Brent Bristol/Flickr
Posted on 12/13/2014 5:43:39 PM PST by SunkenCiv
A site on Apache Mountain, where Apache warriors plunged to their deaths to avoid the U.S. cavalry, may soon overlook a copper mine.
Archaeologists and Native American tribes are protesting language in a Senate bill that would approve a controversial land exchange between the federal government and a copper mining company -- a swap that may put Native American archaeological sites at risk. The bill is needed to fund the U.S. military and is considered likely to pass the Senate as early as today.
The company Resolution Copper Mining hopes to exploit rich copper deposits beneath 980 hectares of Arizona's Tonto National Forest. The land, however, also contains important archaeological sites and places sacred to local Native American tribes, especially the Apache...
Archaeologists fear that the standard process for approval of a land exchange is being sidestepped. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) lays out a process to determine a land transferal's potential impact on the environment, archaeological and historic sites, and places sacred to Native Americans. The language inserted into the defense spending bill states that the land will be transferred to Resolution Copper 60 days after an environmental impact statement, part of the NEPA process, has been completed. That prejudges the outcome of the evaluation, says Jeffrey Altschul, president of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in Washington, D.C...
Attaching the land exchange rider to the defense spending bill is a way to circumvent that opposition, says Michael Nixon, an environmental lawyer who works with the Maricopa Audubon Society and has fought the land exchange since the beginning...
What is at stake is a landscape that has remained essentially unchanged, except for a few modern roads, since the Hohokam people lived there more than 500 years ago, says J. Scott Wood, an archaeologist for the Tonto National Forest.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sciencemag.org ...
Brent Bristol/Flickr
The Apache entered the area in the 17th century.
After seeing the blight on the landscape that solar panels and windmills produce, my first response is NO mining.
Discuss, and get all the details out in the open.
Then ... We’ll see.
;’)
Give them a little money....like a few million...and they’ll let it happen.
Not every scrap of earth or building has to be saved for what ever reason. The future of mankind does relay on resources that are gained from the earth, that is until we can start mining asteroids & comets for the minerals we need.Then the eggheads would say we need to study them to understand somethingelse...We can never win with them.
If Nevada NIMBYs don’t want it, I’d love to see the Michigan copper mines back in full production. Its the purest known copper too.
Humanity doesn’t owe anything to the Apache.
In 500 years nobody will know or care there was a copper mine. At least copper is useful for something. Like building solar panels and windmills which cost more energy than they produce.
The Apache were once known as “the finest light cavalry in the world”. But their one-time experiment in airborne & air assault operations would ultimately come to grief.
;^)
What about all of the white eyes’ “sacred” places. They are all being destroyed by the communists and we don’t hear all this whining about them?
That reminds me of the tale that I have never been able to debunk or verify as true, that the Russians experimented with “parachuting” men into snow banks without parachutes.
That was the Comanche,
I think that is Apache Peak, about 45 miles NE of Phoenix.
There is an Apache Mountain in New Mexico, but it is in Gila NF.
You can’t walk a mile down a dry river bed without disturbing a Hohokam Indian ruin. Oak Flat was a camp for the Apache raiders who jumped to their death rather than surrender to the army. The wall around the Picket Post mansion is topped by metates and grinding stones found in the area. Queen Creek is lined by ruins from different ages. I used to find arrowheads on my way to school. Let the archaeologists do their rescue work and then the project can proceed. That’s how it’s done on every road, pipeline or housing subdivision. Environmental extremists and anti capitalists are out to stop this project and, in the process, bankrupt the evil mining company.
I hope Woodstock is left as pristine as the hippies left it forever./s
There is some mining ramping up at the Eagle Project and Copperwood mines in Michigan.
>>Kennecott Eagle Minerals Corporation has proposed to open a nickel-copper mine called the Eagle mine project in the Yellow Dog Plains, about 25 miles northwest of Marquette, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Construction work started in 2010, with production planned at the end of 2013 and to continue up to eight years. After mining is finished the site will be reclaimed. The mine will produce separate nickel and copper concentrates containing an average of 17,300 and 13,200 tonnes per year of nickel and copper respectively. Ores will be processed at the Humboldt Mill in Champion, Michigan. The ore deposit is estimated to contain up to 140 thousand metric tons of nickel and 91 thousand metric tons of copper, as well as platinum, palladium, and cobalt.
On March 13, 2013, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) issued Orvana Corporation, of Toronto, Ont. final permits to begin mining north of Wakefield, in Gogebic County.
Orvana estimates that approximately one billion pounds of copper are present at their site, along with smaller quantities of silver. Studies indicate that 800 million pounds (360,000 metric tons) of copper can be extracted, as well as 3,456,000 ounces of silver.
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