This story resonates all the way east to the upper Ohio River valley where I have spent the bulk of my life. When I was born, there were 48 states in the union, nothing had been blasted into orbit and the steel mills and strip mines were running full tilt. Three shifts a day.
When I was just graduating high school, the strip mines had scraped all the coal they could from 10s of thousands of acres in the Tri-State area, where Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia converge. Steel mills from Homestead down stream passed Ambridge, Aliquippa and Midland, Pennsylvania were downsizing at best, closing permanently at worst. Within another five years, just as I was earning my degree, there was only one division of one steel mill open.
We had the rusting hulks of blast furnaces, coke plants, foundries, sheet and bar mills, tank farms and slag piles. Not to mention a scared landscape that was rapidly eroding soil, clogging up streams.
We got rid of the industrial waste. The warning is, once that infrastructure is gone, it's never coming back. The soil reclamation efforts paid off. The hardwood forests need thirty or forty years to come back. With luck, I'll hike among tall oaks, poplar, wild cherry and hickories.
Cleaner is better. Especially after you have learned not to work in the mill but in something less brutal.
