Jan. 23:
Economist Tom Power and the West's Post-Cowboy Economy

Jan. 30:
Forest Service learned little from 30 years of controversy on Montana forest.

Feb. 6
Idaho's newest judge illustrates the rising influence of Hispanics.

Feb. 13
Utah's newest monument proposal could be a chance to mend political fences.

Feb. 20
Collaboration and consensus emerge as new ways to manage public lands.

Environmentalists sue to stop what they say would be violations of state laws

By Tracy Stone-Manning
for Headwaters News

Earlier this year, the New York Times ran a Page One story familiar to so many: Agencies issue permit to mine; environmentalists vow to sue.

It seems a yawner — we’re all so used to it — but perhaps it landed on Page One of the Times because of an added twist: This particular copper and silver deposit sits beneath the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness in Montana, one of the original areas protected under the landmark 1964 Wilderness Act. The miners will work from the edge of the wilderness, boring three miles laterally to get to the ore.

And while mining under a designated wilderness area is philosophically abhorrent, that is not what led environmentalists, including the group I work for, to sue, though it certainly fueled our resolve. We're suing the government for issuing the permit because it allows the miners to violate clean water and clean air standards.

While the mine fight is the same old story on paper, the mine site is a place, a beautiful bit of wilderness that deserves description. In the northwest corner of Montana, the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness is wet, much wetter than the rest of the state.

This is not Big Sky country. Its towering firs and cedars wrap in around you. It is muffled, not windswept. It is home to bull trout, harlequin ducks, lynx, wolverines and a struggling population of grizzly bears.

The mine threatens to drain two wilderness lakes. All wilderness lakes are beautiful, but there’s something particularly calming about Cliff Lake. The blueness, maybe. Or the stillness.

Rock Creek, from which the mine draws its name, drains out of the wilderness and into the Clark Fork River, about 25 miles upstream from Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho. Pend Oreille is big, clean, and beautiful. It’s one of the West’s secrets. A few years back, 1,500 of the 5,000 residents in the lakeshore town of Sandpoint marched in opposition to the mine.

Montana’s Sanders County, home of the mine site, is struggling economically. Sure, some want the jobs that the mine would provide. But residents here are wary of mining. So much so that Sanders County voters were among those that carried the successful ballot initiative to ban cyanide heap leach mining in Montana. (Cyanide heap leaching is typically used in gold mining and would not be used at Rock Creek.)

People here seem to understand that boom equals bust.

They’re also leery of Sterling Mining Company, whose principals, including Frank Duval, have left a string of spectacular messes in their wake: bankruptcies, SEC violations and polluted landscapes.

The mine permit was issued by two agencies, the Forest Service and Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality. They issued the decision, in the making for nearly 15 years, the day after Christmas.

Of course we cried foul. It’s clear the agencies were attempting to slip the decision past the public. Who wouldn’t? More likely than not, they were embarrassed by it. They excused the decision by saying their hands were tied by the 1872 Mining Law, the trump card of development. It’s "the devil made me do it" argument.

In 1872, the U.S. government was hoping to settle the West. What better way than a whopping subsidy to encourage that settlement: Miners could stake free claims on federal mineral deposits; the miners didn’t have to pay the government any share of the loot; the right to mine superseded all other landowner rights; and if need be, the miners could buy the land above the minerals for a mere $5 per acre.

Much has changed since then. Women can vote now. The Cavalry no longer slips out on Indian-killing raids. Miners no longer use a pick and a shovel. The West settled, and then some.

The mining law, however, is still in effect, despite repeated efforts to reform it. And while agencies claim to have their hands tied, they cannot violate other laws in their scramble to uphold 1872’s mineral giveaway.

Yet that’s what they’re doing at Rock Creek. That’s why I believe we’ll win this battle for this one place. In part, that’s what keeps me going to work every day.

At the same time, the effort, singular and battle-like, is deeply frustrating. I don’t like suing. It reeks of us against them, society pitted against itself. Maybe that’s why people complain that environmentalists sue too much, as if we do it for sport. But those criticisms miss an important point. More often than not we win in court, where laws and reason hold sway.

Even though environmentalists can claim these short-term victories, we're all – agencies and the public – losing in the long term. It's a paradigm of conflict, the old West against the new, recycled in place after unspoiled place.

Agencies issue permits; environmentalists sue. We're at odds when we should be working together to forge a future of healthy economies, communities and landscapes.

It's as if we are battling over the merits of a vestigial tail when we could and should be crafting the equivalent of an opposable thumb.

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Mining industry fast losing ground

By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Feb. 27, 2002

The Bush administration has reversed political fortunes in the decades-long battle between the mining industry and environmentalists, but on the annual bottom line, industry is still losing.

Industry lobbyists now are gleefully backing a different set of reforms than they opposed with equal vigor eight years ago.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton is preparing revisions to laws governing mining on federal land patterned after a 1994 measure backed by Idaho Sen. Larry Craig but vetoed by President Clinton.

Norton's plan would attach royalties to the net profits of mines on public lands, not the value of the mined ore, as Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt wanted.

And it will probably not give the Interior secretary the authority to reject mining plans because the site is more suited to recreation or habitat, as the Clinton clan wanted.

Environmentalists call it sham reform that just might fool the public, while a spokeswoman for the National Mining Association pledged industry support.

The differences go on: Babbitt rejected the Crown Jewel Mine in Washington, but Washington Republican Sen. Slade Gorton revived it. The mine failed to get necessary permits, and the issue helped Gorton lose the next election.

Norton approved a California gold mine Babbitt had killed. And critics say Montana's Rock Creek Mine would never have been approved in the Babbitt climate.

Debate over the Rock Creek Mine has been going on since at least the early 1980s, and calls for reform of the 1872 Mining Act go back even farther.

Polls in the mid-90s showed most voters in favor of mining reform of some kind, but industry lobbyists had to wait for the Bush administration for signs it might go their way.

Despite the signals, it hasn't happened yet. Across the region, industry is ailing, mines are folding and companies are begging release from their larger financial burdens.

The Kennecott Rawhide mine in Mineral County, Nev., will lay off 55 of its 160 workers next summer as the gold and silver veins play out.

The Getchell Mine laid off 157 of 193 workers three weeks ago at its gold mine near Winnemucca because of falling prices. The mine had 600 workers in 1999.

Colorado-based Canyon Resources, saying it was starving for short-term capital, announced mid-month that it would sell the mineral rights beneath 1 million acres of western Montana, including Flathead Lake shore property and 700,000 acres of timberland.

Canyon is holding onto its holdings at the headwaters of the Blackfoot River, site of a proposed and bitterly opposed open-pit gold mine.

In New Mexico, Phelps Dodge wants to change the state's requirement that it buy expensive third-party insurance to guarantee reclamation at its copper mines.

In British Columbia, industry spokesman said the Liberal government's reforms are probably too little too late to spur any significant recovery.

Executives at Hecla Mining Co., a 100-year-old Idaho company, were elated they lost only $5.7 million last year; the company lost $92 million in 2000.

A century of tradition is rapidly coming to a close in Idaho's Silver Valley, while state and federal officials, and local business owners and residents argue over the extent of the cleanup.

A bill to give mining companies a $500 tax break for every existing job and another $500 for every new job is making its way through the Idaho House on pleas that without help, the state's industry will die.

A sympathetic White House and the West's Republican heavyweights may be eager to usher in a kinder, gentler mining reform, but if they don't hurry, there will be still fewer operations to benefit.

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Headwaters News is a project of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana.