The idea started in Montana and now is spreading across the west: no new mining unless you can prove up front that you won’t need perpetual water treatment when you shut down. The same folk who stopped mines that use cyanide in Montana are behind this new move, in spite of protests from the Northwest Mining Association. 

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Somebody who has kept writing is Fathi Habashi. I drank a gin and tonic with him at the 2007 Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration (SME) Annual Meeting in Denver and wondered at his intensity and energy. We were sitting with mining engineers from Mongolia and, for politeness sake, we stuck to “international” topics and “easy” sentences. Then he entered a discussion with a fellow metallurgical engineer and the Mongolians, and I lapsed into silence and incomprehension. Fathi’s words flew faster and faster, and his ideas became bigger and greater by the minute. Innocently I asked him if he had ever written about his ideas. Almost shyly, he quietly said yes. ”Can you send me some?” I asked. And he did, and here is a link to what I got. It is simply amazing. You will have to look yourself, for my descriptions would not do him justice.

Here is some background and a whole lot of links on the issue of mining and aboriginal rights in Canada. This article is prompted by a Canadian Press report from the PDAC conference. I quote—and edit slightly:

The mining industry should steel itself for increasingly frequent protests and blockades linked with unresolved aboriginal land claims in Canada warned Hans Matthews, of the Canadian Aboriginal Minerals Association. He predicted that there will be three or four more cases per year like the fierce dispute that remains unresolved at Big Trout Lake, in northwestern Ontario, where the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation (KI First Nation) shut down exploration efforts by Platinex Inc. with a blockade and then interim court injunction last year. 

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