Dear HCN,
Your article on coal
mining in the North Fork of the Gunnison River was interesting in
its happy-happy spin on ersatz consensus and collaboration groups
(HCN, 7/31/00: Out of the darkness: A Western Colorado community
meets a coal boom halfway). As an environmental activist, the main
question I had was this: “Was the environment protected through
this process, and was the public’s interest maintained?”
The answer is a pretty obvious “no.” The surface
issues, involving trucks and trains on the highway, seemed to be
addressed pretty well – though resolved only mediocrely. That would
involve what I would call “human impact.” But at what cost? The
company is now going to pull three times as much stuff out of the
ground as they were before. No more jobs will be created –
indicating a terminal industry. No real analysis was done on what
would happen to groundwater in the area – only the promise of
mitigation (score 0 for the real environmental issue in the area).
The state of the North Fork of the Gunnison (poor to absolutely
godawful) was not assessed – though this is probably as much a
fault of the ranchers in the area as anyone. Score 0 for the
natural environment again. The BLM staffers, the trained
professionals who were supposed to be doing their jobs as
regulators, defaulted on their duties one more time, recasting
unpaid citizens in the roles of regulators. You can be sure that
the coal company’s representatives were receiving money for their
time at the table.
Oh, but local people liked
each other in the end – sorta. Or at least some of them don’t have
to worry about mining thugs killing them. And a generalist endemic,
widespread species (the robin) that’s as likely to be found in New
York City as Paonia, was tweeting at the end. That’s what really is
supposed to come out of an EIS process in a rural/wildland
area?
Chuck
Pezeshki
Moscow, Idaho
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Who needs “ersatz consensus’?.
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