Photo: Lori Andresen

Not surprisingly, the Clean Water Act loopholes have harmed communities and wildlife that depend on the waters poisoned by mining pollution.  Last month, National Wildlife Federation (NWF) released a new report, Honoring the River: How Hardrock Mining Impacts Tribal Communities, which describes the particularly negative effects of mining pollution on the nation’s tribal communities.

What is surprising is how little attention has been paid to this issue.  According to EPA, mining is the number one source of toxic pollution in this country.  In Representative Grijalva’s home state of Arizona, there are more than 24,000 abandoned mine sites.  This is a huge problem that can be readily addressed with simple changes to agency regulations—yet the Administration has done nothing.

The truth is that mines are generally located in remote places and the communities most affected by them are often small, with little political and economic clout.  The dangerous waste disposal practices that are authorized by the Clean Water Act loopholes would never be tolerated if mines were located near Chicago or Boston. Unfortunately, “out of sight, out of mind.”

This is why NWF is so pleased to see a letter from members of Congress drawing attention to the two Clean Water Act loopholes.  As Representative Holt said in a press release,

“Too often mining companies are given sweetheart deals at the expense of local communities and the environment.  The Clean Water Act loopholes addressed in this letter can and should be fixed administratively.  Expedited action will help to ensure that low-income and native communities are protected from unsafe drinking water that has been tainted by toxic mining waste.”

Thank you Representatives Grijalva, Holt, Hanabusa, Conyers, Edwards, Hastings, Honda, Huffman, Lee, Pocan, Polis,  Schakowsky, Slaughter, and Tonko.

Tweet it! Thanks @RepRaulGrijalva for speaking up to protect our waters from toxic mine waste: bit.ly/198lC1A @EPAgov @WhiteHouseCEQ @USACE_HQ

 
Urge the EPA and Army Corps to stop Big Mining from using our waters as industrial waste dumps.

Photo: Colin Ruggiero

New NWF Report Tells Story of Mining and Tribes

The National Wildlife Federation has just released a new report, Honoring the River: How Hardrock Mining Impacts Tribal Communities, which tells the story of mining and tribes, from the checkered history of federal legislation allowing mining companies to lease minerals on tribal lands—often without tribal consent—to the many new mines being proposed near tribal communities and lands.

Photo: Earthworks

One of the key points of the report is that tribes view water as sacred, something to be honored. Our government could certainly learn from this perspective. Despite its commitment to clean water and environmental justice, the Administration has been slow to make the relatively simple rule changes needed to close the loopholes in the Clean Water Act. It hasn’t honored the river.

Tribes Speak Out Against Mining

Even as tribes continue to suffer from poisoned rivers, contaminated sacred sites, and other devastation caused by old and abandoned mines, they face a new round of threats. Mines are being proposed from Alaska’s Bristol Bay, a watershed that supports the greatest remaining runs of wild sockeye salmon on earth, to the Great Lakes basin, which contains 84 percent of North America’s supply of fresh surface water.

Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Chairman Mike Wiggins is fighting to stop the permitting of the largest iron-ore, open-pit mine in the world slated for the headwaters of the Bad River, six miles from the reservation border in northern Wisconsin ceded territory. The Gogebic Taconite mine’s proposed location threatens the Kakagon and Bad River Sloughs, a 16,000-acre wetland complex at the mouths of the two rivers that contains valuable flora and fauna, including wild rice beds of cultural significance to the tribes. These resources are within the Bad River Reservation and contain 40 percent of the Lake Superior Basin coastal wetlands.

“This ecosystem is as good as what we have left in the state and in the world. We all have an impact on the environment. We really have to humble ourselves. Environmental stewardship is a sacrifice.”

-Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Chairman Mike Wiggins

We may not be able to undo all of the inequities of the past, but we can learn from the original stewards of the land and require mines to operate responsibly. Surely nobody can argue that mines should be able to store untreated industrial waste in living waters. Closing the mining loopholes would not stop hardrock mining, but it would help protect tribal communities, all of our communities, from the chemicals, heavy metals, and acid mine drainage produced by modern mines.

Urge the EPA and Army Corps to close these mining loopholes to protect our nation’s waters and wildlife.

