I've been accused of being a raging environmentalist a few times but now I think it's apparently time to relax environmental standards for mining.
There is no point in having the bar on mining development set where it is, when logging can permanently disrupt the landscape on much larger scales with near impunity.
Here in Wells, the contrast between mining and forestry has become a joke... but a bad one.
The gold mine here is, theoretically, under strict environmental control, and frequent inspections by the Ministry of Mines. Although the current minesite is a little bigger than a Walmart parking lot, they're mining in our drinking watershed, so rigorous oversight is even more welcome to me. This mine would also love to expand, and if it did it may even get as big as a single West Fraser clearcut.
The trouble is, this winter, West Fraser Timber removed one-third of the watershed timber supply, without community consultation or addressing flooding concerns. Although it was a shock to the community, and even the mining company, it was left to the mines inspector to be the most disgusted. I can't speak directly for the inspector, but I'm sure that he wondered why he was inspecting the mine for environmental hazards, making sure they had cariboo mitigatation strategies in place, and controlled their watershed impact, while he stood in a logged-out bowl with mud running over improperly installed culverts, creeks logged to the banks, and one third of all the possible cariboo habitat removed in one season's pass. This inspector was bold enough to raise a formal complaint against West Fraser... but logging is not his jurisdiction, after all.
Recently the same local mine entered into a new environmental assessment phase to establish baseline environmental data and, in the case of expansion, monitor their effect over time. At one time I thought this was prudent stewardship and would help the mine to monitor, and prove its impact over time. After all, in this, and every other case, we, the public demand accountability. Establishing baseline environmental data is also a good way for a mine to cover their butt if they need to provide answers in the future.
The typical environmental assessment for mines covers huge areas outside of the actual working mine site, and they even step out of that immediate area to measure comparative data, in other watersheds, over time, to see if change is the result of mining or other factors. In this case, they can't do their job because the landscape on Cow and Barkerville Mountain is about to become so altered by logging, and future logging, that the baseline data will be virtually meaningless, and the mining impact will be inconsequential. This is not just about cariboo habitat, but fishbearing streams, small mammal and amphibian species, and even tourism and public access to safe drinking water.
Don't just blame industrial logging giants like West Fraser for the problem. B.C. Timber Sales, the arm of government which, theoretically, directly manages our forests in our public interest is also mocking the environmental scrutiny that mines undergo. They recently provided our community with the most amateur set of fuzzy maps, misnamed land use zones, and double named cutblocks, combined with low resolution, 10-year-old Google Earth images to invite public comment on future cutblocks.
It could easily be construed that they are hoping that the confusion would stifle comment. It certainly worked at least once before. Then, they managed to defy the spirit of the six years of negotiations it took to create a Quesnel Land Use Plan and drop a cut block right into the center of our viewscape in a land-use hole. That hole, ironically, was created because mining interests trumps land use planning, and so this patch had to be left unprotected for future potential mining. Now, even the mine (also unaware of the cutblock) is alarmed because, if the logging goes ahead, the runoff changes will directly impact a toxic but currently stable tailings pond on the edge of the community, for which the mine has liability.
My question is simple.
Why do we care about mines, when timber harvesting can threaten our tourism values, our watersheds, and years of community consultation to establish forest use goals through the Land and Resource Management Plan? Why demand mining companies engage in long and expensive impact studies and then think it's okay for forest companies and the forests ministry to pay lip service to the same process regarding decisions that include permanent road construction and giant areas of habitat disruption with endless 120-year cycles? Frankly, these landscape impact cycles are much longer than the lifetime and landscape rehabilitation times of most mine sites.
Today, you can not see the complete deforestation and devastation caused by placer miners in the 1800s and early 1900s, but we will live with the impact of clear cuts forever, as rotational cycles endlessly revisit watersheds to disrupt theoretically successfully regenerated stands.
I understand that the Forest Practices Code is meant to provide checks and balances, and that people even label forestry as renewable and sustainable but when a government mines inspector questions the value of his contribution to enforcement in the face of the vast impact of logging, and when the value of the independent environmental assessment of mining is made redundant by forestry practices, then it's time to stop and assess what our goals really are.
Piecemeal, project by project, impact assessments have gone the way of the dinosaur. If we can't be bothered to hold forestry's total landscape alteration practices to the same rigorous standards of public consultation and environmental planning to which we insist on holding mining companies, then why care about mining?
Dave Jorgenson, Wells
