It’s easy for me because I live in a natural paradise with very tough environmental regulations since almost the beginning of Statehood. We had the benefit of the lesson of being a plaything for those with friends in the federal government and saw what rape of resources really looks like. For the right contribution they’d give you a whole river and let you put a huge wooden trap across the mouth of it and take every single salmon returning to that stream to breed. And you could even put your armed guards around it to make sure the Alaskans didn’t take any of your precious fish.

Since my State has long had strict but fairly balanced environmental regulations, it is easy for me to be down on crazy greenies that think man is a virus that ought to be eliminated from the Earth. I’d have a much tougher time down South. I watched as political and business leaders desperate to get people off the north end of a southbound mule let Yankee companies treat the Earth, the resource, and the labor like crap. Practically every plant of my youth in my little town is now a Superfund Site. One big textile printing and finishing plant wiped out every living thing within a hundred yards of the banks of a small river for twenty miles downstream. As some environmental regs came along to stop dumping the raw aniline dye in the river, they just laid off everybody and walked away leaving the mess for the taxpayers. It really wouldn’t bother me to kill people like that. And it isn’t a thing of the past. Only a couple of years ago they busted a plating and polishing plant; those things use some deadly chemicals. He followed the code and had the sumps put in even bought a tank truck and made it look like he was pumping the sumps and taking the toxic waste for proper disposal, but it was all fake. He’d just bypassed the sump and was dumping it all in a nearby creek totally untreated to save the disposal costs. Yeah, I want to fish that stream and get a good diet of cadmium and chromium and God knows what else.

So, I’m on both sides of this issue. God gave us the Earth for our use, but He also commanded us to be good stewards of that Earth. I’m not going to stop someone from making use of the Earth, but I’m damn well going to demand that he be a good steward of it, and notions of private property end when your waste crosses my property line.

Three quarters or more of my peers in rural Georgia in the fifties and sixties came from families that knew nothing but subsistence agriculture and that was the way it had been since time immemorial. Well, by the sixties it was pretty evident that the single family farm wasn’t going to let you have fun, fun, fun til daddy took the T-Bird away. If you were ever going to have anything you were getting an education and getting as far from a farm as you could get. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure that out.

Of my HS graduating class of 127, four remain in my home town and all but one had heriditary wealth. The fourth was a white trash screw up in the eyes of the proper people who somehow got in to some ironworker apprentice program and when he isn’t in Alaska or Saudi or some place like that he comes back to the old family farm on which he built about a half million dollar house in the eighties when that was a real house and he enjoys his time off with hot and cold running women from Atlanta.

Yes, there’s a way to mine without destroying the land or least not destroying so that it can’t be put back. But, if the way you make your living goes away, you find a way to make a living and if necessary, you go someplace else. I have over two hundred years of family history in Georgia and I am still tugged by the mystic chords of mystery, but they’ve never tugged hard enough to get me to consider anything closer to farming that helping tend my wife’s garden – and I don’t even like doing that!

Stevens got them a gravy train with the uncompetive contracts. Comrade Obama seems likely to cut that off unless they swear fealty to Democrats forever. Since so much of several of the Corps’ business is tied up with the oil industry, that gives them some real issues to resolve. Their biggest problem is that they basically have to compete with the State’s welfare system so they’re under constant pressure to pay dividends rather than invest in their corps.

Only the rocks are forever, and now we know even that isn’t true. The world I started grade school in had ceased to exist by the time I heard Pomp and Circumstance. The world I started college in in ’67 didn’t exist by ’69. The Atlanta I went to in ’71 had ceased to exist by ’74 when I left for Alaska, and I’m not going to use the bandwidth to lay out all the things I’ve done and changes I’ve been through here. The life of staying in one place is gone with the wind.

I think you can manage and restore an open pit. We’re going to have a big test here over the next few years. The Pebble Prospect appears to be a fabulously rich mineral prospect in Southwest Alaska. Southwest Alaska is a very undeveloped area with persistently high unemployment. The only real economic activity is seasonal commercial fishing, a little retail and service support, and government. Mining would bring much needed jobs and economic development. But, Pebble dominates the watersheds that feed into Bristol Bay, the richest salmon grounds in the World. They want to build an open pit mine and a huge containment dam and lake for the waste. As everyone knows, Alaska is a very active seismic zone. Contaminant leaks or a seismic failure of the containment dam could dramatically damage the Bristol Bay fishery. So, even without considering the natural damage that could occur, you have two different econimic sectors at odds with each other, commercial fishing and mining. Frankly, I’m not fond of either industry because I don’t think my State makes enough off either. Commercial fishing is dominated by Seattle interests and the Japanese, neither of whom give a damn about Alaska. The regulatory environment for mining is stuck in the 1870s except for the discharge and reclamation rules, so states don’t get nearly enough revenue from mineral extraction. So, we have some choices to make.