The CWA reflects a number of national policies, but one of the most fundamental is that we will no longer allow our waters to be treated as industrial waste dumps.  By many measures, the act has been a profound success.  Rivers no longer catch on fire and pipes spewing untreated waste directly into the nearest waterway are no longer common sights.

Unfortunately, one industry has refused to move with the times. Hardrock mining companies are regularly taking advantage of two loopholes in the CWA in order to store millions of tons of untreated waste in our wetlands, streams, and lakes–a practice that is tolerated only because most mines are developed in rural areas with limited economic alternatives or political clout.

Lower Slate Lake in Alaska, before and after the Kensington gold mine waste dumping (photo on left: Irene Alexakos; on right: Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation).

While storing tailings in the nation’s waters is convenient for mining companies, it is not a necessary way of doing business. Almost 30 years ago, EPA found that mines could operate profitably without discharging their untreated wastes into waters. The agency adopted strict pollution standards which, if enforced today, would prohibit many of the mining industry’s most harmful practices.

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful 40th birthday present if EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers used their authority to close the two loopholes in the Clean Water Act that allow hardrock mines to ignore decades-old pollution standards and poison our waters?

Isn’t it time that the hardrock mining industry was required to play by the same CWA rules as everyone else?

Urge the EPA and Army Corps to protect our nation’s waters and wildlife from toxic mine pollution.

Shane Rucker: Wisconsin Natural Resources

Iron mining has long been a fixture of the Great Lakes economy. However, sulfide mining is nothing like iron mining. Sulfide mining is the mining of metals such as copper, lead, nickel, and zinc from sulfide ore bodies. When sulfide ores in tailings or waste rock are exposed to air and water, they oxidize to form sulfuric acid which in turn dissolves heavy metals such arsenic, lead, and mercury. The increased acidity and dissolved metals from mine waste and runoff poison plants, fish, and wildlife.

Mines in the western U.S. have been cited for hundreds of violations of the Clean Water Act and mines that have not caused water quality problems are rare as hens’ teeth.

State Laws Not up to the Task of Protecting the Great Lake’s Water and Communities

Nickel may demand $17,000 a ton, but water is unquestionably the Great Lakes’ most precious resource.  The Great Lakes are the largest surface freshwater system on earth, accounting for about 84% of North America’s surface fresh water.  In an era of increasing global demand for fresh water, the purity of the water in the Great Lakes basin is a matter of global significance.

Unfortunately, weak laws and lax enforcement in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Canadian province of Ontario leave the Great Lakes vulnerable to the adverse effects of sulfide mining.  A new report prepared by National Wildlife Federation and Ecojustice Canada finds that state and provincial laws, regulations, and resources are grossly insufficient to adequately regulate the onslaught of new sulfide mines.

What’s even more alarming is that no one is looking at the cumulative effects of these mines.  The Great Lakes basin is a single, incredibly important ecosystem, but sulfide mining is being regulated by different political entities with different jurisdictions and inconsistent laws and environmental policies.

The Feds Need to Step Up

Ultimately, we need to strengthen state management of sulfide mining.  In the short term, the federal government needs to fill in the gaps where the states are falling short.  There are two things federal agencies can do right now to help protect the waters and people of the Great Lakes region.

1.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Army Corps of Engineers should revise the Clean Water Act’s regulations to prohibit sulfide mines from using wetlands, streams, and other waters as dump sites for mining waste, a practice that is currently rampant within the industry.  Regardless of the merits of an individual mine, it is just common sense that untreated mining waste should never be dumped into natural waters.
2. EPA should conduct a scientific analysis of the Great Lakes basin, similar to the agency’s recently-released assessment of large-scale mining in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, to determine how sulfide mines, individually and cumulatively, may affect the water quality, aquatic ecosystems, fish, wildlife, and human inhabitants of the region.

Urge the EPA to protect our nation’s waters and wildlife from toxic mine pollution.

Bristol Bay supports the largest runs of wild sockeye salmon in the world, a historic complement of other wildlife species, and more than two dozen Alaska Native communities that have maintained a salmon-based culture for at least 4,000 years. According to EPA, the watershed is exceptional because of its high-quality, diverse and free-flowing aquatic habitats.

