Federal mining bill would threaten acequias, wildlife and public lands
Here in New Mexico, we know too well the tremendous damage irresponsible mining inflicts on our land, our water and our communities. These atrocities have been made possible by a 152-year-old federal law that still governs the mining industry on federal lands in New Mexico, even as the laws protecting people, public lands and wildlife from other extractive industries have been updated.
Now, a bill gaining traction in Congress would take the bad parts of the 1872 mining law and supercharge them.
This would have devastating consequences across the West and especially for New Mexico, where the Questa mine in Taos County poisoned the Red River, spewed toxic waste into acequias and became a Superfund site costing taxpayers an estimated $1 billion to clean up.
Open-pit copper mines near Silver City have contaminated the region’s groundwater and polluted the air we breathe.
The disgraceful history of uranium mining in New Mexico has destroyed lives and ancestral landscapes, and continues to poison watersheds.
The Terrero mine and El Molino mill site contaminated the Pecos river in the 1990s, killing about 90,000 fish, impacting downstream farms and ranches and costing the state millions of dollars for cleanup. Despite the ongoing cleanup and impacts, the Pecos area faces the threat of new mining proposals today.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the metals mining industry is the single-largest source of toxic waste in the United States, and hardrock mines have contaminated an estimated 40% of Western watersheds.
Costs to frontline communities are incalculable and enduring, but under the antiquated federal mining law, mining companies, whether domestic or foreign, don’t pay the American public a single cent for the more than $4 billion in minerals they remove from our public lands every year.
Adding insult to injury, companies can find ways to change hands or dissolve after they’ve pocketed their profits, leaving taxpayers to clean up their toxic mess.
This is a terrible system. But the so-called Mining Regulatory Clarity Act would make it even worse.
The industry-backed bill would lift one of the law’s few protections — proof that there are valuable minerals below the ground to establish rights to mine the land. This appalling giveaway to mining companies would make claim holders the decision-makers when it comes to mining and other uses on public lands, which also affects our watersheds.
Anyone could claim property rights just by staking a flag on our public lands. The consequences would be disastrous, locking up land held in trust for all of us and putting recreation, wildlife habitat, sacred sites, scenic landscapes, forests and even renewable energy projects at risk.
The bill would hand the mining industry indiscriminate access to public lands to dump waste rock and toxic chemicals. This is a blatant end run around two recent federal court decisions that found the company behind the proposed Rosemont copper mine in Arizona’s Santa Rita Mountains had no right to dump the mine’s toxic waste on Forest Service land.
If companies can dispose of their toxic waste anywhere they choose, New Mexico’s acequias, groundwater aquifers, rivers and streams could face even greater risk of contamination than they do today.
The bill entirely ignores the devastating risks modern hardrock mining poses to water. Large projects can use millions of gallons of groundwater a day, for decades. Instead of calling for mining companies to be accountable for their excessive water use in the already arid West, this bill would give them a blank check to abuse our life-giving water and shared places.
The good news is the Clean Energy Minerals Reform Act is a much better alternative, and Congress needs to pass it.
In line with recommendations from the Biden administration, the good bill would, for the first time, require companies to pay the American public for the minerals they extract from our public lands. It would set aside funds for mine cleanup and give local communities and Tribes more say in determining where mining should and should not take place.
These are critical changes that would bring mining into the 21st century, rein in reckless pollution by mining companies, and prioritize environmental justice. Good mines don’t need shortcuts, they need environmental standards and the approval of people who will be most affected.
Perhaps nowhere would these protections be felt more directly than in New Mexico, where acequia, land grant, and Indigenous communities have been paying the price of mining for generations.
As mining moves into the future, we have to make sure we don’t repeat the sins of the past.
Ralph Vigil is chairman of the New Mexico Acequia Commission and owner of Molino de la Isla Organics, a small acequia-irrigated farm along the Pecos River in East Pecos. Paula Garcia is executive director of the New Mexico Acequia Association and operator of a small ranch in Mora County, where she irrigates from an acequia with water from the Sangre de Cristo mountains.