I have fished in Colorado a good deal. No one fishes a stream below the mining waste sites as they are deviod of life. More of the bush legacy of environmental destruction!


UNLIMITED TOXIC WASTE DUMPS ALLOWED ON PUBLIC LANDS

Bush Administration Favors Mining Corporations with Change

Washington, D.C.--A new opinion issued by the Bush administration will permit unlimited toxic waste dumping by companies that mine for gold, silver, copper and other precious metals on public lands owned by U.S. taxpayers.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton was pressured by members of Congress sympathetic to the National Mining Association to have the new opinion issued by the Interior Department's Solicitor's office.

The decision nullifies a limit reflected in federal mining law, which was reinforced by a previous decision issued in 1997.

"Negotiated behind closed doors between the Bush administration and America's most toxic industry, this outrageous reversal directs the government to quit enforcing existing federal law," said Steve D'Esposito of Mineral Policy Center.

Added D'Esposito: "It puts clean water and community health at increased risk, with an open invitation to dump massive quantities of toxic mining waste on unlimited amounts of our public lands."

More toxic waste is produced by hardrock mining than any other industry in America, as shown by the industry's own reports to EPA. 2.8 billion pounds of toxic waste were produced by hardrock mines in 2001--including 366 million pounds of arsenic, 335 million pounds of lead and 4 million pounds of mercury--according to the most recent numbers released in June 2003 by EPA.

America's federal mining law was written in 1872 to encourage homesteading in the American West. For each 20-acre mining claim, the law allows 5 additional "mill site" acres for activities "ancillary" to mining. In 1872, a mill site provided room for equipment to process newly-extracted ore.

But modern mining techniques and pollution are dramatically more dangerous and toxic now. Chemical leach technology, widespread since the 1970s, uses poisons like cyanide to extract piles of "waste rock" contaminated with poisons like cyanide and massive amounts of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and mercury.

Now mining companies, seeking more public land for dumping toxic waste rock, have succeeded in pressuring the Bush administration into lifting the 5-to-20 ration established by the mining law.

The new opinion issued by Deputy Solicitor Roderick Walston directly contradicts an opinion issued in 1997 by then-Solicitor John Leshy, which stated the mill site provision should be enforced, even though it had been ignored for nearly a century. Leshy's opinion gave federal land managers the ability to deny mine permits in cases where hardrock mines proposed dumping excessive amounts of waste on public lands.

I don't know enough about this subject to make an informed opinion. But I know enough to know that the mining industry's track record and abuse of public resources of land, water, and air cause me to be extremely suspect. Therefore, I would agree to let only those mining projects go foreward wherein the chief operating and executive officers and principle investors receive their, and their immediate family's, drinking water directly from the mining operation effluent and their air supply from the stacks of any milling operations. If they agree to that, strictly monitored of course, then I would agree to let them mine public lands and discharge their modern, safe, effluent into public waterways and atmosphere.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.