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Mining Conflict and Opposition

West Virginia’s Mine Wars

This article is from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History website: http://www.wvculture.org/index.aspx

Compiled by the West Virginia State Archives

On March 12, 1883, the first carload of coal was transported from Pocahontas in Tazewell County, Virginia, on the Norfolk and Western Railway. This new railroad opened a gateway to the untapped coalfields of southwestern West Virginia, precipitating a dramatic population increase. Virtually overnight, new towns were created as the region was transformed from an agricultural to industrial economy.

With the lure of good wages and inexpensive housing, thousands of European immigrants rushed into southern West Virginia. In addition, a large number of African Americans migrated from the southern states. The McDowell County black population alone increased from 0.1 percent in 1880 to 30.7 percent in 1910.

Most of these new West Virginians soon became part of an economic system controlled by the coal industry. Miners worked in company mines with company tools and equipment, which they were required to lease. The rent for company housing and cost of items from the company store were deducted from their pay. The stores themselves charged over-inflated prices, since there was no alternative for purchasing goods.

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Harlan County, USA (Mining Documentary – 1976)

This information is from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Harlan County, USA is an Oscar-winning 1976 documentary film covering the “Brookside Strike”,[1] an effort of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company’s Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1973.[2] Directed by Barbara Kopple, who has long been an advocate of workers’ rights, Harlan County, U.S.A. is less ambivalent in its attitude toward unions than her later American Dream, the account of the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota in 1985-86.

Synopsis

Kopple initially intended to make a film about Kenzie, Miners for Democracy and the attempt to unseat Tony Boyle. When miners at the Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky, struck in June 1972, Kopple went there to film the strike against Duke Power Company and UMWA’s response (or lack thereof). The strike proved a more interesting subject, so Kopple switched the focus of her film.

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The Windy Craggy Experience (British Columbia Mining History) – by Mary Page Webster (Fraser Institute – undated)

This article came from the Fraser Institue website: http://www.fraserinstitute.org/

I first learned of the Windy Craggy copper-cobalt deposit when I was a student working towards my degree in Geology. Geddes Resources Ltd. was exploring the property and the president of Geddes (my father) showed me some surface samples. The massive sulphides in the samples indicated that Windy Craggy was one of the most important mineral finds in North America.

Windy Craggy is in the Tatshenshini Area of Northwestern British Columbia, about an hour west of Whitehorse by helicopter. The area is isolated with no ready surface access, and no permanent residents. It is not prime hunting and fishing territory. In fact, the only person working a trapline in the area at the time it was explored was a man named Yurg Hoffer, who had emigrated from Switzerland. His trapline extended along the west side of the Haines Road from about the Yukon Border to the Alaska border near Haines—a distance of about 40 miles. The scenery in the area is typical of the Rocky Mountains which extend northwest through Alaska, and south through the western United States and into Mexico.

My first visit to Windy Craggy was as part of an exploration team several years after I graduated. I spent much of the next 10 years working in the area, including in the Yukon and BC. For four of these years I was exploration manager for Geddes Resources.

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Quebec risks driving away mining investment with Bill 14 – by Jean-Francois Minardi (Fraser Forum – January/February 2012)

This article came from the Fraser Institute website: http://www.fraserinstitute.org/

Until recently, mining executives around the world saw Quebec as having the best policy environment for mining investment (McMahon and Cervantes, 2010). This is mainly thanks to a predictable regulatory
environment, the absence of territorial claims in Northern Quebec, high quality geo-scientific data easily accessible to miners, good infrastructure, a skilled workforce, and an attractive mining tax system (McMahon and Cervantes, 2011).

But with the introduction of Bill 14, tabled on May 12, 2011 to amend Quebec’s Mining Act, the province is now poised to introduce a high level of uncertainty that may scare investors away and seriously damage the policy attractiveness of Quebec to mining investors.

Bill 14 gives additional power to municipalities to control mining activities in their territories. But giving municipalities control over where and how mining can take place sidelines the provincial government as the sole mining regulator and runs the risk of erecting multiple barriers to mining investment, investment that creates well-paying jobs in many Quebec communities.

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NEWS RELEASE: MiningWatch Canada Welcomes Drummond Commission’s Recommendation to Examine Mining Taxes

Thursday, February 16, 2012

(Ottawa) For over a decade, MiningWatch Canada has been saying that Ontarians should be getting a better share of the resource wealth that is extracted in the province. The coalition of social justice, environmental and Indigenous groups welcomed the recommendation to eliminate a key tax break for mining companies and to review the mining tax system in the recently released report from the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services, chaired by Donald Drummond.

The report recommends that the province “eliminate the Ontario resource tax credit and review the mining tax system to ensure that the province is supporting the exploration and production of minerals in Ontario while receiving a fair return on its natural resources.”

“Given the province’s economic situation and the current growth in the mining sector, this is an important recommendation that the government should definitely implement in this year’s budget,” urged Ramsey Hart, Canada Program Coordinator at MiningWatch Canada.

