To say that reform of an antiquated 140-year-old bill is drastically overdue would be a grave misrepresentation. Yet here we are, in 2012, and a hardrock mining law that promoted expansion of the West – a bill that was passed in 1872 – is still on the books. And it’s particularly bad for our nation’s rivers.
Back at my old stomping grounds at Down To Earth I used to write a lot about the old General Mining Act of 1872. In fact, I was just re-reading some of my old posts about this topic and that above opening sentence seemed ripe to plop on to this post. Of course I had to change the numbers because when I first wrote it, the year was 2009 and at that time the law was only 137 years old. At this point, what’s another 3 years.
I was brought back to this topic by a great op-ed that appeared in the New York Times last week. The piece was calling for the time to put an end to this law, and it was tied to the threat to water which caught my attention. Here’s a great excerpt:
Oregon’s Chetco River is one example. The river’s gin-clear waters teem with wild trout and salmon, including giant Chinook salmon tipping scales at more than 60 pounds. In 1988, Congress designated the Chetco a national wild and scenic river “to be protected for the benefit of present and future generations.”
But the river is now threatened by proposals to mine gold along almost half of its approximately 55-mile length. Suction dredges would vacuum up the river bottom searching for gold, muddying water and disrupting clean gravel that salmon need to spawn. Despite the Chetco’s rich fishery and status as a wild and scenic river, the United States Forest Service is virtually powerless to stop the mining because of the 1872 law.
For background, the Mining Law, which hasn’t been substantially updated since its adoption in 1872, allows mining companies to extract minerals such as gold, silver and copper from the ground without paying royalties – unlike coal, oil and gas companies who pay royalties for using public lands. And since the idea of protecting the environment and ecological conservation wasn’t prevalent in 19th-century America, the law doesn’t contain environmental protection provisions.
There have been serious threats to places like the Grand Canyon and Montana’s Cabinet Wilderness in recent years that have resulted in attempts in Congress to do away with this law, but it’s been a fight. You can imagine that with all of the swipes at the Clean Water Act and overall environmental protections recently that that fight is only getting harder.
