Poisoned Snow Geese in Butte: the New “Canaries” Warning Us Humans About the Toxic Nature of Copper Mining

< <<Why Depleted Copper Mines are Common EPA Superfund Sites>>>

As is true for most copper mines around the world, the Berkeley Pit contains toxic levels of mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, copper, zinc and iron. Each dangerous metal ion was once safely in the ground in the form of a relatively inert metal sulfide – until it was ground up and exposed to oxygen and water. Sulfur-containing ore, when exposed to oxygen and water (as in a rainstorm), readily turns into sulfuric acid (H2SO4).

Clean-up responsibility for the massive pollution problem in Butte has been assumed by the EPA as a Superfund site, which is not fully funded by the under-regulated mining companies that created the problem in the first place. Remediation costs are so astronomical that mining companies could never be expected to voluntarily set aside large enough escrow accounts to pay for real clean-up.

With all the sulfuric acid being produced, most copper mine effluent has a pH of 2.5 – the acidity of gastric acid! Such acidity is incompatible with aquatic animal or plant life, and it can cause severe mouth and esophageal burns when swallowed. Even more problematic than the acidity is the metallic content of the water, which includes the aforementioned heavy metals such as mercury, lead, arsenic and cadmium.

The mouth of British Columbia’s Hazeltine Creek below Mount Polley’s copper mine (normally 6 feet across) after the massive sudden discharge of millions of gallons of toxic tailings flowed into Quesnal Lake. The tan objects floating in the lake are millions of uprooted pine trees

A typical example of a copper mine mega-flood happened on August 4, 2014 at Mount Polley’s tailings pond in British Columbia. It was called the worst environmental disaster in Canadian history. As far as I was able to ascertain, the disaster was never reported in the media of my region of northern Minnesota. The water-soaked earthen dam broke and poured millions of gallons of toxic waste directly into the previously pristine Quesnal Lake and soon thereafter into the Fraser River that flows to the Pacific Ocean (see aerial video footage of the disaster at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-mines-inspector-makes-19-recommendations-over-collapse-of-tailings-pond/article27818772/).

The two Penny Stock mining companies (PolyMet and Twin Metals) that are making so much noise about wanting to mine low grade copper ore and precious metals in northern Minnesota will need to construct large tailings ponds, utilizing earthen dams. One of these dams will be located near the pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area that flows north, and the other will be at the headwaters of the St. Louis River, which flows south into the western tip of Lake Superior. If such tailings ponds suddenly break during a torrential or a prolonged rain event, catastrophic flooding could occur, permanently polluting everything downstream with the tailings toxins, with serious consequences for children and other living things downstream including fish, fowl and wild rice beds.

I have written about some mining catastrophes in previous Duty to Warn columns. A good place to start would be at: http://www.duluthreader.com/articles/2016/01/14/6559_the_polymet_projects_tailings_pond_could_someday)

In the mainstream media, mining disaster stories are rarely covered in the media. If they are dealt with at all, they are not covered in any meaningful way. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to answer the question “why aren’t they covered?” One only has to take note of the fact that big polluting corporations shell out serious advertising money with the expectation that the publishers and editors will be giving them favorable coverage – or else. Simultaneously, the absence of hard-hitting journalism will create readers that will eventually come to believe that even obviously amoral or even cunning and criminal corporations are actually good citizens because they sponsoring our favorite TV shows and sports events. The tactic is called “green-washing”.

< <<The Foreign Penny Stock Companies PolyMet and Twin Metals Want to Mine Copper in Northern Minnesota>>>

I hope that all politicians, journalists and investors who are capable of unbiased critical thinking will do the right thing and listen to reason when they hear the pro-sulfide mining hype that is coming from the two Canadian Penny Stock Junior mining companies (PolyMet and Twin Metals). Despite never having done any mining before, they are both being allowed to fast-track the approval process to start mining copper (and building tailings ponds) in northern Minnesota. Both of these paper companies are obviously  “wagging the dog”, with shady deals with large foreign multinational corporations waiting in the wings to buy the companies and take over the mines.

Montana Resources is the mining company that currently operates an open pit mine not far from the Berkeley Pit. It is called the Continental Pit. It continues to pump both tailings and waste water from the pit into the already toxic, benignly-titled, Yankee Doodle Tailings Pond.

Lime rock is added regularly to the slurry in the pond in order to artificially create a neutral pH, thus mitigating what is called acid mine drainage. However, the lime does nothing to mitigate the lethality of the heavy metals that will permanently remain both in the toxic sludge at the bottom of the pond and in the water above.

