CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Corrupt Mining Decisions Yield Public Health Dangers

Drainage pipe from an abandoned uranium mine in southwest Utah. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Most people who society labels “environmentalists” begin their vocation in defense of their own local environment. If they continue that campaign, the work of a lifetime and beyond in itself, at first, they see the opposition as one or more “special interests,” influencing local politicians from the mayor to the congressman and US senator. But after a few years of legal and political struggle, you conclude it is more than a set of special interests; it is your whole local society.

After you have simmered in that pot for a few years, you might be ready to understand a message from muckraker Lincoln Steffens from the first years of the 20th century: “Here then, is our guide out of the labyrinth. Not the political ring, but big business—that is the crux of the situation. Our political corruption is a system, a regularly established custom of the country, by which our political leaders are hired, by bribery, by the license to loot, and by quiet moral support, to conduct the government of city, State and Nation, not for the common good, but for the special interests of private business. Not the politician, then, not the bribe-taker, but the bribe-giver, the man we are so proud of, our successful businessman—he is the source and sustenance of our bad government. The captain of industry is the man to catch. He is the trail to follow.”

And if Canadian mining companies should wrap themselves in the stars and stripes, set up US offices and buy the appropriate licenses along with the appropriate politicians, the corrupt system we call the “American Way of Life” is secure from the terrible threat, the ultimate danger of environmental consciousness, composed of two dreadful premises: first, that growth has limits; second, that political decisions affecting the environment and defenseless residents “shall do no harm.”

To the ruin of sleep and disposition, my investigations into environmental destruction and the laws meant to obstruct it, to the terrible conflict on the Colorado Plateau between its residents, the Diné, Ute, Hopi, and several Pueblos, and the Uranium mining and milling complex, composed of transnational mining companies, billionaire speculators in small modular (nuclear) reactors, data centers and dubious forms of radioactive mine-waste cleanup, local, tribal, state and federal politicians, and the ever-compliant “captured” environmental regulatory bureaucracies. And when the elephantine National Security fiction is introduced, what shred of conscience that can’t be bribed is terrified into submission.

Our old friends, Energy Fuels, Inc., which has dumped several hundred thousand dollars into Congress to make it illegal to buy Russian power-plant-ready nuclear fuel (with the big loophole that until domestic production someday, maybe, catches up with the Russians) – I mean it is a Matter of National Security! Don’t think! Don’t consider where the Nuclear Power Industry will put the waste from its “clean energy” plants, the old large ones, and the proposed “small (nuclear) modular reactors.”

The company, whose ultimate headquarters is in Toronto, after a half dozen years of constant flak, wrapping itself in the red, white, and blue, has nearly removed the crimson shadow of the Maple Leaf. It operates a uranium mine in the Kaibab National Forest on the rim of the Grand Canyon above the village of Supai, home of 200-400 Havasupai people, and a destination for 20,000 tourists a year. It trucks the ore from the mine about 300 miles north through the Navajo Reservation into the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, to its mill at White Mesa, Utah.

Before reopening and renaming this mine, now that uranium........

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