Salon.com > Maureen Nandini Mitra

The Gulf Coast may never recover

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:02:00 +0000

Three years after an explosion at British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers, injured dozens, and set off the worst oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, the waters along Gulf Coast seem almost back to normal. Much of the oil is gone. New Orleans-based photographer Julie Dermansky says there’s still a lot left. The oil, she says, is often hard to locate because it has a tendency to play hide and seek. Dermansky, who photographed the spill in 2010 “pretty much non-stop for four months," has been doggedly following the story for the past three years — reading up all the research she can lay her hands on, making trips out to the worst impacted areas in Louisiana every few months, and talking to people from affected communities. In the early days of the spill she was hired by several major publications, including The Times, London, The Washington Post, and Der Spiegel. But these days she travels without assignment, covering expenses on her own, since few publications hire photographers or reporters to cover what’s now an old news story. Last week, Dermansky again visited the beaches and marshes along the Louisiana and Mississippi coast — some of the worst hit areas where crews are still cleaning up tar mats and tar balls. I spoke with Dermansky via email and over the phone about her trip and her assessment of the situation in the Gulf Coast.

Are Arizona’s national forests worth destroying?

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 21:00:00 +0000

An ongoing battle between local residents and environmentalists and a Canadian mining company eager to dig for copper in the spectacular Santa Rita Mountains in southern Arizona’s Coronado National Forest has become the poster child for the need to reform a 141-year-old law that governs hard rock mining on federal lands.

A state fish and game department report says the mine would render the northern parts of the Santa Rita Mountains "almost useless.”

Vancouver-based speculative mining company, Augusta Resource Corporation, and its Arizona subsidiary, Rosemont Copper Company, plan to blast a mile-wide, half-mile deep copper mine on 4,000 acres of the mountains, 50 miles southeast of Tucson. If its proposal goes through, Rosemont claims the mine could supply 5 percent of the country’s copper needs and will bring “thousands of jobs” and “$19 billion in economic stimulus” to southern Arizona.

Noise isn’t just annoying, it’s bad for your health

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 13:52:00 +0000

When I last visited Kolkata, India, after a long period of living in the relatively quiet hills of Berkeley, CA, my ears were assaulted by the cacophony of traffic noise from the street outside my parents’ apartment. The daily discordant orchestra of blaring horns, squealing brakes, shouting vendors, and loudspeakers blasting religious songs would start in the wee hours of the morning and go late into the night. It felt like torture: I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading, I couldn’t hold a conversation without raising my voice. The din of my increasingly congested birth city seemed to have risen in volume over the years.