A strong editorial statement appearing in the Wednesday, January 17, 2007 online edition of the Daily Inter Lake . . .
The urgency and tenor of opposition to potential coal mining in the Canadian headwaters of the Flathead Basin has reached a new pitch.
And rightly so. The Flathead river system and Flathead Lake cannot become the septic system for Canadian mining profits, but that’s exactly what it would become if coal mining is allowed to proceed in the Canadian Flathead.
The British Columbia government went through the motions of including a delegation from Montana to help develop terms and conditions that the Cline Mining Co. must meet in developing its own environmental assessment for an open pit coal mine 22 miles north of the border.
But the Montana delegation’s recommendations were ignored. The proposed terms only require Cline to assess environmental impacts in the immediate vicinity of the mining operation, without any broader study of the impacts of the mine or of future mining operations that might follow.
Read the entire article . . .