Canadian land grab in Black Hills approved by US House

The US Forest Service is often powerless to stop the extractive industry from permanently altering sensitive watersheds because of the General Mining Law of 1872. Repeal or even reform of the 1872 statute has been thwarted repeatedly by the Earth hating Republican Party. 

In the pre-cellphone days Brohm Mining Company and this former Twin City Fruit marketing associate shared a radio telephone party line where managers plotting an environmental disaster at the Gilt Edge site unwittingly leaked the news to anyone listening. Brohm was an Australian company recruited by a now-dead Republican governor who gutted environmental protection in South Dakota. In 2016 then-Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton toured the Janklow/Brohm mining disaster calling it "a textbook example of how not to do it." 

Recall that in 2016 the Forest Service told South Dakota to go fuck itself after Republicans tried another land grab in Spearditch Canyon. 

Today, the State of South Dakota is trying to force a sale from the Forest Service so Republicans can lease or sell it to Canada-based Agnico Eagle and its CEO, Ammar Al-Joundi to further despoil the sacred Black Hills. The US House has passed the Gilt Edge Mine Conveyance Act.

Dave Miller grew up in Deadwood and was part owner of Twin City Fruit.

In late 1986 and the mid 1990s South Dakota officials issued mining permits to Brohm Mining at Gilt Edge Mine near Deadwood. Brohm was spectacularly high risk from the outset, and informed people were not surprised when Brohm abandoned the site in bankruptcy in 1999. Since the Mine was clearly a public health threat the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2000 declared Gilt Edge a superfund site. By 2019 federal taxpayers alone had spent 120 million dollars to contain and control poisonous mine drainage that could not and cannot be stopped. That did not, then or now, much concern State leadership. The State has all along focused on how to escape responsibility (liability in particular) for the ongoing disaster it permitted at Gilt Edge. It can do that by permitting another mine at Gilt Edge because with that permit the new mine will also assume the liability that comes with Gilt Edge. That is why, without so much as a public meeting, State and Federal regulators in 2018 quietly allowed another mine, AGNICO, to do exploratory drilling at Gilt Edge—drilling in a disaster area already known as a hot bed of acid producing rock. And the story isn’t over. [David Miller]

South Dakota School of Mines President Jim Rankin believes there's no time like the present to rape Native cultural sites in He Sapa, The Heart of Everything That Is. SDSM&T has just broken ground on the $40 million Nucor Mineral Industries Building named for a North Carolina Earth raper.

Learn more at Bill Janklow's idea of public radio.

ip photo of the high walls at the Gilt Edge mining disaster taken from Elk Creek Road.