All That Glitters -- w/Poll (#3 in Series)
by Land of Enchantment
Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 02:11:12 PM PST
Here's the latest e-mail from National Environmental Trust regarding the Pombo Amendment: "Congressional Quarterly is now reporting that the leadership still does not have the votes to carry the reconciliation bill. Could happen later today or tonite, but might go back to rules for more changes in the bill tonite. Not too late for calls, letters, emails." Call your representative toll free at 1-800-828-0498.
Story below the flip
The Midas Touch
Gold has some special properties. It's shiny, it's easy to work with, it doesn't tarnish, and it conducts electricity. Those are the things its value is based upon. For centuries, its value is has been largely symbolic. That is, it's valuable because everyone says so. Its first use as currency was in a principality/kingdom called Lydia, occupying the central area of modern-day Turkey. That changed things. Our lexicon uses it to connote everything good: Golden Boy, Golden Rule, the Gold Standard, Good as Gold. But how good is it really? This diary starts to explore that question, and the next will finish it up.
Once upon a time, some 750 years BC, legend has it that Bacchus visited a little kingdom in what is now Turkey. It's king was named Midas. Bacchus liked his hospitality, and granted a wish, which we've all heard of. Perhaps he was greedy, or perhaps he was just tired of his people being poor. At any rate, Bacchus allowed him to reverse his wish when turning everything into gold didn't turn out, by bathing in the Pactolus River. His kingdom became rich. And gold washed downstream to the kingdom of Lydia, the first place in the world to issue standard gold coins as currency. This is where we move from legend to recorded history and physical evidence.
Timeline of Important Events in the History of Gold
- 687 BC Lydia originates state-monopoly on gold coinage (from Herodotus)
- 1492 Columbus's first voyage, setting mass looting of New World gold
- 1848 California gold rush
- 1980s Large scale cyanide heap leaching introduced
Purifying the metal from the ore
Because of gold's chemical stability, it takes a little work to separate it from ore-bearing rocks. In earlier days, mercury served the role. Mercury is a heavy metal, persistent in the environment and toxic in various ways. It bioaccumulates in the body. Leftover mercury from gold mining is the primary cause of advisories limiting or forbidding the consumption of fish caught in polluted rivers to this day. 750,000 miles of rivers in the US carry fish advisories due to mercury as well as 13 million acres of lakes. See EPA's Fish Advisories webpage for technical information. Westerners for Responsible Mining as a more user-friendly discussion.
But since the 1980s there's a new kid in town: cyanide. Cyanide is a chemical union of one carbon and one nitrogen atom, held together by a triple bond. The molecule's shape is such that it easily bonds to hemoglobin, the oxygen-bearing pigment in our blood - it's what makes it red. Cyanide binds so well that it doesn't let go, thus starving the body of oxygen. That's why it's toxic.
Tailings
Those are the waste products associated with extracting the metal from the ore. There are other parts of mining. There's tailings, the waste left over after the ore has been processed. In the case of gold, it contains cyanide. While it's true that cyanide will break down, in time, to harmless carbon and nitrogen, that doesn't happen instantly. It remains toxic as cyanide for some time. And, it also forms a variety of complexes with other materials that can later convert back to cyanide. The point being that when environmental monitoring is done for cyanide, it doesn't measure these related cyanide species, so reported results are biased low. Cyanide is toxic for any organism that breathes oxygen, which doesn't rule out much. Not something to welcome to the neighborhood.
Tailings are wet, and generally stored behind a dam to contain them. From time to time, these dams breach. And then there's trouble. More here.
On 30 January 2000, a breach in the tailings dam of the Aurul S.A. Baia Mare Company, released some 100,000 m³ of cyanide-rich tailings waste into the river system near Baia Mare in north west Romania. This spill released an estimated 50-100 tonnes of cyanide, as well as heavy metals, particularly copper, into the Somes, Tisza and finally into the Danube Rivers before reaching the Black Sea.
...
IMPACTS
- Contamination of the Somes/Szamos stream, tributary of the Tisza River
- Contamination and interruption of the drinking water in 24 locations and of 2.5 million people
- Massive fishkill and destruction of aquatic species in the river systems
- Severe negative impact on biodiversity, the rivers' ecosystems, drinking water supply and socio-economic conditions of the local population
- Cleanup costs = N/A
This kind of thing happens routinely on a smaller scale.
