Strong mining rules a necessity, not a nuisance
To the editor:
I am trying very hard not to be a “nimby” (Not In My Back Yard). While I make the personal choice to eschew cell phones, television sets, and other electronic devices with their demand for toxic heavy metals, I am not such a purist as to give up on the metal bits that make up my car or the eyelets on my boots.
Everyone uses metal products, so everyone has skin in the game with regard to extracting metal from the earth. It is true that “someone” needs to live next door to mining operations in order for us to live the way we do. Selection of that someone should not be “ABM” (Anybody But Me).
However, I have had the experience of living in northwest Pennsylvania. Though the mines were spent decades ago, it is clearly obvious from looking at the landscape left behind that the land is ruined. There is no commercially viable agriculture or forestry over the entire mountain ridge. Slag heaps are covered with a few inches of soil that lack the capacity to sustain more than weeds and spindly “Dr. Seuss trees.” The mining companies that extracted the saleable ore are long gone, taking their profits and jobs with them; the mountain towns are peopled with residents too poor to leave.
I am assured that mining has changed since those coal mines were active, that legal protections are in place to make the desolation and decimation I describe a thing of the past. I am told that what happened to the coal miners in PA could not possibly happen to the truck drivers, loggers, and sportsmen who populate northern Maine. I am asked to trust that mining companies will do the right thing.
Without pointing fingers or casting aspersions, I will note that I have not noticed corporations to be terribly good at policing themselves. I am clearly not the only individual who harbors this impression, else we would not have mining regulations, a Clean Water Act, or a Superfund to respond to past ecological disasters when the creators of those messes are long gone or bankrupt.
It falls to us, the residents of Maine, to protect the miracle that is the back yard for me and for fellow Mainers. To accomplish this, we trust organizations like the Environmental Protection Agency to be our front line, to strengthen rather than weaken, protections already in place. We trust out representatives in the Legislature to remain focused on our needs, to hold the line on depredation of our landscape for short-term gains. I ask you to strengthen, rather than weaken, the laws that protect our home, to demand long-term, extra-strength commitments from mining companies backed by funds held “in escrow” into perpetuity. If the mining enterprise is not financially able to give us the assurances we need, perhaps that is an indication that the plan to mine is inappropriate, that the financial gain is not supported by the possible loss. If this is the case, the planned mine should not be allowed to go forward.
Catherine Anne Chase
Ashland
