US becoming reliant on imported minerals

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has long been an anomaly in the Department of the Interior, particularly in the bad old days when Bruce Babbitt ruled the department with a mean green fist. The notion of using public resources to help miners find mines was anathema to the former secretary of the interior, and so the survey toiled in relative obscurity, doing more politically correct things, such as studying earthquakes and volcanoes, under its new motto: science for a changing world. The real action in the department was in preserving wilderness lands and in concocting schemes to undermine mining laws and the industry’s regulatory regime. Babbitt never missed an opportunity to bad-mouth mining, thereby minimizing public resistance to his heavy-handed and often unconstitutional assault on the industry.

The guerilla tactics worked, and mining went into a tailspin that soon became a vortex. But new figures released by the USGS show that the U.S. is now reliant on foreign sources of supply for many vital minerals, including some it had previously exported, such as aluminum, copper, lithium, magnesium metal, rare earths and even cement.

Indeed, U.S. reliance on imports of raw and processed materials of mineral origin has increased more than seven-fold since 1993. By 2000, the U.S. was more than 50% import-reliant for at least 29 mineral commodities, including bauxite and alumina, chromium, cobalt, iodine, manganese, nickel, platinum-group metals, potash, tantalum, titanium metal, tungsten and zinc. As things now stand, George W. Bush will be building his new missile defence system with mostly imported minerals and materials.

In recent years, few Americans worried about decreases in their balance of trade stemming from falling resource exports. After all, high-technology and high finance had powered the “new economy” into the stratosphere, far above traditional industries toiling below. That was then. Now, high-tech companies are folding faster than bad poker hands, and financiers are heading for the high hills with a posse of irate investors and vigilante lawyers on their tails. The high-tech heist is over, and it’s time to get back to business. Unfortunately, when it comes to mining and other resource industries, America has a lot less business to get back to than it did 20 years ago.

That’s fine with some folks, including many urban Americans who believe that mining has no relevance to their lives. That’s fine with environmental groups, who funded and waged highly successful anti-mining campaigns. And, no doubt, that’s fine with Bruce Babbitt too.

But it’s a different story in Idaho’s Silver Valley, where citizens are mourning the recent death of “the greatest, grandest, deepest and longest-lived primary silver mine the world has ever known” — the 120-year-old Sunshine operation. As local reporter David Bond wrote: “Buried with Sunshine and so many other Western mines, pointlessly, are millions of tons of reserves, the hopes and dreams of thousands of mining families, and the future of a once self-sufficient, once mighty nation.”

The legendary mine has single-handedly out-produced all of the mines in Nevada’s famous Comstock Lode, in a district that has out-produced the Potosi, Bolivia silver lodes. But it will not produce another ounce, and not just because of diminished reserves and low silver prices. Mine workers say their federal government killed the mine when one of its agencies refused to let the mine owners pump its lower workings to get at some high-grade reserves. Bond says the grand old mine will be mourned only by those who knew her best.

“Why is there no requiem for mines and miners?” he wrote in a recent editorial. “Where is the outrage that a uniquely American way of life has writhed and died? Where are the leading stories on the evening news?”

As a newspaperman, Bond knows the answers to his questions. “The short answer is that, unlike farmers and ranchers, miners do not snivel and call press conferences, and the national media rejoice in the death of a mine.”

To be fair, mining is not the only symbol of industrial prosperity that has become vilified in these anti-everything times. Many old lights and landmarks are gone — sacrificed to the vague notion that nations can prosper without exploiting their land and resources. The USGS might have been sacrificed too, were it not for its important public-safety role. In keeping with its more traditional role, it now warns that if present trends continue, America will be dependent on foreign sources of supply for most mineral commodities essential to its economy and national security.