Answer:
Mining in the United States has been active since the beginning of colonial times, but became a major industry in the 19th century with a number of new mineral discoveries causing a series of mining rushes. In 2015, the value of coal, metals, and industrial minerals mined in the United States was US $109.6 billion. 158,000 workers were directly employed by the mining industry.[1]
The mining industry has a number of impacts on communities, individuals and the environment. Mine safety incidents have been important parts of American occupational safety and health history. Mining has a number of environmental impacts. In the United States, issues like mountaintop removal, and acid mine drainage have widespread impacts on all parts of the environment. As of January 2020. the EPA lists 142 mines in the Superfund program.[2]
There are places in Australia that are awe-inspiring, spectacular, mysterious; they touch our spirit and help define our nation.
Kakadu is one, Uluru another, the magnificent red sandy deserts, the Kimberley. These are part of our country’s essence, and they provide a rare lens into the wonder of nature and the timelessness and value of our land.
But these places are embedded in a wider landscape and are dependent upon that landscape for their future.
We haven’t really had a name for it, but the Australian outback fits. It’s both the wonderful sense of space in remote Australia, or the humdrum monotony of the Australian bush.
This place faces numerous challenges — one of the worst extinction records in the world, ongoing biodiversity declines, and neglect. But there are also opportunities — global recognition, and the rapid expansion of land managed and protected by Indigenous Australians.
This place, and its coherence is important to us, but it is also internationally significant, as one of the world’s last remaining large natural areas.
Explanation:
The “outback” is a quixotic term that has sometimes more shifting myth than reality. In a new study funded by Pew Charitable Trusts assessing remote Australia, we mapped and defined the outback on the basis of explicit criteria: distance from major population centres, relatively intact natural environments, low human population density, relatively infertile soils and low productivity.
So defined, the Australian Outback comprises 5.6 million square kilometres, or 73% of the Australian land mass. It is of course the Red Centre, but also the monsoonal north and the semi-arid fringes.
It includes less than 5% of the Australian population, but a relatively high proportion (more than a quarter) of that population is Indigenous. Many of these geographical, climatic, demographic and environmental factors are richly interconnected.
Conservation on an outback scale
So, why define such a concept? It is because we are being forced to re-imagine how conservation works, and how we live in this land.
Leichardt’s grasshopper, found in the monsoon tropics. Craig Nieminski
Regrettably, it is now clear that even large national parks — established to protect and provide access to tourist icons, to conserve threatened species and to represent the diversity of vegetation types — are losing components of their biodiversity. Such parks are necessary and good, but insufficient.
They weren’t designed to look after the ecological processes that underpin biodiversity — the continental-scale ebb and flow of species dispersing to track shifting resources, the interplay of drought and flood, the large-scale workings of fire regimes, the metastatic spread of weeds and pests throughout our land.
If we want to retain our extraordinary and distinctive wildlife, we need to break conservation out from beyond the bounds of National Parks to think and manage far larger landscapes. The outback works at such a scale.
Learning from the past
In the little over 200 years since European settlement, our nation has lost 30 of its endemic mammal species, more than 10% of the wonderful legacy we had inherited, and that rate of loss is continuing.
This is an extreme outcome, not simply a normal consequence of societal change. For example, European...
for detailed answer go to https://theconversation.com/why-australias-outback-is-globally-important-32938