My inclination is pretty much always going to be to develop the resource, but I’m going to insist on a revenue structure that covers the infrastructure and social costs of added development and on stringent environmental safeguards. If you live anywhere in the West, you have a very clear idea of what unregulated mineral extraction can do to the land and I DO NOT want to go back to that.

I don’t think there is anything conservative about allowing mineral companies to “rape, ruin, and run,” which is what history shows us they will do if allowed to and I can show you a zillion old mine sites in the West to prove it. The Treadwell Mine, across the Channel from Juneau in Douglas closed in 1918 and it is still not safe to get off the marked trails anywhere in that are due to the open shafts and all-too-frequent collapses of old shafts and adits. Until quite recently, they just did as they pleased, took what they wanted, paid as little as possible, and walked away leaving the mess when it wasn’t making enough to suit them.

I’m obviously “greener” than some of you, but I still consider myself and am considered by those who know me here pro-development. That said, I’ve seen enough of what unregulated industry, and especially mining, can do to want to make sure there are some strict rules on what they do.

If you look at Juneau and its environs today, you see a small town nestled in pristine wilderness: http://www.traveljuneau.com/cms/index.php?id=92

Tourists ooh and aah and the greenies rant and rave about old growth forests. I got a flash for them both; for much of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the whole area was one of the largest and richest industrial mining provinces in the World and there wasn’t a tree within miles of the place. Much of the downtown area is built on mine tailings. The area near the airport now designated the “Mendenhall Wetlands” is a State park and people carry on about preserving its pristine beauty, so much so they vociferously opposed very badly needed runway expansions, is nothing but mine tailings that in combination with glacial river silt have essentially close off the once navigable Gastineau Channel in the area.

As I relate in another post, it isn’t always good as new, especially with regard to old mining properties that were simply abandoned, but even left to its own devices and with little or no human intervention, nature restores itself pretty quickly.

because it is all navigable waters and therefore pretty much entirely federal jurisdiction or at best joint state/federal inside three miles.

But even assuming it were solely a state matter, how does a conservative deal with it? Do you just let the market work? Does the 30 foot whale watcher just compete with the 300 foot Russian whaler. Who gets the king crabs, the local family with their single 4 foot pot that they pull by hand from 300 feet down or the crabber from Seattle with his huge pots and hydraulic pullers on a 100+ foot boat. Does the local family that fishes for salmon in an open skiff for personal subsistence and a little cash just have to duke it out with the purse seiner’s industrial gear? And since there are lots of bald eagles here and they never cross state lines and they are pretty pesty causing power outages and endangering airplanes etc., should we be allowed to hunt them and destroy their nests?

Those are the kinds of questions that people who actually participate in governments have to deal with every day and it is a Helluva bunch harder to be pure when you’re looking any one of those people you have to make decisions about in the eyes than when you’re being a purist ranting on a blog.

people could have something resembling intelligent and informed political discussions. What it has become is a rightwing version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution where a self-appointed group has designated themselves as the judges of everyone’s ideological purity.

Some here simply conflate conservative and troglodyte and prove that everything is clear and simple if you’re just ignorant enough. Your and several others’ simplistic positions and solutions to everything are totally representative of what bedevils everybody who holds elected or appointed office in this Country, Republican or Democrat. Why don’t we go back to having trial by fire or trial by water so you and Ace can figure out who the true conservatives are? You’re caterwauling about the trouble in the Republican Party over some people thinking that there might be some virtue in not raping the planet or that there might be some public virtue in making it possible for an individual to make a living off a commonly held resource rather than just letting the biggest fisher get all the fish.

Oh, well, just like your idol Sarah Palin, everything is simple when you don’t know enough.

I’m just not so fine with stupidity. The comdemnation brigades and circular firing squads are totally out of hand here.

At a time when Republicans need every vote they can get, we are acting like a bunch of ten year old boys about who can come in our tree house. We’re way past stupid on this, and the fact that I despise Sarah Palin really doesn’t have anything to do with it; if Sarah was a caucus vote, she’d be my best friend.

This sort of thinking seems to elude our puritanical friends.