January 28, 2012 – Republic of Mining

Descendant of Jack London opposes [Northwest Territory] mine – by By Stephen Hume (Vancouver Sun – January 28, 2012)

January 28, 2012

The Vancouver Sun, a broadsheet daily paper first published in 1912, has the largest circulation in the province of British Columbia.

Aboriginal opposition to development of silver-zinc deposit in Nahanni National Park Reserve is supported by writer’s great-granddaughter

Celebrated writer Jack London’s great-granddaughter is supporting northern first nations and environmental groups challenging efforts by a Vancouver mining company to redevelop a rich silver-zinc deposit within the Nahanni National Park Reserve.

The park, surrounding the South Nahanni River where it carves through the Mackenzie Mountains about 1,300 kilometres north of Vancouver, has been called Canada’s Grand Canyon.

Last December, the Dehcho First Nations wrote to the federal government saying that a decision by the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board dismissing the need for an environmental impact review for the Canadian Zinc Corp.’s Prairie Creek mine was “troubling and disappointing” in its failure to adequately address their concerns about downstream water quality.

[India] Odisha CM urges Centre to complete ban chromite export with immediate effect – (Orissa Business News – January 26, 2012)

January 28, 2012

This article originaly came from India media: http://www.orissadiary.com/ Bhubaneswar: Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has demanded a complete ban on its exports with immediate effect. In a letter to Union Minister of Mines Dinsha Patel, the Chief Minister on Wednesday urged him to stop chrome ore export in order to provide raw material security to …

For people of Attawapiskat, hope endures – by Jim Coyle (Toronto Star – January 27, 2012)

November 5, 2015January 28, 2012

The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

ATTAWAPISKAT, ONT.—For more than 20 years, Gilles Bisson has been visiting Attawapiskat, often flying his own small plane up to this remote Cree reserve. As much as any outsider can, he knows all the people, all the issues. Being a smart guy, he also knows how much he doesn’t know.

“Sometimes,” sighs the veteran New Democrat MPP for Timmins-James Bay. “I wonder if I really understand the community any better now than when I started.”

Attawapiskat is basically built on swamp, about 300 kilometres north of Moosonee on the James Bay coast. And the imagery fits. Lately, as the reserve became the new Canadian shorthand for native need, dysfunction and failure, its problems have seemed just as boggy and intractable.

The community is, to be sure, everything it has been portrayed as and more — a world of chronic poverty and dependence, of babies having far too many babies, of cascading generations piling up in shanties, of disheartening self-sabotage, of nepotism and decidedly imperfect governance.

Cleaning up California’s Wild West: EPA takes on polluted mercury mine in San Benito ghost town – by Paul Rogers (San Jose Mercury News – December 4, 2011)

January 28, 2012

This article originally came from the San Jose Mercury News: http://www.mercurynews.com/

Every second of every day it flows: a river of poison gushing from the hillsides.

Forty gallons a minute, 21 million gallons a year. It bubbles and gurgles across the landscape, a bright orange toxic brew, nearly as corrosive as battery acid, teeming with mercury, aluminum, iron and nickel, the legacy of a long-abandoned mine, relentlessly pouring into nearby streams.

For 120 years, the mining town of New Idria in the rugged back country of southern San Benito County was a colorful California outpost, a Wild West community frequented by prospectors and speculators, stagecoaches and famous bandits like Joaquin Murrieta, known as the “Mexican Robin Hood.” Herbert Hoover even owned part of the claim at one point.

Today, after decades of neglect, this remote landscape with so much history may finally have a future.

The [resource] race to China – by Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – January 28, 2012)

January 28, 2012

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

KITIMAT, B.C. — In a climate of growing hostility toward energy industry development across North America, Timothy Wall, president of the Canadian unit of Houston-based Apache Corp., took the road less travelled to the heart of Kitimat.

He flew multiple times to the 9,000-resident town on the northern British Columbia coast to ensure support for his liquefied natural gas plans. He unleashed a team to explain the challenges and the benefits.

He won over the local aboriginals, the Haisla Nation, by meeting with them, acknowledging their rights, making them his landlords. “We had a big push … trying to make this a win-win for everybody,” Mr. Wall, who is originally from Houston, said in an interview.

“We told the stakeholders in the Kitimat area that there would be challenges, but that we would work through them. That with everybody pulling in the right way, we would get there.”

The two-year effort paid off with widespread community support for Apache’s plan to pipe natural gas from fields at the other end of the Rockies, build a terminal down the canal in Bish Cove to liquefy it, and transport it by tanker to Asia.

[Jim O’Neil and BRIC countries] The world’s not in crisis – it’s just between stabilities – by Doug Saunders (Globe and Mail – January 28, 2012)

January 28, 2012

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

There’s something you crucially need to understand about the global economic crisis: It doesn’t exist.

Sure, Europe may be weeks away from a monetary cataclysm that has the potential of crashing all its economies plus some of the euro-exposed banks across the Atlantic. The United States may be suffering its highest poverty rates in half a century. And here in Britain, the combination of high inflation and an economy that actually shrank last quarter may return the ugly word “stagflation” – stagnation plus inflation – to our vocabulary.

But that hardly constitutes “global.” If you live in Sao Paulo, Moscow, Mumbai, Shanghai, Mexico City, Jakarta, Istanbul, Johannesburg or a dozen other centres in the eastern and southern three-quarters of the world, then your country hasn’t been experiencing any kind of crisis, beyond a few rough months in 2008 and 2009. In fact, most of those places have been enjoying a more or less continuous boom.

If you view the world rather strictly through the lens of economic growth, you can paint a picture of neatly symmetrical rebalancing.