Starving to death along a clean river
To the editor:
Who cares if a Canadian corporation owned by J.D. Irving mines the top off Bald Mountain which it now owns? They have technology that will prevent serious pollution from occurring. Besides, struggling families in the area need jobs. Arsenic in the water hasn’t killed anybody yet. Aroostook County is a community that doesn’t need science to inform its decisions about the environment.
Such attitudes emerged from a few excessively vocal attendees at the Sept. 18 presentation in Presque Isle on the open-pit mining plans for Bald Mountain near Ashland and Portage. They in part echoed those expressed by representatives Bernard Ayotte (R-Caswell) and Troy Jackson (D-Allagash) in a Jan. 6, Maine Sunday Telegram report by North Cairn. “Do we want to starve to death along clean rivers?” asked Ayotte; or is mining “ … an option we have to consider[?]” for an area in dire need of jobs as asserted by Jackson.
We were among the majority in attendance at the K of C Hall who listened, and who took home startling, substantiated, factual scientific and political data. We find ourselves among the 61 percent who answered “no” to the Sunday Telegram’s Jan. 6 opinion poll “Should the state allow a company to mine for gold, silver and other deposits on Aroostook County’s Bald Mountain?” But our “no” response is not unqualified.
We are grateful to Shelley Mountain, Gayle Maynard and Alice Bolstridge for coordinating and bringing to the public the September presentation that was not a simplistic starve or mine Bald Mountain discussion.
Granted, their speakers, Jeff Reardon and Nick Bennett, are biased in favor of preserving Maine’s clean air, land and water, but their information was plausible and cross-referenced to identified sources anyone can access to discover if these gentlemen twisted facts. So we looked things up.
We have reached the conclusion their facts were not twisted. In fact, as we back-tracked this mining project we realized the most compelling issue is not the mining but the destruction of Maine’s environmental protection laws that empower Irving to move ahead. And tangled up in that is the recent reshaping of the Department of Environmental Protection that has left it unlike what most of us believe it should do and be. At any rate, as Nick Bennett put it, mining in Maine is inevitable, but if Mainers allow it to occur without adequate safeguards for the environment, the consequences are dire — economically and environmentally.
When our sitting legislators in Augusta took only two weeks to whisk through L.D. 1583 that has the potential to gut Maine’s regulations impeding destructive consequences of mining, they did so at the behest of the J.D. Irving corporation, who happens to be the largest landowner in Maine. That suggests Maine is for sale to foreign interests, and that the decision-makers we elected see benefit in selling out to foreigners.
And it is a sellout. An investment would not require laws be repealed, it would instead operate inside of those laws. Troy Jackson stated he wanted the DEP to be left alone to get its work done, but there are those of us in Aroostook who want him to pay attention to what has happened in the DEP. He says he wants a thoughtful, transparent process that engages the public in meaningful ways, and that we must be ever mindful of preserving our clean environment. We are not so sure we trust the DEP or our elected representatives to ensure this will occur.
Natural Resource Council of Maine identifies four exceedingly dangerous changes in Mining regulations our esteemed legislators are preparing to write into law in favor of Irving. They are: no more limits on ground water contamination; three decades to treat wastewater when best practices require only one; only one half of clean-up costs required at startup; and no air quality monitoring during mining.
Contrary to what corporations and politicians might believe and hope, while many of us are struggling financially and would like more employment opportunities, not everyone in Maine or Aroostook County is scientifically ignorant, indifferent to the environment, and passive about the way our government functions or dysfunctions.
We know that Bald Mountain water flows downhill and into the Fish River and Fish River chain of lakes, all the way to the St. John and Atlantic Ocean. We know that in years of high rainfall such as this year that water overflows its banks — even manmade “containment” ponds do that. We know that mining operations have a bankruptcy option that has been used in Maine to abandon pollution control to taxpayers. We know that “cleanup” is a misleading term because the toxic elements released through open pit mining never, ever get “cleaned up.” They require containment and monitoring forever. We know that arsenic is a powerful carcinogen. It causes cancer in humans. We know that Bald Mountain deposits are high in arsenic, and that open-pit mining will release it both in the air and in the water.
We also know that Maine’s greatest resource is its water, land, forests. Mining carves out other natural resources, but open-pit mining creates as many problems as it might solve. Open-pit mining destroys or threatens existing environment-based economies and lifeways. It will likely require heavy taxpayer investment to contain the inevitable pollution. There is no guarantee or even a convincing promise from Irving that significant numbers of local workers will be “qualified” for employment in the Bald Mountain project. Starving to death along a clean river is highly unlikely unless you are utterly incompetent and ignorant. Aroostook County is neither of those.
We are hopeful more Aroostook citizens will join other Mainers in pro-actively following the twists and turns of L.D. 1853 — An Act to Improve Environmental Oversight and Streamline Permitting for Mining in Maine. There is more to it than the title suggests. You can contact your representatives any time, the sooner the better. Your voice can be heard, read, or delivered in writing to the Board of Environmental Protection at a hearing in Augusta on Oct. 17.
Pamela and Wayne Sweetser
Presque Isle
