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Strategies & Market Trends : Commodities - The Coming Bull Market -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: craig crawford who wrote (767)	9/5/2001 3:42:02 AM
From: craig crawford	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1643

Editorial: The gold rush of 2001 By Register Editorial Board desmoinesregister.com 08/17/2001 They're waiting on the edge of their seats. The same way the loggers, snowmobile enthusiasts and oil drillers were. Now the gold miners are perched at the helms of their excavators in anticipation of President Bush reversing Clinton-administration regulations on gold mining. After more than 100 years of the mining industry stripping land, destroying landscapes and rivers and making profits on public land with no benefit to the taxpayers, President Clinton set up rules that included responsible environmental practices and guidelines protecting special areas of public lands. These requirements were described by the manager of one mining company as "devious and malicious." So miners are looking for Bush to give the nod for them to continue their old habits. So how bad is the destruction resulting from gold mining? In Nevada, where 70 percent of the country's gold is extracted, there are countless acres of debris, hundreds of feet tall. The waste contains rocks, metals and poisons, and the process for extracting gold requires the use of a cyanide solution. Then it rains. The hills of waste result in the biological death of some rivers. But the American public has, perhaps, a romantic and misguided affinity for gold miners. Images of the gold rush, intense labor and our ancestors sometimes staking everything for a crack at the American dream tend to cloud perception. But pick-axes and shovels have been replaced by backhoes and dump trucks. There's nothing nostalgic about this quest for wealth anymore. Just ask those living in states like Nevada where there are pits up to a mile wide on public lands. But the mining companies, many of them foreign-owned, want to continue their destructive practices on public land without paying a penny in royalties. They're calling on the president to help. He shouldn't.