Waste Rock and Overburden
Waste rock is that which doesn't have enough gold in it to be worth processes. Waste rock is separated from good ore, and tossed aside in big waste piles. Overburden is similar. For a pit mine, typically the ore body is not right at the surface. So other rock, sometimes hundreds of feet thick, have to be removed to get at the ore. This is the main source of the giant unsightly piles of rock so characteristic of pit mines. Typically, they're piled as steep as they can get, and sometimes have landslides.
This is just regular native rock, so there shouldn't be any toxic problems with it. Right? Wrong. It's been ground up small pieces, allowing air and water into the spaces between all the pieces. Think of it like coffee: You pour hot water over a bunch of coffee beans and not much happens. Grind them up into little bits, and we all know the result. A similar thing happens with these rocks. Typically, one of the elements in those rocks is sulphur, typically in the form of H2S, because it's been locked up deep underground with little exposure to air or water. When air and water happens, the whole business is oxidized, with sulphuric acid H2SO4 being the result:
And therein lies the problem. Sulphuric acid is a strong acid, and dissolves metals out of the rocks as it percolates through them. As in the drawing above, it enters groundwater and eventually makes its way to surface water. In the case of underground mines, the old mineshafts and adits themselves can act as conduits to the toxic water. This water can be as strong as battery acid. I'll spare you a long discussion of all the bad things that happen. The EPA link above can help those wanting more in-depth technical info. Except for catastropic accidents and spills, as described above, acid mine drainage is the primary source of pollution from hard rock mining.
In fact, ore processing for some metals, like copper, mimic acid mine drainage to separate the metal from the ore. The ore is ground up, stacked up into heap leach piles, and processed by adding sulphuric acid. All that extra acid poses environmental threats because it accelerates acid mine drainage when it inevitably migrates through the area surrounding the mine.
About 40% of all headwater streams in the West are impaired (to use EPA language) by acid mine drainage.
The New Gold Rush
From the point of view of gold mining, cyanide was a great technical advance. It can extract gold from low grade ores that couldn't be processed before. Too bad tons and tons of cyanide degrade all living things in the vicinity. Nevada has been particularly active in this new gold rush. The new mines are HUGE, as can be well understood by considering the following:
Nevada is the driest of America's 50 states, so its ecosystems are particularly sensitive to disturbances in its hydrological cycles. And with these gigantic mines, which chew up whole mountains and spit them out, hydrology is inevitably redirected. If the mine digs into a spring, the water is pumped away to keep the mine dry. If it's too dry, water must be pumped in to be used for processing. All this massive gold mining has caused massive disruption for Western Shoshone living in small groups scattered throughout the Nevada countryside.
Carrie Dann, Western Shoshone:
In our traditional way, that our people have told us, the water in the earth's body is like blood in your veins. It's a life system within the earth. And they're taking it out. What's going to happen then? Do you know? Nobody knows!
These two maps show Western Shoshone traditional lands covered by the Ruby Lake Treaty of 1864. Link to larger map showing some of the facilities in Newe Segobia, the Shoshone name for their homeland. Western Shoshone, living in such dry country, traditionally moved around a lot within the territory shown above. At times different small groups scattered to different areas. They all gathered to during the salmon run on the Snake River in Idaho to catch and dry fish. It's not hard to figure see their ancestral lands will be particularly hard hit by the Pombo Amendment sell-off of public lands.
Gold has not been kind to the Western Shoshone. The main overland route for the 49ers followed the Humboldt River across northern Nevada (I-80 follows much of the same route today). From a handful of wagon trains in previous years (such as the Donner party, who had the bad luck to pick a serious El Niño year), and a handful of trappers, over 30,000 forty-niners made their way along the main watercourse in Western Shoshone territory. All those thousands of horses and oxen stripping the landscape of forage, and thus decimating the Shoshone's hunting and gathering. Some of the wagon trains shot at Indians for sport; conflict of various sorts flared up. After a decade of this, the Shoshone were in a lot of trouble. They submitted to the Ruby Lake Treaty in 1863 (ink to full text here). It's terms weren't particularly favorable. But somewhere along the way, all the land got reclassified as National Forest, Bureau of Land Management, National Wildlife Refuge, Area 51, Nuclear Test Range, and so on. There was never a formal transfer of title. Link to larger map showing some of the facilities in Newe Segobia, the Shoshone name for their homeland.