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Plan Nord Under the Microscope – by Frédéric Dubois (The Dominion – Janurary 9, 2012)

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/

Public involvement in diamond venture ends once gems are found

MONTREAL—Since the mid 1900s, every man, woman and child living in Quebec has donated the equivalent of $20 towards exploration costs for the province’s first diamond mine project. But when a mine was finally discovered and the promised rewards for years of the province’s investment began to be realized, the Quebec government sold the project to a private company. Not only that, but Quebeckers can expect to shell out even more as the now privately owned mine moves towards production.

According to documents obtained by The Dominion, all that’s left for the public after they invested over $157 million in the Renard Diamond Project is a 37 per cent stake in a private company, and token public representation on the company’s board of directors.

The diamond mine is today being hailed as a model operation by the Quebec government. But a deeper look into what this model would mean for Quebeckers casts a long shadow over the government’s economic policies.

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Southerners need to learn of folly of caribou plan – Wayne Snider (Timmins Daily Press – February 22, 2012)

The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper. Wayne Snider is the paper’s city editor.

Time is at hand for NEOMA to step up lobbying efforts

It’s great to see that our leaders in Northern Ontario are switching into overdrive when it comes to lobbying. Members of the Northeastern Ontario Municipal Association (NEOMA) have a special subcomittee set up to look at ways to get the North’s voice heard in the corridors of power at Queen’s Park.

The most pressing issue right now is the caribou protection plan, pushed through by the government under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

If the plan goes through as currently structured, 65% of the Abitibi River forest will be off limits to industry within the next 20 years.

That means wood allocation for forest companies would drop significantly, leading to the closure of many regional operations.

NEOMA — which is comprised of mayors and council members from municipalities across the Northeast — realizes this would be a catastrophic blow to the region’s economy, creating massive job losses and jeopardizing not only the standard of living but the Northern lifestyle.

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Audacious Environmental Hypocrisy: James Cameron – Grow Up – by Ann McElhinney (BigHollywood.brietbart.com – February 24, 2010)

Beautiful but Dangerous Avatar – Ann McElhinney’s You-Tube posting speech, above is from the conservative CPAC convention (February 2, 2010).  Ann McElhinney, the director of “Not Evil Just Wrong” and “Mine Your Own Business” speaks about anti-development bias in James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar and about environmental indoctrination in public education system in US.

This column below is from: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/

Ann McElhinney is a conservative documentary film director and producer.

I thought Avatar was a great film, beautiful even.  Cameron is such a good story teller he even had me rooting for the blue rain forest people and wishing death on all the appalling Americans in final battle scene.
 
But seriously, James Cameron grow up. Avatar is an anti-mining, anti resource development rant worthy of a not very clever spotty undergraduate.

James Cameron is a self confessed unrepentant greenie, and in the world he creates mining is evil and life in the rain forest is just spiffing. So lets throw a few facts in the way of Cameron’s gorgeous but idiotic narrative.

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Avatar activism: Pick your protest – by Henry Jenkins (Globe and Mail – September 18, 2010)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of communication, journalism and cinematic arts at the University of Southern California and the author of Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

Five Palestinian, Israeli and international activists painted themselves blue to resemble the Na’vi from James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar in February, and marched through the occupied village of Bil’in. The Israeli military used tear gas and sound bombs on the azure-skinned protesters, who wore traditional kaffiyehs with their Na’vi tails and pointy ears.

The camcorder footage of the incident was juxtaposed with borrowed shots from the film and circulated on YouTube. We hear the movie characters proclaim: “We will show the Sky People that they cannot take whatever they want! This, this is our land!”

The event is a reminder of how people around the world are mobilizing icons and myths from popular culture as resources for political speech, which we can call “Avatar activism.” Even relatively apolitical critics for local newspapers recognized that Avatar spoke to contemporary political concerns.

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Avatar as a criticism of mining or a reflection of deep cultural memory – by Jack Caldwell (I Think Mining.com – January 4, 2010)

http://ithinkmining.com/

My grandson, four-years old, and me went this afternoon to see Avatar.  This is the billion-dollar-grossing movie from James Cameron that is now all the rage. 

Opinions on this movie are all over the map.  The quarrelsome son who could never agree with his father, a mining consultant, says “It is the best movie I have ever seen.”  My son-in-law and daughter said “We have seen that story before in Dances With Wolves.”    The blog-sphere is awash with comments on the movie’s religious significance, its tree-hugging philosophies, and the racism of depicting innocent savages as blue-tinted aboriginals fighting to protect a forest from mining by white-men Americans.

I personally found the movie just too long and too noisy—even my grandson remarked “it is a loud movie.”  And I felt uncomfortable most of the time thinking that I had read this story too often for my own good in the mining news columns of the past few years.  Here is a link to one blog that analyzes the mining-related aspects of the movie, saying:

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Movie “Avatar” has few fans among mining execs – by Steve James (Reuters.com – March 11, 2010)

The article is from the Reuters website: http://www.reuters.com/

(Reuters) – It’s enough to make a mining executive grit his teeth or his kids to give him the silent treatment. In a case of art imitating life — with perhaps a little poetic license — Oscar-winning movie “Avatar” paints big mining companies as the villains of the future.

