Craig Claims Environmentalists Are In Power Idaho Senator Says Mining Industry Is Being Judged For Past Mistakes Rather Than Current Practices

A swinging political pendulum has swept many of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig’s opponents into positions of prominence.

As author of the Mining Law Reform Act of 1997, the two-term senator and influential member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee is wielding his pen to beat them back.

In his talk Wednesday to the Northwest Mining Association convention, Craig said the environmental vanguard of the 1960s has become today’s governmental old guard.

“The environmental community is now in power,” Craig said. “But there’s a unique phenomenon about their power. They are now the ones who are unwilling to change. They are the guardians of the status quo.”

Echoing remarks made Tuesday by former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus, Craig said the mining industry is being unfairly judged for its past practices without receiving credit for environmentally sound production in a contemporary setting. His proposals to reform a 125-year-old mining law pit him against opponents who seek to attach environmental regulations to legislation he said is aimed specifically at mine claim procedure.

“The 1872 Mining Law has everything to do with locating a mine and rights of ownership and absolutely nothing to do with bringing a mine into production,” Craig said in an interview after the speech. “Where the conflict comes in is that the environmental communities want to write a lot of regulations into a law that has nothing to do with the environment.

“We’re saying that isn’t necessary,” he continued. “Those regulations are already on the books.”

Craig criticized environmentalists’ attempts to insert provisions that would allow mining projects to be blocked based on compatibility with surrounding geography.

“They want the right to accept or reject a discovery based on what they’re calling its ‘suitability,” he said. “There’s one great, gaping fallacy in that: The mineral is where you find it.

“Where there is a discovery, we must accept development,” Craig added. “At that point, all environmental laws should apply to the development.”

Like Andrus, Craig took on the Clinton administration in general and interior secretary Bruce Babbitt in particular. Arguing against a top-down, federal approach to regulation, Craig favors a collaborative approach originating at the local level.

“It’s interesting to find two people from two different political spectrums agreeing that the mining that happened in the past is not the mining that’s happening today,” said Holly Houston of the Coeur d’Alene Basin Mining Information Office.

Sandy Patano, Craig’s state director, said the former political adversaries don’t agree completely on the fine points of mining law reform, such as the lease versus long-term ownership aspects and what percentage of hardrock mining royalties should be dedicated to reclamation and cleanup of abandoned mines.

“But now they disagree by degrees,” Patano said.

Craig told association members he is united with them in “a just cause,” and that he is ready to do battle with the administration to preserve their interests.

“The people now in power fervently believe that the way you save the environment is to get people out of it,” Craig said after the luncheon. “But I believe good public policy condones things like mining, logging and recreation in the right context and under the right environmental guidelines.”

Earlier in the day, Douglas Silver, president of Balfour Holdings, gave a preamble to today’s presentation on how the Bre-X scandal has affected the mining industry.

When the company’s stock became red-hot, he said, the mining world was sucked into what Silver carefully alluded to as “the alleged scam.”

“The two governing rules of investing are fear and greed,” he said. “Fear caused people to invest in Bre-X and greed kept them in.

“Here’s a small company from Calgary that picked up some moose pasture in Indonesia and proceeded to find huge amounts of gold using a Dutch geologist who lived in the Cayman Islands,” he added. “Why didn’t people say, ‘You’re a company nobody’s heard of and you’re working in a country that’s one of the most corrupt in the world. Why should we believe you?”

, DataTimes