The intent of the treaty was to get the Western Shoshone to take up cattle ranching, and many did. The Dann family obtained land for a ranch under the Homestead Act (below, left). (I'm staying with them as a case study, because it's easier to tell a story with a human face on it.) Today, if you stand where this picture was taken from, and do an about-face, you'll see one of the ten largest working gold mines in the world. And they've got plans for major expansion. The Pombo Amendment pending before Congress this week, will be a big help to the mining companies. I've discussed this amendment in previous diaries and posts here, here, here, here, and here.
Turns out that northeast Nevada is the epicenter of the new gold rush, in a geologic region called the Carlin Trend. If Nevada were a separate country, it would be the second largest producer in the world. 2/3 of all gold mined in the US these days comes from Nevada. Here's a map showing mines around the Dann Ranch:
The old Horse Canyon mine is at a site known as Mt. Tenabo to the Western Shoshone. It's estimated that roughly $10 billion of gold (yes, with a "B") lies within that mountain, which a mining company proposes to grind up into little bits, drizzle with cyanide, and extract the gold. The mountain, of course, has its own traditional meaning. Early maps from the 1860s show a location marked "Shoshone Wells."Here's the mountain from the ground:
The 1872 Mining Act, signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant, is still in force. See the first diary in this series for discussion of its provisions. Its purpose was to promote settlement and development of the west after the Civil War and completion of the first trans-continental railroad. It allows for the sale of public land at $2.50 to $5 per acre. In the Clinton Years, Interior Secretary called a press conference to spotlight the $275 check the government received for a land sale involving millions of dollars of gold. This contributed to a climate where these sales were placed in moratorium. Mines still proceeded on public land, and were thus subject to environmental review under NEPA, NAGPRA, Endangered Species, Clean Water, Clean Air and so on. Pombo's Amendment changes that by again permitting sales, but for $1000 per acre.
Before Pombo, Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-NV) introduced a bill which would make an exception to 1872, and allow sale of 60,000 acres of federal land including Mt. Tenabo at fair market rates. (60k acres is a square about 9.7 miles on a side.) That might amount to $100 per acre, maybe more. At $100, the sale price would be $6 million for $10 BILLION of gold. Not the same bargain as Babbitt protested, but still a pretty good deal. Unlike when oil is extracted, no royalty fees would be required. Presumably Gibbons, who serves on the House Resources Committee which Pombo chairs, had a hand in crafting the Pombo Amendment to the Budget Reconciliation Bill. (The advantage to this approach is that Budget Bills are exempt from filibuster in the Senate.) Consulting the map above, it's pretty clear that Gibbons's mining company "constituents" will be the #1 beneficiaries of the Pombo Amendment boondoggle.
Meanwhile, there's been an ongoing dispute between Western Shoshone ranchers and the Bureau of Land Management. BLM exercises authority over public lands, including grazing leases. It's their contention that Western Shoshones owe millions of dollars in grazing fees for using public land. Only thing is, there's no paper trail documenting the transfer of title. Because it never happened. The Indians contend that they're doing exactly what they agreed to do at the time of the treaty, raising cattle on their traditional lands. They do not recognize the federal government's authority to charge lease fees for them to use their lands. Background: In the 1960s (or so) there was a bizarre court ruling that the Shoshone had lost title to their land through "gradual encroachment".
At that time, Congress passed a bill to compensate them - for most of the state of Nevada (plus) - at the rate of 5 cents per acre. Dirt cheap even compared to 1872 Mining Act prices. They refused to accept it, and the money's been sitting in escrow for all that time. All kinds of efforts to divide and conquer, or ram the settlement down their throats have been attempted since then. At present, with accrued interest, it amounts to (ball park) a one-time cash payment to each Shoshone of $30k. One mid-range heavy duty pick-up. Harry Reid, whom many Kossacks love to love, has led the pack in these efforts since he's been in office.