But real-life executives are not entirely amused by their fictional colleagues being cast in evil roles in what is already the biggest-grossing Hollywood movie of all time.

“Let me put it this way, my kids saw the movie, and my kids know I’m a miner, and they didn’t say anything to me,” said Peter Kukielski, head of mining operations for ArcelorMittal (ISPA.AS) (MT.N), the world’s largest steelmaker.

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Mine Your Own Business (Mining Documentary – 2006)

This information is from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Mine Your Own Business is a documentary directed and produced by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney in 2006 about the Roșia Montană mining project. The film asserts that environmentalists’ opposition to the mine is unsympathetic to the needs and desires of the locals, prevents industrial progress, and consequently locks the people of the area into lives of poverty.

The film claims that the majority of the people of the village support the mine, and the investment in their hometown.[2] The film presents foreign environmentalists as alien agents opposed to progress, while residents are depicted as eagerly awaiting the new opportunity.[3]

Film content

The documentary follows Gheorghe Lucian, a 23-year-old unemployed miner from the Roşia Montană in northern Romania, whose chance of a new job disappeared after an anti-mining campaign orchestrated by foreign environmentalists.

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Stakeholders brace for sweeping changes on environmental protection laws – by Mike De Souza (Ottawa Citizen – February 15, 2012)

www.ottawacitizen.com

OTTAWA — Industry and conservation groups are bracing for the federal government to introduce sweeping changes this month to reduce Canada’s environmental protection laws in order to speed up reviews on proposed projects.

All stakeholders agree that certain changes would be welcome to improve the process, but some have also warned the government that it could cause more harm than good if it proposes a plan that ignores long-term benefits or consequences of projects.

“It’s all very well to say we need more mines, but how do we actually know that they are actually going to be sustainable or going to be of net benefit to Canada?” asked Stephen Hazell, an Ottawa-based environmental lawyer.

While he said some mines have clear benefits, he noted that a recent arsenic spill at an old gold mine near Yellowknife raises serious concerns, especially because of melting permafrost.

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Molycorp’s $1 billion rare-earth gamble – by Richard Martin (Fortune Magazine – November 18, 2011)

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/

How an American company is trying to break China’s monopoly on high-tech minerals.

FORTUNE — Few weekenders making the four-hour run from L.A. to Vegas notice the big mill works overlooking Interstate 15 at Mountain Pass Summit in California, near the Nevada line. Even fewer realize that the pale-pink buildings, gone patchy with age, are the focus of an extraordinary business drama that involves national security, China’s monopolizing the strategic market in rare-earth metals, and one company’s attempt to restore American preeminence in a crucial mining sector it once dominated.

Those sprawling buildings are owned by a Denver mining company called Molycorp (MCP), which is now spending nearly $1 billion to restart rare-earth-mineral production at Mountain Pass Summit and in the process revive a moribund U.S. industry. It won’t be easy. A decade ago the U.S. was the world’s biggest supplier of lanthanides, scandium, and other rare earths, and the Mountain Pass mine was the world’s largest producer of the minerals.

Rare-earth elements enable the creation of super-magnets, which operate at high temperatures and are also used for a range of high-tech applications, from missile-guidance systems to compact fluorescent light bulbs to wind power turbines to motors in electric vehicles.

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A hedge fund bets big on a Canadian mega quarry – by By Scott Cendrowski (Fortune Magazine – February 15, 2012)

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/

Superstar investor Seth Klarman’s controversial plan to develop a quarry in Ontario could pay off bigtime.

FORTUNE — Drive an hour northwest from Toronto along Highway 10 and you come across some of the best farmland in Canada. Folks here call it the Garden of Eden. Atop a 15,000-acre plateau sits a layer of dark dirt so perfectly balanced with clay and nutrients that it breaks apart in your hand like potting soil. “The stuff is like butter,” says a local potato farmer, David Vander Zaag, who sells his spuds to Frito-Lay. Even better: Below the rich topsoil lies a limestone deposit some 200 feet thick, creating an ideal natural drainage system. It once rained nine inches in a day, says Vander Zaag, and he didn’t lose a single potato from his crop.

It’s that limestone, though, that has brought the farming town of Melancthon, Ontario, pop. 2,900, the fight of its life. Last spring a Canadian firm called the Highland Cos. submitted an application to turn 2,300 acres of area farmland into one of the top-producing rock quarries in Canada. One of the principal owners of Highland is the Baupost Group, a $24 billion hedge fund based in Boston and run by a secretive investor named Seth Klarman.

Highland’s quarry proposal has ignited a firestorm of controversy in Melancthon. Residents have myriad concerns — from increased truck traffic to the impact on the water supply to the unsightliness of an enormous pit mine in the distance.

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