Posted on 06/09/2011 8:46:28 AM PDT by OL Hickory
California, the state built on gold prospecting, is set to outlaw ... Gold Prospecting
There's gold in them thar hills, but pretty soon you won't be allowed to touch it. In California, the state built on gold, the time is up for prospectors who are about to see their way of life declared illegal. Just 162 years after history's biggest gold rush, diggers - or dredgers as they now are - are losing a long-running battle with environmentalists.
The reason for this mammoth fight is ... salmon.
At the center of the battle is suction dredging, today's mechanized version of gold panning. Up to 4,000 people in California use suction dredging to extract gold. It involves motorized rigs which act like giant vacuum cleaners, sucking up mud and gravel from the bottom of a watercourse and then using gravity to sort tiny quantities of gold from the rocks and dirt. Environmentalists say the technique disturbs riverbeds where fish such as pacific salmon lay their eggs.
The salmon population has fallen steeply in the Golden State. The environmentalists also say the dredging releases poisonous mercury into the water. They persuaded California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to agree to a two-year moratorium on suction dredging in 2009 while scientists compile an impact report.
The 800-page report has been finished at a cost of $1.5 million. It recommends that the dredging can carry on, but under a strict set of conditions dictating the size of the machines and when they can be used. It says that dredging should be banned in some ecologically important rivers and streams. The report's findings are due to come into effect in six months.
(Excerpt) Read more at findsbook.com ...
“The 800-page report has been finished at a cost of $1.5 million. “
That’s the real gold mining going on these days. The mining of taxpayer dollars with 800 page “reports”.
Really!is that the reason?It seems to me that California is in debt up to it’s armpits and it may want that gold for its self.
When you outlaw gold only outlaws will own gold.Oh California you very sick puppies.
Simple,The Queers,Pedophiles and assorted human scum,want to make California into a Park.
“Simple,The Queers,Pedophiles and assorted human scum,want to make California into a Park.”
And at the rate they are going, they might just succeed!
Because it won’t be long before no one can afford to live there.
This is no longer a free country. When things like this happen, and a guy has his house busted into because his ex-wife is in arrears on her student loans, and the Department of Education suddenly has a need for weaponry.
Evil is afoot, my friends.
We use to joke about California that it was going to fall off into the sea.
Unforgivably California is going destroy its self without mother nature doing a thing, this is another example of government agenda being pushed without science. Economic starvation is already their and California political elites will end killing the whole state, Bye Bye California!!!!
“Simple,The Queers,Pedophiles and assorted human scum,want to make California into a Park.”
And at the rate they are going, they might just succeed!
Because it won’t be long before no one can afford to live there.”
Exactly industry is treated like Taliban there,the smart move to Arizona or Texas.
I am leaving this coming Autumn.
I was born and raised in So. Cal. but I won’t stay where I am not wanted. When you turn to me with a gun in your hand and tell me “you worked hard so give that illegal over there more of your money — it is a, uh, fee” you are telling me you don’t want me.
My 6-figure income is going with me. I have no kids and am only in the State on weekends, which means I put almost zero use of the infrastructure. Can you imagine how difficult it will be to fiscally replace me?
Know how many lawns will need to be cut and how many rooms will need to be cleaned to replace that income?
They will have to prey my dredge from my cold wet hands.
Save the world shoot an environmentalist.
The truth is, is that the salmon thrived in the rivers where the sediment was kicked up by mining activities. The rock debris from the hydraulic mining provided a perfect habitat for the fish and their prey.
The ‘environmentalists’ ruined the habitat by stopping all activities on the rivers and turned it into a clear sterile place fish don’t like.
That and all smart growth intensive development along the river sterilizes the natural environment too by clearing away all the vegetation and animal life that used to thrive on that river.
ping
However, the fish love it when the stream and river bottoms are stirred up. I did some easy fishing off the back end of a gold dredge on the middle fork of the Feather River.
The Mercury is as natural as the Gold, and the dredgers remove it too, just as they do the Lead, Iron, and other contaminants that have found their way into the water over time.
The rivers and the fish will suffer from this foolish move, but it won’t kill prospecting/mining, it will continue.
If you are dredging where people can see you, they probably will.
If most people are dredging off the beaten path, I don't see how this law can be enforced.
They seem to think they’ll be allowed to live there, despite driving everyone else out. (Never mind all the infrastructure needed to live there...)
When some twit opines about how great place X would be with no people, ask ‘em about all the other great places which have no people - and are generally not known about precisely because nobody is there to comment thereon.
Long past time to rename this socialist mess.
It’s not the golden state. Hasn’t been for quite a while.
It’s the stupid, regulatory leftwing bureaucrat state.
(will that fit on maps?)
Hard to imagine this state was once about as libertarian and free as it was possible for a state to be.
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