One can be certain that, when Montana Resources has finished with the Continental Pit, it will – along with the Berkeley Pit – become just another EPA taxpayer-funded Superfund site.

Montana and Butte will be on their own if the Trump administration succeeds in its anti-environmental agenda. Scott Pruitt, climate change denier and Trump’s nominee to head the EPA, will surely cripple many of the EPA’s functions, including the Superfund management duties.

(Incidentally, Montana voters voted for Trump by a 56% to 36% margin, but its duped citizens surely did not think that they were voting to make the state unlivable for the children in the vicinity of Montana’s 19 Superfund sites.

To check on EPA Superfund sites (all of which seem to have been created by corporations, US military bases or municipalities), go to:

https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-you-live

On that site you will note that Montana has 19 high-priority Superfund pollution sites, Wisconsin has 55 and Minnesota has 46.

< <<What Needs to be Done With Corporate Sociopaths?>>>

Most corporations, especially the multinational ones, meet the definition of sociopathic personality disorder, and so, given that their purpose is to greedily maximize shareholder value at all costs, they cannot be expected to do anything for the common good. Doing something for the common good is good socialism but bad capitalism.

Therefore a different standard needs to be applied to sociopaths. Historically, the executives of for-profit corporations never get punished when they commit crimes – except for the easily affordable “wrist slap” fines that governments occasionally impose – which corporations regard as simply one of the costs of doing business.

Sociopathic corporations – just like their human counterparts – tend to be conscienceless predators, exploiters and serial liars. They are fully capable of doing criminal deeds while simultaneously feeling no guilt or remorse for perpetrating them. Human sociopaths are incurable and therefore the dangerous ones need to be removed from civilized society and even locked up. It is my considered opinion that sociopathic corporations that commit homicidal acts, deserve capital punishment for their capital crimes, simply to defend innocent folks trying to live in a civilized society. It is the nature of dog-eat-dog predators in our uber-capitalist society to beat up, exploit and consume their competitors. It seems that they can’t quit unless there is force involved.

(Parenthetically, I have to say that I am against the death penalty for human beings, but I am for the death penalty for inanimate homicidally-criminal corporations. I also think that “guilty until proven innocent” should be the norm for corporations that are inherently anti-democratic whenever they are just suspected of criminal behavior. In my opinion, such anti-democratic entitles do not deserve the democratic privilege of being considered “innocent until proven guilty”.)

And that goes for mining corporations. Therefore I call on all people of conscience at all levels of society to act to protect the planet from corporate exploiters, predators and destroyers. The snow geese would agree.

Acknowledging the Crimes Against Humanity Committed Against Indigenous Peoples by Mining Companies Through the Ages>>>

Indigenous people who have lived for generations on land where extractable resources have been discovered are likely to be “disappeared” from those homelands by mining companies – by any means necessary – with lots of high-priced lawyers and obedient cops backing up the ruthless corporations. Forcible re-location of aboriginals is often done with the willing assistance of military and paramilitary groups in addition to industry-bribed legislators.

In third world countries, union organizers and investigative journalists are often intimidated, tortured or murdered when they try to unionize their fellow mine workers or when altruistic journalists try to expose the criminality of certain corporations in their media outlets.

Most mining accidents are illegally covered-up by the mining corporations themselves. But some of those accidents are so catastrophic that they can’t be totally swept under the rug, but even the catastrophic ones can still be censored out of the public consciousness by half-hearted news coverage – thanks to the semi-censorship tactics of our industry-controlled media.

Sociopaths and those with financial or professional conflicts of interest are incapable of heeding the tragic lessons of under-regulated industries that cavalierly and knowingly poison the air, water and soil and the living things that depend on them. Non-sociopaths, even politicians that are under the influence of cunning corporate lobbyists, should somehow be able to understand that future generations – including their own children and grandchildren – need nontoxic air, water, soil and food in order to survive and thrive.

I call on all people of conscience at all levels of society to act to protect the planet from corporate exploiters, predators and destroyers.

The surviving snow geese of the western US and Canada would agree.

By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters (Snow geeseUploaded by Dolovis) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

This article (Poisoned Snow Geese in Butte: the New “Canaries” Warning us Humans About the Toxic Nature of Copper Mining) was submitted by Dr. Gary Kohls as a special to Natural Blaze and appears here courtesy of the author.

Dr. Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. He is a contributor to the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. While running his own clinic, he taught a graduate level course, The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection, at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He now gives occasional presentations to the public and to healthcare professionals for CEU credits and writes a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. Many of Dr Kohls’ columns are archived HERE or https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles