I didn't realize they actually had a detector that went off when Brown's Canyon started getting smokey. I guess it saves having a lookout on duty in the tower.
I wouldn't take that device anywhere near the House of Commons or the Ontario Legislature or it would blow the crystal into the next county during first reading.
Someone has figured out that 25% of Canada's total economy comes from the Boreal forest. (It is 60% of the land mass.) Now the only real devastation of nature happened in the past 400 years where most of the people live, which is where they put the cities and farms, in the south of the country. There never has been, nor probably never will be a good reason for large numbers of people to live in the Canadian Siberia, although I will allow that it is pretty.
There has been "thinking" going on for some time how, something in the Upper Canada Golf Pro & law school gymnasium called Queen's Park that there should be nothing going on north of the Albany River. Now that is a natural anyway as it is what they call remote, swampy and hard to get to. A far haul from the pulp mill, which so far no one has built up there as there is no hydro and it gets expensive to get the wood back. Mines mostly had to be richer than average as most were fly in, as there are only four roads, and two railroads that go far into that area. One road in Manitoba, one in BC's north, and two in Ontario. Rail lines there are two that I know of. But Highway Eleven, the CNR and the CPR actually traverse the Boreal proper, which comes right down to the shore of Lake Superior. A government web site states that there are only two mines in the area. No never mind. Right. What they mean is only two mines in area they intend [now] to wall off from mining and forestry. What they fail to mention is that there are quite a few in the Boreal itself and several were in the area where they intend to prohibit any activities except "traditional native, and tourism". Sachigo River, Zahavy, Bond Gold, Argosy (Casummit), Kenty, Detour, Pickle Lake, (5 mines) come readily to mind.
It is also apparent that they don't want the Indians ever doing anything useful, as "tourism and traditional native" stuff don't make no money.
It is significant that all the gold camps occur in the Boreal. Red Lake, Pickle Lake, Savant Lake-Sturgeon Lake, Kenora-Dryden, Beardmore, Nakina, Timmins, Detour, Kirkland Lake, Casa Berardi, Meen Dempster, Hemlo, and Swayze. A couple of hundred million ounces have been mined from there in the past 100 years. Many more greenstone belts that hold good gold but have been too remote to see much intensive exploration occur even farther north. Favourable Lake, Big Trout Lake, Sachigo River Belt, the Meen Dempster (from Pickle Lake to McVicar Lake, near Red Lake over 150 miles of volcanics and potential.) Many, many kimberlites, over 1000 known, occur in this area, as well as all the big Carbonatites which contain 100's of millions of tons each of ores of rare earth and other metals such as Niobium, Tantalum, Lithium, Uranium Phosphate, cesium, cerium etc. about 50 of those known bodies are mostly in the Boreal. And the kimberlites and carbonatites do not just occur in volcanic areas, they pop up anywhere, in granite or late sediments, so you cannot classify mineral potential in a narrow way.
There is far too much mineral potential in these area to simply say "we are not going there, we must make it a park". If in 400 years there has not been significant devastation, then probably there never will be. What McGuinty says is that "China and developing countries are after our mineral wealth, so we must protect the forest now" Huh? He actually said that. Right. we can make money, so we must not make money. And what is there to protect against with mining? You can put a mine and its buildings on a postage stamp, and have room left over for the library of congress. There were 300 mines in Canada operating in 1979. There are 75 today. All of them in that bygone era, on average with their infrastructure would sit on 30 acres of ground at absolute most. Many on only 5 acres. A few, mostly the open pits would eat up perhaps 300 to 400 acres. (The McIntyre Mine of 16 million ounces gold sat on ten acres.) So we say 10,000 acres for all CDN mines of that period. Wow. Holy Sh*t. What a friggin desert! The Boreal forest has 3 million square kilometres of which 28,000 burns in any given year. More burns than is logged every year. (They say less than 1/2% of the Forest is logged each year.) That is 10,000 acres torn up by mines out of 765 million acres total in Canada. (They say that actually the Boreal is 1.3 billion acres, so my figures are conservative.) So ALL the mines, which are not necessarily located in the Boreal, would chew up, a grand total of 0.0013% of the Boreal land area. That is right. 13 ten thousandth's of a percent of the land mass of the Boreal forest. Over their entire life time. Real scary. That is real pressure. And we can regenerate it all, except for the open pit, which will become a lake. Well we have too many lakes, so I guess that is a no, no. What to do?
Let's ask childish questions and see whether it can get real bad. What if we mine all the land we can it all becomes open pit lakes? Well I can tell you that won't happen. We won't do that. What if we mine 10% of all the land and make that all into an open pit, then what? Well guess what, even if we did that, which I can guarantee you won't happen -- and they all filled up with water they would look about what it does now, as lakes cover over 16% of the entire province right now. So even given a mining pressure which is from our figures above of 24.7 million acres under "cultivation" in Ontario, we would not entirely devastate the country. That is an increase in mining rate of 2,472 times. Not likely.
If we generate 300 mines, quadrupling our present mineral output, and put them all in the Boreal and make half of them open pits with a life of 25 years, and make those pits 1.5 miles by 1/2 mile wide, we get 150 X 500 acres = 50,000 acres in 25 years, or 2000 acres per year, which would fill with water. In 1000 years we would have 2 million acres of new lakes. Again I should point out that we dealing with an area of 1.3 billion acres in Canada of the Boreal. In 1000 years we would on the average "devastate" 0.15% of the land area. That puts it into realistic perspective. In time I think we would run out of minerals, or find cheaper ways to mine underground, or perhaps better ways to rehab pits to minimize impact. We could even compensate by planting Redwoods in Queens park. Or in a politician's back yard of the cottage in Muskoka he got as a bribe from Boise Cascade for its clear cutting permits.
Contrast that to farming in Ontario which covers thousands of square kilometres and you start to get a sense of balance. Hell, parking lots and gravel pits cover 1000's of square kilometers in Ontario alone. I will bet there are more than 40,000 acres of parking lots in Ontario. I will further give you 50,000 acres of gravel pits. How about city garbage dumps? A few, perhaps quite a tens of thousands of acres there as well. Yet all the mines in Canada cover 10,000 acres of buildings and clearing in its low tax, low labour cost hey day, and the politicians are screaming blue murder. The can spray agent orange all over Ontario forests with its dioxins and furans and we have to take it. We want to erect one ball mill in Hellengone Ontario and there is a torchlight parade on the castle. What has got into the effing poltiican's heads?
Apparently, and sadly, not much.
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