This matter has been taken to international forums on the grounds of human rights violations perpetrated by the US government. And the Western Shoshone had some rulings in their favor. None of which slowed the BLM down in confiscating a whole bunch of Indian cattle, and most of the Dann's horses which were put up for auction to offset the grazing fees.
So whaddya think? Is this about cattle grazing? Or is it about driving the Indians out so that multi-billion dollar gold mines can proceed without impediment? I think it's the latter, don't you? Did you think the days of dispossessing the Natives is something of the past, long over? Hasn't happened since the 1800s? Sorry, it's time to let go of another illusion about what the US government does in all of our names. I guess this is a good place for a link to the Western Shoshone Defense Project, in case you're disturbed enough about this to want to know more, or even help out.
BTW, I've recommended to YearlyKos that Western Shoshone Defense Project, and a relevant spiritual person, be invited to the gathering in Las Vegas next June. For an invocation (decidedly not affiliated with Jesus), and for a presentation. On the grounds that if you visit a place, you ought to know something about the locals. No telling if anyone with clout will notice. I certainly haven't got any!
Here's a quote from Carrie Dann regarding the land claims and land settlements:
The Indian Claims Commission payment constitutes selling of our Indian lands and destruction of the Indian heritage and culture. No money would ever compensate taking the land from our native people. No race of people has ever sold their homeland. Where will our homeland be if we accept the money? Let us walk with dignity and honor and never as a people without a country.
Of course, there are mining interests elsewhere, too. And corporate cronies all over the place to please. Though I wouldn't be surprised if those mining gold in Nevada haven't found a way for a few $$ to find their way to Pombo. Hopefully, Pombo's vulnerable in `06, due to redistricting, demographic changes in his district, and lack of concern for his constituents compared to the cronies. And judging by the editorials popping up all over the West (kudos to excellent media work being done by mining activists - link here), there's some backlash to his (ahem) crap.
Generally, we expect the Democrats, especially in the Senate, to do the right thing on these matters. In this case, Harry Reid is not the guy I'd prefer to have leading the charge. He has a long record of being in the pocket of mining interests. Dang!!!!
At any rate, there's hope in the House. The GOP hasn't mustered the necessary votes to get pass the bill yet, so there's still a chance to stop it. Could come up as soon as today, so keep your eyes pealed (peeled?!?) for alerts. National Environmental Trust website is a good place to look for the latest on this issue.
Next: The social and economic role of gold, and campaigns addressing a few of its more glaring problems: shareholder activism, No Dirty Gold. It would seem that the "No Summos Pendejos" installment will be coming later.
*Take it from the Indian, sell it to the highest bidder*
...Well, some things never seem to change.
A potential land grab, the likes of which haven't been seen since the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, is upon us. A huge acreage of what remains traditionally Indian land, and yet in many places has seemingly been passed to the public domain as federal trust lands, is slated to be put up for claim and/or sale, if a provision pushed by U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., chair of the House Resources Committee, passes Congress. Pombo's provision, slipped inside a House budget bill, would overturn a congressional ban that has kept both mineral companies and individuals from taking patents on public lands, prohibiting purchases in national forests and parks, for supposed mining purposes.
The new bill would make it legal for anyone to stake out a mining claim on public land and then be allowed to buy it. Pombo is ostensibly revising the 1872 General Mining Law that encouraged easy claims to stimulate westward migration. The loophole would now be expanded by lowering the levels of commercially viable ore that must be present. Ultimately, an estimated 350 million acres of ''public lands,'' much of which is still legitimately Indian land, could pass into private hands, at giveaway prices, under the new provisions. That estimate is more than three times the amount of land lost by Native nations as a result of the allotment acts.
In at least one case, the so-called settling of title with the Western Shoshone via legislative manipulation imposed by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and signed by President Bush allows the possibility of large privatization in that state, where nearly 60 million acres could ultimately be sold to developers. Six of the top 10 present claim-holders are foreign entities, mostly Canadian and Australian mining companies.
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