Ten Treasures at Stake: New Mining Claims Plus an Old Law Put National Parks and Forests at Risk

Examines how the 1872 Mining Act and new claims threaten national parks, monuments, forests, and historic sites such as the Grand Canyon and Yosemite. Calls for law reform; public lands withdrawal by federal, state or local governments; and transparency

Mitigating Environmental Externalities through Voluntary and Involuntary Water Reallocation: Nevada's Truckee-Carson River Basin

A transition from the era of building water projects and developing new supplies to an era of water reallocation is well underway in most of the West. Two decades ago, experts were debating the ability of western water institutions, originally conceived to serve the earliest non-native water diverters-irrigators and mines -- to adapt to the growing demands of cities. By acquiring water formerly used to grow crops, through voluntary market transactions, western cities have demonstrated that water law and policy prove flexible when the economic and political stakes are high enough.Initially fueled by urban growth, water reallocation is now being stimulated by a new array of forces. Throughout the West, water reallocation is beginning to reflect environmental benefits alongside the traditional uses for water in irrigation, cities, and industry. Some reallocations have involved market transfers of water arranged through voluntary negotiations; others have involved involuntary reallocations prompted by court rulings. This article argues that both types of reallocation will continue to be important in managing western water resources, but that each has quite different implications for the distribution of benefits and costs from reallocation

Independent Expert Scientific Panel – Report on Unconventional Oil and Gas

No abstract available

Workplace conflict and the origins of the 1984-85 miners' strike in Scotland

Literature on the 1984-85 miners' strike in Britain tends to be dominated by examination of peak level relations between the Conservative government, the National Coal Board and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The strike is usually depicted as being illegitimately imposed, without a national ballot, on the industry and the miners by the NUM leadership. This article develops a more rounded perspective on the strike, by locating its origins in workplace conflict which had been steadily escalating in the early 1980s in the Scottish coalfields. A significant portion of Scottish miners, anxious about employment prospects and angry about managerial incursions on established joint industrial regulation of daily mining operations, pushed their union towards a more militant position. This subverts the conventional picture of the strike as a top-down phenomenon. In this respect events in Scotland, which rarely feature in established literature, were in fact extremely important, shaping the national strike that emerged from the workforce's opposition to managerial authoritarianism as well as the closure of uneconomic pits. The peak level context of deteriorating relations and pit level details of incrementally intensifying workplace conflict are established through industry and trade union records and press accounts

Restructuring and rescaling water governance in mining contexts: the co-production of waterscapes in Peru

The governance of water resources is prominent in both water policy agendas and academic scholarship. Political ecologists have made important advances in reconceptualising the relationship between water and society. Yet, while they have stressed both the scalar dimensions, and the politicised nature, of water governance, analyses of its scalar politics are relatively nascent. In this paper, we consider how the increased demand for water resources by the growing mining industry in Peru reconfigures and rescales water governance. In Peru, the mining industry’s thirst for water draws in, and reshapes, social relations, technologies, institutions and discourses that operate over varying spatial and temporal scales. We develop the concept of waterscape to examine these multiple ways in water is co-produced through mining, and become embedded in changing modes and structures of water governance, often beyond the watershed scale. We argue that an examination of waterscapes avoids the limitations of thinking about water in purely material terms, structuring analysis of water issues according to traditional spatial scales and institutional hierarchies, and taking these scales and structures for granted

Gila Box Area: Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area, and the Fishhooks and Needle\u27s Eye Wilderness Areas

23 p. : ill., maphttps://scholar.law.colorado.edu/books_reports_studies/1017/thumbnail.jp

Environmental offsets and other market approaches with specific reference to the Olifants River (East) and Berg River

Biodiversity offsets for a river create the incentive for cooperation amongst stakeholders with benefits to the environment. Because of the isolation paradox supporting institutions need to be created to facilitate cooperation. Environmental pollution caused by mining activity is a problem in the Olifants River (East) in South Africa. The catchment surface is fractured by mining activities and water is drained into underground aquifers, after which it seeps into streams. Mines have been permitted to release nutrients in the streams during periods of high flow, which is called the “controlled release schemeâ€. A main problem is the effluent leakage from old disused mines during times when river flow is low and not sufficient dilution of nutrients is possible. DWAF (Department of Water Affairs and Forestry) has accepted ownership of these mines but they may not have the technology (which is expensive) to desalinate the effluent. In an offsetting arrangement, incentives can be provided to existing mines to desalinate water from these defunct mines by allowing them to discharge a given amount in the Olifants when the water flow is sufficiently high. The above arrangement will cost the taxpayer nothing while discharge during low flow periods is reduced. A discussion was held with stakeholders of the Olifants River Forum during 2006 and support was received for some of these policy options. It is shown how offsets can mitigate negative effects of dam construction. It is further proposed that tradable pollution permits be adopted which are subject to a rule that discharges in the river are only allowed when flow is sufficiently high and that trades may only occur within certain parameters.environmental offsets, pollution permits, Olifants River (East),