February
24, 2008
On
the first page of The Assault on Reason,
Al Gore asks
the question that guides the course of his book, “Why do
reason,
logic, and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way
America now makes important decisions?” The nature
of the
recent utterances by the stylized environmentalists and
conservationists at the Environmental
Working Group, the Grand Canyon Trust, the Grand Canyon
Chapter of the Sierra
Club,
and the Flagstaff office of the Center for Biological Diversity, with
regard to the return of uranium exploration and mining in northern
Arizona, supports Mr. Gore’s thesis that a nation-wide trend
towards reactive irrationality is upon us. Transmission of
these unexamined views and ideas by local newspapers like the Arizona
Daily Star (2-21-08), the Arizona
Daily Sun
(2-06-08), the Tucson Citizen (2-12-08), and the
more widely
distributed New York Times (2-14-08), only
multiplied the
negative effects of speech that was initially poorly-considered.
Each
of these groups makes the same two root mistaken representations with
regard to the work of northern Arizona uranium exploration, uranium
mining, and mining in general, to wit:
- The
mistakes sometimes made in uranium mining and milling-related
operations of the 1940s and 1950s (the first period of
uranium mining in the US) went unrecognized and uncorrected
with the development of modern uranium exploration and mining methods
used in northern Arizona in the late 1970s to early 1990s.
In fact, the entire first modern period of uranium mining in northern
Arizona was remarkable for containing only a single minor negative
incident involving a single ore haul trip (out of ~33,000 such trips),
an incident that had no deleterious short- or long-term effects because
of planned precautions made by the operator, and the federal and state
agencies concerned.
- The
General Mining Law of 1872 has not undergone improvement
since that time and is “antiquated”.
In
the period 1872-1993
there were at least 71 different Acts of Congress that directly
modified the 1872 General Mining Law. Just like the US Constitution,
the General Mining Law is not a static,
“antiquated” entity. The
National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, and the subsequent Federal
Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 that was specifically directed
to resource operations on federal public lands, in fact formalized
and made the environmental precautions carried out by mineral
explorationists, miners, and the federal agencies administering such
work, much more rigorous. This rigor statutorily increases as the
potential risks involved do. Thus, to say that current federal
regulations permit people working in the mining industry to operate
on the public commons with only “minimal environmental
safeguards”
and in a manner that “elevates mining over all other uses of
the
land, including wildlife protection and recreation” are clear
untruths.
The
question is – if these reactively irrational groups are as
smart
and careful as they otherwise seem to be, why have they based their
actions and words with regard to northern Arizona uranium on such a
weak foundation? Going back to Al Gore, he may have been on the
right track with regard to exactly this sort of case when he also
wrote in The Assault on Reason concerning a now
common
American mindset (p. 29):
Psychologists
have studied the way we make decisions in the presence of great
uncertainty and have found that we develop shortcuts – called
“heuristics” – to help us make important
choices. And one of
the most important shortcuts that we use is called “the
affect
heuristic”. We often make snap judgments based principally on
our
own emotional reactions rather than considering all options
rationally and making choices carefully.
We
counsel such organizations as the Environmental Working Group, the
Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological
Diversity, the New York Times, the Arizona
Daily Sun,
the Arizona Daily Star, and the Tucson
Citizen, to look
much more carefully into the practices, and records of all federal,
state, and corporate entities working in the area concerned, as well
as the state and federal laws and regulations imposed on these
parties, before speaking any further on the matter of uranium
exploration and mining in northern Arizona. Northern Arizona is home
to the lowest energy cost, lowest environmental impact,
conventionally-mined uranium ore in North America. In view of our
country’s very uncertain energy future, and its extremely
large
energy-derived impact on the global environment, it would be a
serious mistake to seek to throw a very valuable baby important to
the future of the US out with the dirty bathwater of emotional
reactions. News agencies in particular should, as Al Gore would say,
‘consider all options rationally and make choices
carefully’ by
directly contacting companies like Denison Mines, VANE Minerals
(Tucson, AZ), Liberty Star Uranium (Tucson, AZ), and DIR Exploration,
for the sort of on-the-ground information that they, the companies,
can best provide as to the work that they are doing and planning
right now in northern Arizona. Suffering what Al Gore refers to as
“great uncertainty” and weakly employing
“affect heuristic”
decision-making are not things that have to be blithely accepted in
this important matter.
On
the behalf of DIR:
Lawrence
D. Turner,
President/Managing Geologist/Director
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