Bristol Bay also contains large deposits of copper, gold and other minerals which have attracted the interest of mining corporations. The Pebble Partnership has proposed the controversial Pebble mine, but there are other potential mining sites in the region, including several adjacent to the Pebble development. The Pebble mine, the first of this new generation, would be the largest open pit mine in North America and would churn out over a billion tons of mining waste.

After reviewing the data, EPA concluded that large-scale mining would have significant impacts on salmon and salmon habitat in the vicinity of the mines. EPA’s finding was hardly a surprise to anyone familiar with the dismal environmental track record of the hardrock mining industry or the richness and fragility of the Bristol Bay watershed. What was unexpected was how deftly EPA framed the debate.

The arguments about Pebble and other large mines tend to revolve around “what ifs.” What if one of the massive tailings dams collapsed and sent a tidal wave of toxic waste down the watershed? What if industry applied state-of-the-art technologies and avoided the problems seen in older mines?

EPA addressed these “what ifs” but first reminded us that there is a more fundamental question: even if there is no human or engineering failure, is it worth developing Pebble and other large mines if it means losing extensive areas of important aquatic habitat? According to the risk assessment, the construction and routine operations of one Pebble-like mine would destroy between 55 and 87 miles of streams and between 2,512 and 4,386 acres of wetlands. These are huge numbers and essentially represent the inevitable cost of developing large mines in a region laced by a system of prolific wetlands, streams and rivers.

So, is it worth degrading the sustainable salmon fishery, rich wildlife, and Native cultures of Bristol Bay in order to develop mines that will play out in decades? Not to me or approximately 80% of the residents of the watershed. Even if I assume that mining companies could do things like build tailings reservoirs that last forever, the unavoidable destruction of aquatic ecosystems due to construction and routine operations–in this unique region–is too great to justify.

My hat’s off to EPA for conducting this rigorous assessment. Now I urge the agency to use its discretion under the Clean Water Act and take the steps needed to protect the public’s interest in the waters, fish, wildlife and communities of Bristol Bay.  At least in this instance, large-scale mining isn’t worth the tradeoff.

Urge the EPA to protect our nation’s waters and wildlife from toxic mine pollution.

The Pebble gold and copper mine is planned for the headwaters of Bristol Bay's best wild salmon rivers.

Metal prices are on a tear. Both gold and silver prices recently hit all-time highs. While this is good news for investors, it should alarm anyone who cares about clean water and wildlife.

That’s because these soaring prices have caused a surge of new hard rock mining claims, bringing with them a multitude of threats to our nation’s water and wildlife.

Hard Rock Mining a Toxic and Destructive Force on Ecosystems

The hard rock mining industry is the single largest source of toxic waste and one of the most destructive industries in the country.  Today’s industrial-strength mining involves the blasting, excavating, and crushing of thousands of acres of land and the use of huge quantities of toxic chemicals such as cyanide and sulfuric acid.

The mines that produce our gold, silver, and copper are notorious for polluting adjacent streams, wetlands, and groundwater with toxic by-products. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 40% of the watersheds in the western U.S. are contaminated by pollution from hard rock mines.

New Mine Could Threaten Wild Sockeye Salmon Run

Record metal prices, coupled with new technologies, allow the mining industry to develop in places–and at a scale–that would not have been feasible in the past. The Pebble Partnership, for example, is proposing to build North America’s largest copper and gold mine in the remote headwaters of Alaska’s Bristol Bay, the source of the greatest runs of wild sockeye salmon left on earth. This project would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago.

Closing Loopholes to Protect America’s Waters

The good news for people who care about pure water and abundant wildlife is that the Clean Water Act could prevent many of the most destructive practices of hard rock mines. With a simple rule change, EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) could close two “loopholes” in this critical law that allow many large hard rock mines to dump their tailings and other wastes into the nearest lake or river.

Earlier this year, the agencies seemed poised to make exactly this change. President Obama had made a strong public commitment to protecting the nation’s waters and EPA and the Corps had discussed specific regulatory language. Unfortunately, Administration progress on clean water has been slow going, mired in budget battles and a barrage of industry lobby attacks.

But, it’s not too late. There is still time to restore Clean Water Act protections for embattled western streams and close the loopholes that allow mines, such as Pebble Mine, to legally poison our waters. Mining wastes threaten the nation’s wildlife and community health. If we don’t take immediate action, soaring metal prices will only make the situation worse.