Mines where wild things are

In recent years, the mining press has been replete with stories about mine developments being stopped by special interest groups purporting to care for the environment. Indeed, these groups seem to have a stranglehold on North American mining that only tightens with the passage of time.

Reduced to its essentials, the environmental anti-mining platform consists of three planks: landscape development; release of toxic chemicals; and disruption of wildlife habitat. The first is subjective and remediable. The second is controllable. The third is hard to dispute because techniques available for measuring wildlife populations are indirect, inaccurate and subject to emotional interpretation . . . and for this reason, it is heavily used by anti-mining groups.

The supposed destruction of grizzly bear habitat was one of the main reasons the Windy Craggy project in British Columbia was turned into a park. The idea that mining destroys wildlife habitat seems obvious; perhaps that is why it is not more vigorously contested.

However, I have spent most of the past 10 years in remote areas and, based on my experience in underground mining, this is completely untrue.

While working in Chile, I visited a diamond drill site 13,000 ft. above sea level in the Andes. Twenty feet from the roaring drill stood a guanaco, an animal similar to the lama, watching. Wild animals are often attracted to human activity out of curiosity.

At another high and remote site operated by the same company were six condors. Regrettably, they were attracted by cookhouse garbage. Wild animals are attracted to human activity as a source of food. At most remote sites in northern Canada, all food garbage must be burned lest animals become dependent on it.

Polar bears were attracted to a mine on a small island in the Canadian Arctic, possibly because they smelled cookhouse garbage, but certainly because they smelled humans and relished adding them to their diet. Polar bears will hunt humans for food. We took rigourous precautions to avoid this fate. The camp building was on stilts so that its heat would not disturb the permafrost, but bears hid beneath the building in hopes of catching an unwary human.

This mine site was populated by an astonishing variety of wildlife: bears, muskox, foxes, hares, lemmings, ravens and owls. Seals, whales and walruses abounded on the shore. All of these animals moved in and around the mine site and used man-made structures for dens or nests.

Environmentalists make much of the “fragile” Arctic environment, implying that, once disturbed, it does not return to its original condition. The land is a cold desert dotted with small plants. On a gravel road unused for four or five years, these plants had re-established themselves at the same density as on the undisturbed tundra.

At a remote mine site in northern Saskatchewan, in the summer, bears rabbits and squirrels come right up to the buildings. One squirrel would come into the buildings and run between my feet as I worked at my desk. One evening, I looked out of my room to see a bear lumbering fewer than 100 ft. away. Raptors perch on power poles. Even wolves can be seen in the winter. The ravens that sit on buildings and the foxes and rabbits whose tracks criss-cross the snow do not seem bothered by man’s presence. If these animals sense that their habitat is being disturbed, they surely would not come so close.

In the United Kingdom, the operators of a small gold mine were prohibited by law from going back into their old stopes because they had become a habitat for a rare type of bat. While in Nevada, I remember looking up at the wall of an abandoned pit and seeing an owl and its nest. Abandoned mines are a well-known habitat for a variety of wildlife, as I well remember from an encounter with a bee’s nest in a derelict mine building in Brazil.

Human and animals have lived together forever. City dwellers forget this symbiosis and have conjured up a ludicrous image of cuddly animals fleeing from vicious humans — an image that has nothing to do with reality. Wild animals are often curious about humans. Human activities provide food, warmth and shelter and (provided the humans are not hostile) do not significantly interfere with animal habitats or habits. Only cities permanently destroy wildlife habitat.

Different types of mines differ in their impact on wildlife habitat, but, from what I have seen in the back lots of the Americas over the past 10 years, an underground mine has practically no effect on wildlife habitat. As soon as the humans move out, the wildlife moves in and the mine and its structures become habitats.

It is time we put the skids to this, the environmentalists’ big lie.

— The author is a mining professional who resides in Delta, B.C.