Gold Mining and Wildlife

What fool would pose such a question: “Should we allow a foreign interest to extract gold from the American soil of a proposed national park and leave us a seething, cyanide-laced toxic pit?” At best, the popularity of such a proposal is laughable. Unfortunately, the humor is lost both on the Bureau of Land Management as well as to our archaic and permissive General Mining Law of 1872.

The responses which predictably range from shock to incredulous disbelief tell us that Californians are not humored. The BLM hearing, which should have asked the question “whether,” merely asked “how.” But despite this breakdown of the representative process, thanks to the efforts of Levine and the environmental consciousness basic to almost all Americans, both the bureau and the Viceroy Resources Corp. will receive their unsolicited reply.

PATRAIC KELLY

Vice President

Citizens for Mojave National Park Inc.

Barstow