Cyanide leach mining: What is it? Why so dangerous? And why you pay the bill.

BISHOP, California — To spread awareness of the threat that taxpayer-subsidized, cyanide-based gold mining poses to our use of public lands and waters, the Owens Valley-based Friends of the Inyo provides an instructive presentation on YouTube that explains cyanide leach mining.

The presenter of "The Dirty Truth About Modern Cyanide Gold Mining," Bonnie Gestring, is Northwest program director at Earthworks, a Montana conservation organization. The devastating consequences and costs born by Montana taxpayers compelled voters there to ban new cyanide leach mines in 1998.

We're sharing Gestring's talk because eastern California's rural Owens Valley and Inyo Range face the same threat as Idaho's Centennial Mountains, in rural Clark County.

As Gestring explains, industrial-scale cyanide leach gold mining operations, like those now devastating and closing off landscapes in Nevada, are an existential threat to the American public's access to and use of Western public lands.

Foreign mining firms join forces for Nevada-scale open-pit mine in Idaho's Centennials

The Canadian mining firm Excellon Resources Inc. has acquired Otis Gold Corp., also of Canada, to bolster their high-risk scheme to launch a Nevada-scale cyanide-based gold mine in the Centennial Mountains. The operation's toxic leaching ponds would lie at the headwaters of Idaho's vital Snake River Plain aquifer.

The objective: To chemically leach traces of gold from poor-quality ore by destroying a southern extension of the Centennials in Clark County and risking contamination of water that is the lifeblood of eastern Idaho.

“Destroying” sounds alarmist, but it is accurate, for in the business of open-pit, cyanide heap-leach mining, there is no other way.

Round Mountain Mine, Nevada. Canadian miners want this to be the future of Idaho's Centennial Mountains, in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. (Photo © Tony Huegel)

Cyanide-based gold-mining scheme targets Continental Divide, Yellowstone regions

The farming and wildlife-rich area in Idaho that a foreign gold-mining company is targeting.

Canadians eye U.S. lands for trainloads of free gold from cyanide-based Kilgore Project

“When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so.” 

President Donald Trump, December 4, 2018
 
“We must not allow corporations to pillage our public lands and leave taxpayers to clean up the mess.” 

Elizabeth Warren
U.S. Senator (D-Mass.) and presidential candidate,
April 15, 2019


We agree -- especially when the raider is a foreign gold-mining company.

Yet President Trump and the U.S. Congress are exempting Canada's Otis Gold Corporation from this pronouncement. So this mining company -- and others like it -- is indeed hoping to extract American wealth from America's wildlands without paying a penny in royalties to the American treasury.

And they hope to do so in a part of Idaho where few will notice ... until the train has left the station.

Canadian firm pitches risky cyanide mining process, snubs Greater Yellowstone wildlife

Grizzly bear warning near Kilgore Project site.

As generations of hunters, campers, ranchers, wildland travelers and Continental Divide hikers can attest, the Centennial Mountains between Idaho and Montana are still some of the wildest country along the border between the two Rocky Mountain states.

Yet it is here, on the Idaho side where this photo was taken, that a foreign gold-mining company hopes to cash in on America's policy of giving away its natural wealth without requiring royalty payments to the American people.