Norton reinstates mine waste policy

[SoCalDem]

Norton reinstates mine waste policy

http://www.montanaforum.com/rednews/2003/10/27/build/mining/wastepolicy.php?nnn=6

By SCOTT SONNER
Associated Press

RENO, Nev. – A law that has regulated the mining industry since the Civil War is at the center of a modern dispute between miners and environmentalists who say it has outlived its time. Environmental groups say the General Mining Law of 1872 has no business guiding hardrock mining on federal lands long after the miners have traded picks and shovels for dynamite and dump trucks. Interior Secretary Gale Norton stepped into the fight last week by abandoning a controversial legal opinion adopted under the Clinton administration known as the “Leshy opinion.”


Mining companies and congressional allies said new mining on federal lands had come to a virtual standstill as a result of the opinion – named after John Leshy, the former Interior solicitor general who wrote it in 1997. Leshy’s interpretation of the General Mining Law dramatically reduced the amount of public land the government allowed a mine to use to store toxic waste without obtaining special permission from the Bureau of Land Management. Depending on whom you ask, it either overturned more than 120 years of traditional enforcement of the mining law, or, for the first time interpreted the 19th-century legislation correctly. “With the stroke of a pen, the solicitor reversed a century of settled law and mining practice, but failed to identify any compelling public interest that would be served by upsetting the status quo,” said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

...snip.....

“It puts clean water and community health at increased risk, with an open invitation to dump massive quantities of toxic mining waste on unlimited amounts of our public lands,” said Steve D’Esposito of the Mineral Policy Center, a nonprofit environmental watchdog group in Washington, D.C.


...snip.....

“It gives the mining industry what it has always wanted, which is essentially the right to get – without any veto threat from the secretary of Interior – an unlimited amount of public land for their waste dumps,” Leshy said from San Francisco, where he now is a professor at the University of California’s Hastings Law School.


Copyright © 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


Monday, October 27, 2003

[dusty64]

1. Great, the assault on the Earth

continues and the People don't have a clue.