Seattle PI: General Mining Law: Digging up reform

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Published March 10, 2008

At enormous cost to the West, U.S. mining law remains stuck in the post-Civil War era idea promoting nearly free land for exploitation. Congress has an opportunity to reform an 1872 law to work for a healthier region in a new century. The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a package of major reforms, but it's up to the Senate and President Bush whether meaningful reforms occur. As U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell recently told the Seattle P-I's Robert McClure, it's worth waiting until next year if a good measure can't win approval in the coming months. Under the 1872 law, a 2001 P-I series, "The Mining of the West," showed how mining companies have made enormous profits while paying almost nothing to plunder the land, sometimes using dangerous chemicals and often leaving the costs of cleaning up to the taxpayers. Without reform, the damage will continue to mount from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, often in our most sensitive and beloved parts of the country. Recently, a British company won permission to engage in a study of the uranium mining potential at a site just a few miles from a popular Grand Canyon lookout. Although health effects still plague the Navajo reservation from earlier uranium mining and a number of tribes have voted to ban uranium mining on their lands, the Environmental Working Group reports there is a "modern day land rush" to stake claims, many related to uranium, in sensitive areas near parks. Cantwell is on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which will study the House measure. If the committee and Senate leaders honestly look at the sorry history of the mining law's increasing abuses as massive industrial operations have replaced lone prospectors, they will come to her idea that meaningful reform is the only option. © 1998-2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer