Sausages and holes in the ground: BC Mining Week fairs well on slippery grass

On wet, squishy grass unlikely to survive the frenetic feet of hundreds of school kids, are pitched the tents of the BC Mining Week Community Fair.  In front of the Vancouver Art Gallery.  When I visited yesterday, there were kids everywhere: grabbing plastic bags and filling them with rocks, pebbles, mineral specimens, crayons, coloring books, and propaganda extolling the virtues of mining.  I succumbed and grabbed three posters from Mining Works for Canada.  And stickers of Komatsu trucks–I will take those to Iowa and the grandkids. 

This was indeed kids’ heaven:  a free day off school: free stuff; dirt and puddles; treasure hunts; gold panning; and attentive adults eager to promote mining.  If the intent was to induce kids to like mining, surely this must succeed.  As the Church says: give them to me until they are seven and they will be Catholic for life. 

Even the Vancouver Sun waxes lyrical: 

Society will continue to need mining as its citizens embrace environmentalism, Vancouver’s Board of Trade heard Tuesday.

More than 90 per cent of solar panels require silver; hybrid cars use more copper and nickel than a conventional car; and 170 tonnes of coal are needed to produce a 70-metre-high wind turbine, David Parker, chair of the Mining Association of British Columbia and director of corporate affairs and sustainability with Teck Cominco Ltd., told board members.

                     

Yet mining tends to fall under the radar, something people don’t want to think about, Parker said.   “Mining is like making sausages,” Parker said, paraphrasing Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s first chancellor. “We all enjoy the end result, but no one wants to see where it comes from.”

Much as I love the 170 tons of coal to make a wind turbine, and much as I love his sausage analogy, I like even more his sacrifice zone concept:

“Yes, we do make a hole in the ground,” Lebel said at the release of a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers on the state of the industry. “But that hole in the ground generates hospitals, it generates health care, it generates so many positive things. So we need to accept the hole in the ground in order to get these other things.”

You can always fill the hole in the ground with municipal waste rather than ship it across the border to greedy Americans looking to make a buck/loonie out of BC waste.  Afterall, let us support made-in-BC solutions that involve optimum use of our mines.