I submitted, and in early August the Juneau Empire printed, a My Turn column regarding the EPA’s position in the Pebble Mine controversy.
The mine industry, in the spokesperson of John Shively, responded. Sadly Shively indulged in mine management’s propensity to attack environmental and public officials on a personal level, but of greater interest is Shively’s complaint of lack of fairness in the process. One may cautiously welcome the introduction of the concept of fairness to the discussion, if Shively is introducing an Industrial Mine Industry Fairness Doctrine.
My guess is that a neutral Fairness Doctrine administrator would recommend that the mining industry live up to their promises statewide, nationwide and worldwide, just to get to zero on a fairness-doctrine balance scale.
This could include the Tulsequah Chief Mine leaking heavy metals into the Taku River, abandoned by the operators; the twin open pits in Faro, Yukon Territory abandoned to the long term care of the Canadian public: it dumped lead/zinc and other metals into the Yukon River drainage since 1958 and may well be the cause of the mystery of the decades-long Yukon river King Salmon crash; the recent Polly Mine tailing dam catastrophic failure that impacted the Frazer; the reduction of stream drainages all over Alaska from ecologically stable valleys to wave fields of inert tailings; open pits all over the American West notably the Ajo Copper pit that left tens of acres of spoil still to this day leaching metals into the ground water there; and most of Montana where the ground water runs with salt, sulfides of everything, and arsenic in surface ponds and drainages.
Although the Juneau Empire cannot commit the 60 or 70 pages of space necessary to make a partial list of abandoned mine clean-ups, it would be fair to assume that these projects would come within the purview of the new Shively Fairness Doctrine.
To refine the focus here, it turns out that the Pebble Mine exploration process of the last years has left industrial junk all over the Bristol Bay uplands, in violation of state rules. Presumably the exploration industry feels that they don’t have to clean up because state management is so weak that nobody will force them to do so. Then if permits to develop mines are ever issued, the cleanup will be off the table. I don’t represent myself as a disinterested bystander, but my recommendation to the SFD Administrator would be that nobody at the state or federal level should even talk to the Pebble Mine crowd until the exploration cleanup is certifiably accomplished.
The idea that 10 years of work by interested parties in the region, work which achieved an EPA determination, should be unceremoniously and without due process dumped as a consequence of a change of administration, with everybody being told to start over: this development currently underway could be described, Shively, could very well be described, as unfair.
• Eric Forrer is a Juneau resident.
