Before we get started, a
warning. What you’re about to read is going to sound at first like something
cooked up by the same folks who gave us the oxymoronic (and otherwise
moronic) advertising slogan “Clean Coal.” It will sound like a fantasy story
even a Fox News anchor would not dare announce: “Coal—The Biodiversity Fuel.”
In a paper being published in the
journal Conservation
Biology, researchers in the Czech Republic, who have
been studying bees and wasps, report that some of that country’s endangered
species, including four insects that had been presumed regionally
extinct, have turned up instead thriving in the fly ash heaps at
coal-fired power plants.
Fly ash, as the paper
helpfully explains, is what’s left over after a power plant burns coal, and
it’s composed of “glass-like particles of mineral residua which are carried out
of the boiler in the flow of exhaust gases,” plus bottom ash, boiler slag, and
“flue gas desulphurization materials.” To be clear, the “fly” in “fly ash”
is not a reference to insects; rather, it has to do with the fact that the
substance is so light and fine that it flies up during combustion.
The study found 227 species of bees and
wasps, including 35 that were endangered or critically endangered, living at
two power plant sites. Some of these insects are important pollinators, and
others may be valuable as predators and parasitoids for controlling
agricultural pests. According to lead author Robert Tropek, an
entomologist with the Czech Academy of Sciences, a follow-up
paper will look at five other invertebrate groups also making their last stand
on fly ash waste.
Among the creatures populating this
man-made habitat, for instance, is a tiger beetle, Cicindela arenaria
viennensis (pictured at right), a remarkably swift predator known as
the cheetah of the insect world. Like many of the species in the current study,
that beetle thrives in inland dunes and banks of drift sand, a habitat that has
been systematically eliminated from much of Central Europe to make
“wasteland.” Tropek says he came up with the idea for the study after
photographs of fly ash deposits reminded him of that lost habitat. (Tropek said
the study was funded by the Czech Science Foundation and
the University of South Bohemia. Power industry involvement was limited to the
sites that allowed access to the power plants and agreed to hold off on
reclamation pending the results of the research.)
Tropek
has spent much of the past 10 years studying the wildlife of man-made
wastelands, partly because he likes the spirit of these abandoned sites and
partly because they have become genuinely important habitats. “The evidence is
accumulating,” he and his co-authors write, “that various post-industrial
barrens, such as quarries, gravel pits, spoil heaps and brownfields, often
harbor biotic communities of high conservation value, providing refuges for
many species vanishing from human-affected landscapes.” These are the only
places left for animals to hide out when everything else is in ruins.
To
complicate matters, fly ash wastelands are disappearing, being covered over
with dirt or planted to minimize the human health hazards of airborne fly ash
waste, which may include lung damage. In an email, Tropek acknowledges the
difficulty of the issue. The solutions are “quite good for the human
environment. On the other hand, it is fatal for the newly established [animal]
communities originally specializing in the drift sands.” His ambition is that
the coal ash heaps will last at least until people—or power companies—come to
their senses and begin “effective restoration of natural habitats.” At that
point, “the postindustrial refuges would be the species pool for recolonizing
newly restored plots.”
The phenomenon of species forced to find
refuge among industrial waste is also common in the United States. What Tropek
and his co-authors are reporting, says Lisa Evans, an
attorney with the U.S. environmental group Earthjustice, is “not as strange as
you think, in terms of coal ash impoundments being used as wildlife habitats.”
There are 1070 such impoundments and another 350 coal ash landfills in this
country, according to the official count, and they are located generally close
to the power plants that produced them. These facilities are often
hazardous for humans. In December 2008, for instance, the earthen wall at
a coal ash impoundment in Harriman, Tennessee, burst open and dumped 1.7 million cubic yards of waste onto nearby
neighborhoods.
For birds, amphibians, and possibly other
animals, these compounds are “an attractive nuisance,” the equivalent of toxic waste
sites doubling as playgrounds for city children. Biologists use
the term “population sinks” to describe them, says Evans. “From the outside
they look like habitat for critters, but because of the toxic chemicals in the
ash, it becomes their last resting place. They’re attracted to it, but they
don’t get out.” A study last year at a power plant in South Carolina, for
instance, found that birds nesting around coal fly ash basins
inadvertently contaminated their young with arsenic, selenium, cadmium, and
strontium. Multiple studies found that amphibians at the same site
suffered profound developmental problems and increased mortality.
So, no, coal is never actually going to
become the biodiversity fuel, especially given its richly destructive record of mountaintop removal, acid rain, mercury
contamination, and, of course, global warming. But the new studies suggest a
fresh way for coal-burning companies to clean up their dirty reputations. Skip
the clever advertising campaigns. Instead, spend money to dispose of coal fly
ash safely for people and wildlife alike. Then spend a little more to relocate
the desperate menagerie huddled in those fly ash heaps to some restored version
of their natural habitat.
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