Links to News Items relelated to Mining in Arizona

The Arizona Republic By Mary Jo Pitzl
ENVIRO GROUP URGES MODERN MINING LAW
May, 2004
"Mining companies control more than 640,000 acres of public land in Arizona, an area half the size of Grand Canyon National Park, but the federal government gets only nominal fees in return, says a group that is pushing to reform the nation's 132-year-old mining law. In a report released earlier this month, titled "Who Owns the West?", the Environmental Working Group uses federal data to support its argument that hard rock mining takes far more from the public domain than it gives. . . ."

Court Rules BLM Can Say NO! to Mines
November 18, 2003
Reno, NV.
"The Bush administration’s interpretation of federal law on hard rock mining was today rejected by the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia. Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr., ruled that the Bureau of Land Management has the authority to and must prevent substantial damage to public lands under the undue or unnecessary degradation (UUD) standard of the Federal Lands Management and Policy Act (FLPMA).

Judge Kennedy issued the order in the lawsuit brought by Great Basin Mine Watch, Mineral Policy Center and Guardians for the Rural Environment (of Arizona) against the Bush Administration’s substantial weakening of President Clinton’s revised mining regulations (the 3809 regulations)."

Links to News Items related to Mining in General

BUSH HANDS MILLION DOLLAR PUBLIC LAND TO MINING COMPANY FOR $875
April, 2004
"Last month the Bush administration handed a multinational mining company 155 acres of federally owned, prime mountaintop real estate near a Colorado ski resort. The price? Just $5 an acre (a total of $875), in an area where 1/10 of an acre fetches as much as $100,000 . . . ."

David James Duncan, New York Times
HOW MUCH GOLD IS A RIVER WORTH?
April, 1997
"The Phelps Dodge Corporation of Arizona, in a joint venture with a Colorado company,
Canyon Resources, wants to mine gold at McDonald Meadows, an eight-square mile site on the upper Blackfoot. Phelps Dodge plans to use trainloads of explosives to turn a riverside butte where elk are now calving into a hole more than a mile in diameter and as deep as the World Trade Center is tall. The only comparable hole in America is the nearby Berkeley Pit in Butte, Mont. -- source of the Clark Fork River Superfund sites that are costing $1 billion and a once-legendary trout stream its life. . . . Phelps Dodge proposes to dry out the Blackfoot pit by lowering the water table of the upper Blackfoot Valley by 1,300 feet. Then it plans to extract millions of tons of rock to reach low-grade ore containing just one-fiftieth of an ounce of gold per ton. . . ."

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