Ironically in the land of the free and home of the brave, where the right to vote is universally granted to 18 year old citizens, and where equality of opportunity is touted as a national mantra, residents in American Appalachia find it hard to access even a basic need—clean water.
At the heart of dilemma lies the continued use of an arcane 135-year old piece of legislation, the General Mining Law of 1872, which contains no environmental safeguards concerning use of public lands and requires no royalties from mining companies who use them. Enacted during the Grant administration, the measure was an incentive for pick and shovel mining companies to help develop the West. In fact Congress back then declared mining to be the “highest and best use” of public land. Now that the days of “Manifest Destiny” are over, the law problematically still favors mining use over areas considered to be irreplaceable as wildlife habitat or for clean water.
Fortunately, earlier this year Democrats proposed a rewrite of the detrimental mining law and this month, the House voted 244-166 to add environmental protections and, for the first time, require miners to pay royalties for the gold, silver, copper, uranium and other minerals they extract from public lands. Penned by U.S. Representative Nick Rahall (D-West Virginia), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, the pending legislation is called the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act of 2007 and would require two-thirds of royalty payments by mining companies on so-called net-smelter profits resulting from claims on federal lands to go towards funding clean-up of environmental damage incurred by thousands of abandoned hard-rock mines. The remaining one third of funds would be used to aid communities adversely affected by mining operations.
So what kind of damage can mining operations actually incur on communities? Watchdog groups like Coal River Mountain Watch, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth say the most environmentally hazardous mining technique its mountaintop removal. The process involves removing huge vertical chunks of mountain by explosives in order to get to coal seams, marble rock, or whatever minerals companies are extracting. What were once mountain peaks near Kayford Mountain of West Virginia are now barren flatlands reminiscent of southwest plateaus. The pulverized mountaintops end up in what are called “valley fills,” mounds of dirt which cover 12,000 acres left by corporations like Arch Coal, Horizon Natural Resources and Massey Energy. Removal sites are laced with all sorts of toxic materials which seep into streams which provide drinking water to local communities. In Montana's Little Rockies, for example, a gold mine abandoned by a Canadian mining company has been leaching cyanide into the groundwater for two decades. In parts of Kentucky, water supplies have been known to contain arsenic levels of 2.0 parts per million. What is deemed unsafe for human consumption is anything above 0.1.
Despite failed efforts in the 1970s and in 1994 to revamp the 1872 law, it seems that chances for real change have never been better than today. Two years ago environmentalists were on the defensive, fighting a bid in the Republican-led Congress to let mining companies buy federal land with valuable mineral deposits for nominal fees. But then again, credit could also be attributed to a Democrat-controlled Congress as well as an overall increase in awareness of human induced environmental degradation. "Times have changed," said Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.). "Today's West now depends on the health as well as the conservation of our fragile environment, as much as it relies on mining."
Jewelers of America and Tiffany & Co. support the bill on environmental grounds while opponents include the National Mining Association which argues it would discourage domestic mining and make the U.S. more dependent on other countries, such as China, for minerals critical to manufacturing. "It would be a sick twist of fate if the U.S. had to begin importing uranium from Iran," said Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.). "There are people who want to make the West simply the vacation ground for the rest of the country. . . . We want jobs."
According to the Washington Post, the bill’s fate will rely heavily on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), a gold miner's son from the biggest gold-mining state who opposes a “royalty on operators of existing hard-rock mines but has hinted he might allow royalties on new operations as a way to compromise on a priority of environmental groups, an important Democratic constituency.” Others like John D. Leshy, a former Interior Department Solicitor in the Clinton Administration believe that increased pressure would be placed on the Bush Administration if it refused to sign the bipartisan-supported bill, making passage more likely.
But Congress should be careful about using fixing this legislative anomaly as a blanket solution for mining and environmental reform. Federal jurisdiction concerning mining techniques is a highly complex issue and concrete environmental improvement is difficult enough in addition to the usual obstacles of political lobbying. The negative effects of mountaintop removal are not easily rectified. Regeneration may take centuries and reclamation efforts have been pitiful so far because the land is already so polluted and inaccessible. Past attempts like the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act which was meant to return mountaintop removal sites to their “approximate original contour,” have been relatively unsuccessful. Although the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act claims to expand local jurisdiction in determining methods of land use, federal land managers would be given authority in considering the effects of proposed mining operations on public drinking-water supplies, recreation, hunting, fishing and wildlife habitat, while local governments would only receive the right to petition prohibiting mining on lands.
The fight against environmental damage by multinational mining corporations is also far from over. This month, environmental groups in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania protested a proposal by the Bush administration to relax restrictions preventing mining activity near waterways. The U.S. Office of Surface Mining wants to exempt valley fills from a 20-year-old rule that prohibits any mining activity within 100 feet of a stream while current policy dictates that land within 100 feet of a stream cannot be disturbed by mining unless a company can prove it will not affect the water's quality and quantity. The proposed new regulations would allow mining that would alter a stream's flow as long as any damage to the environment is repaired later. But what if it can’t be repaired later? Consciously wreaking environmental havoc is bad enough policy, but banking on the ability to fix million year ecosystems is plain ignorant. In Alaska, groups like the Renewable Resources Coalition are petitioning against the creation of Pebble Mine. Their initiative specifically seeks to protect Alaska’s interest in water quality by limiting the discharge of certain toxic pollutants on state waters and lands, specifically targeting large-scale metallic mineral mining operations.
In truth, the water situation is precarious enough without mining corporations actively exacerbating depletion issues. The view that rights to clean water is a concern for only developing countries could hardly be more wrong. Many regions of the US, especially in northwestern states, suffer increasingly from drought while other areas like the Sierra Nevada are experiencing severe disappearance of snowpack due to climate change. This is bad news for the Midwest which relies heavily on the Colorado River for fresh water from such melting snowpack. It’s a classic “tragedy of the commons” issue brought on mainly by human negligence. The presence of a common, public resource is said to result in everyone aiming to reap benefits without having to pay for its costs. Some suggest privatizing water resources as one solution to the problem but this method could create new power dynamics or monopolies by powerful corporations and even NGOs. Until governments realize that negligence is not an option when it comes to the environment, solutions, no matter how progressive, will be futile unless they are ones that demand mass action. Cracking down on hazardous mining techniques is only the beginning.
