Editor:
Hazeltine Creek … submerged by an unknown amount of at least 13 “…residue...nasty stuff…” as Sage Birchwater cites the Canadian Environmental Protection Agency’s file on Mount Polley Mine’s five year accumulations of toxic waste materials in their tailings pond (printed in the Green Gazette June/July 2014).
Responsible mining will clean it up.
Tailings pond is the consumer friendly name for a perpetual toxic waste dump.
The aim of the predominating cultures’s industrial waste products is making money for the super rich … while “manufacturing consent … manufacturing content” (Noam Chomsky).
Tom Fletcher’s “Mount Polley spill may be left in place” according to Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett (Weekend Advisor Aug. 22, 2014): Is Bennett showing the way out for responsible mining, Tom?
Soda Creek and Williams Lake Indian Bands want respect for the land.
The Quesnel River Watershed is important to their communities.
The photo opportunity wasn’t to be missed.
Chief Joe Alphonse “...hopes to minimize negative impacts, maximize benefits to Tsilhqot’in communities (reported by Monica Lamb-Yorski, Aug. 6, 2014).
Must responsible mining leave risky perpetual toxic waste dumps in their territories?
The legacy of the old Imperialist Colonial Age is dominion and submission.
In a democracy, submission is abhorrent to all but the powerful elite and their minions.
Evolutionary democracy is a consequence of humanity’s search for stability, peace and harmony for all.
We can accomplish civilization’s collapse or its fulfillment. Time is not on civilization’s side.
In democracies, we are socially equal human beings in terms of rights, morals and dignity.
Democratic equality: social, political, economic, is lacking. The struggle intensifies to correct or maintain this ancient human injustice.
Equality is long unfulfilled in “democratic” Canada. Extreme inequality (.01 per cent, one per cent, 10 per cent vs. 90 per cent — 84 persons own more wealth and income than 3.5 billion people) and its consequent instability and social disharmony will not end policies conceived in ignorance and disdain of the cultures and ways of life in democracies.
Aboriginals will not renounce their long pre-colonial heritage and values to be submerged in the flooding breach of Imperialist dominant culture.
Herb Nakada
Williams Lake