Hard Rock Mining

The New York Times recently wrote that our current mining law “is among the last statutory survivors of the boisterous era of westward expansion.  Essentially unchanged since Ulysses S. Grant signed it into law, its sets the basic rules for mining hard-rock minerals like gold, copper and uranium on public lands.  Useful in its day, it is a disaster now.  It requires no royalties from the mining companies and contains no environmental safeguards, allowing mines to wreak havoc on water supplies and landscapes.”

Our nation’s current mining law is bad for several reasons.

It makes mining the dominant use of federal lands, for courts have interpreted the Act to mean that mining “trumps” all other uses of these public lands.  It offers “miners” the right to buy public lands—even when there is an overriding public need to maintain those lands for public uses, including forestry, watershed protection, recreation, and other uses.

It shortchanges American taxpayers.   Taxpayers for Common Sense points out that our current mining law “robs taxpayers by allowing companies to “patent”—take title of—public lands for the rock bottom price of $5 an acre . . . Once they have purchased this practically free land, mining companies are allowed to extract metals and minerals—an estimated $245 billion worth over the years—without paying a dime in royalties.”  Other industries which extract resources from our federal lands (coal, oil and gas, for example) pay royalties running from 8% to 12.5%.

It doesn’t require the mining companies to clean up their toxic mess.   “Adding insult to injury is that taxpayers foot the bill for billions of dollars in cleanup costs when mines are stripped bare and abandoned. One estimate puts the total cleanup cost at between $32 billion and $72 billion,” wrote Taxpayers for Common Sense.

They also point out that, “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's roster of the nation's worst industrial contamination hot spots, the so-called Superfund list, includes more than 25 mines.  Cleaning them up will cost billions of dollars.”

It risks public health.  While the West was sparsely settled when this law was enacted, that is not the case now.  Mines have impacted many Western towns, destroyed drinking water supplies, and contaminated children’s bodies with lead and other toxics.  Hardrock mining has polluted an estimated 40 percent of western waterways with cyanide, lead, arsenic, mercury and other toxics, and has left a legacy of a half million abandoned mine sites.

It lacks any environmental protection requirements.  It fails to protect water quality, wildlife habitat, and other natural resources from the often devastating impacts of poorly managed mineral activities.

In the fall of 2007, the Conservation Leaders Network worked in three states to generate letters from county officials urging support for sensible policies that support environmentally sound mining practices on federal lands.

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