer than 55 degrees! They also have a life cycle of only four to six weeks, so how do they know to go back to the same place every year? We found them along the Falls Trail loop and it looks like they go to Redwood Regional Park too. One more fun fact: It takes 24 hours for an adult to get its spots.

And for the land-use lovers out there:

A nice shot of the Clayton Quarry, a source of diabase, a hard rock destined by law for local construction uses that have included the rail beds of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and Interstates 580 and 680. Here’s more info on its use and history.

Photo of the Berkeley Pit by Don Ankney

Some people have been asking me how I could call a lake so polluted it kills swans a romantic getaway. And am I serious about visiting these ecodisaster sites, or was the article a joke?

Yes and no. The story was a satire on the style of ecotourism destination roundups, but all of these places are totally worth visiting. Each one is like a historical monument that tells us how we came to be the country we are — the miners of Butte, for example, dug that big hole in the ground so we could make copper electrical wires and light our cities.

Each one is also a great place to go and ‘be with nature’. We tend to think of nature as some other place away from the cities and away from civilization, but, as Jenny Price pointed out in her great Believer piece about finding nature in LA, by doing that we ignore the natural world around us and, crucially, our role in shaping it.

So! My prescription for a romantic Superfund encounter: Stand at the edge of the Berkeley Pit, under the ridge of the continental divide and at the edge of the Deer Lodge National Forest, and look for yourself in its red waters. You might just have one of those ‘the world is so big and I’m so small’ moments that we usually associate with mountain peaks and Niagara Falls and that make us reach for our loved ones.

Speaking of Jenny Price, tours of environmentally damaged areas that are cropping up all over the place and she’s right in the thick of it with trips to the LA River and disputed Malibu beaches over at the LA Urban Rangers. Another travel idea is the Futurefarmers’ Silicon Valley Superfund tour, which you could take on your own with the help of their interactive map (follow the Superfund map link). There are also Global Exchange’s Reality Tours and there’s a Toxic Tourism book about using site visits as an environmental advocacy tool. For more self-guided experiences of our impact on the environment, the database at the Center for Land Use Interpretation is a great resource. In August, they’re doing a bus trip to the Puente Hills Landfill in LA, which was the nation’s largest landfill in 2005! Too bad it’s all booked.

There’s more, too. You can find some gathered at the Temporary Travel Office and advice on visiting Chernobyl, plus links to the dirtiest spots in the world at the pollution tourism blog.

Welcome to the Internet, a convenient place to find my new blog and news about the articles I’ve written. I was on NPR talking about my latest story today — a guide to hot ecodisaster travel destinations in the United States, published by GOOD magazine. It’s a roundup of five super fascinating spots like the Berkeley Pit in Montana, the country’s largest body of toxic water, and Centralia, Pennsylvania, a ghost town on top of an underground coal fire that’s been burning for over 40 years. Sounds like a joke, but it’s not. They charge admission to the viewing platform at the Pit, and another of the sites — the Salton Sea in southern California — used to attract more visitors than Yosemite!