In spring of 1989, following the published plans of Geddes Resources to open North America’s largest open-pit copper mine 100 miles up the road from Haines, resident Jim Stanford organized a public meeting.
Stanford said his meeting would be an objective discussion of the mine proposal. As Geddes officials themselves hadn’t yet come to town to explain their plans, the meeting drew a big crowd to the ANB Hall.
But as soon as Stanford started listing potential ill effects from the proposed Windy Craggy project, people in the crowd objected, saying his presentation wasn’t objective at all. They got up and walked out, leaving only Stanford and mine opponents in the room.
Around the same time, the City of Haines attempted to form an objective “mining committee” to explore Windy Craggy’s implications, but that also quickly fizzled amid complaints that members weren’t objective.
You’d think we’d learn but history tells us every generation must err anew.
I’ve been silent until now on the folly of Chilkat Valley Mining Forum Committee, an ill-fated attempt to present “objective” or “balanced” information about the Palmer Project, the latest plan to build a giant mine up the highway, this one just inside the U.S. border.
But the most recent dust-up, involving the Haines Economic Development Commission twisting itself in knots to more fairly re-configure the committee’s composition and voting privileges, should prove the end of it. Let’s kill this misguided exercise once and for all. Not only will this group’s efforts not satisfy the public, its goals were unrealistic.
Putting a large mine atop the headwaters of a river full of wild salmon is patently controversial. There will be countless arguments against it, and as many for it. People who care will come to one opinion or another, and their opinions may or may not help determine whether a mine ever opens.
And that will be that.
The idea that groups of supporters and opponents will agree to what’s “objective” or “balanced” information about a mine proposal is equivalent to a husband and wife at the start of a divorce hearing agreeing to an objective account of who ruined the marriage.
Like divorce, large development projects are wars, ones that must be fought to bring about a resolution. Truth is always the first casualty in war, so let’s concede that neither side is going to be entirely fair, truthful or objective.
Let’s also put on our big boy pants and face up to the fact that “objective” describes a scientific process for arriving at factual information, and not information itself. Hitler exterminated six million Jews. How do you present that information objectively, by saying the Jews had it coming?
Facts are facts. The media will do their best to find them, test their validity, and report them. If you don’t trust the media, conduct your own factual investigation.
This mining forum committee was hatched on the fallacy that “truth” or “objectivity” can be distilled in pure form under just the right lab conditions, somehow shutting out politics. The real world doesn’t work that way.
The mine is a political issue, a competition between opposing ideas. It’s not a math problem with a correct answer. It’s rhetoric, a messy battle of words that in best cases is fought with facts, logic and some measure of truthfulness.
So let Constantine Metals Resources and the Alaska Miners’ Association Haines chapter make their arguments in favor. And let Lynn Canal Conservation and the Chilkat Indian Village make their arguments opposed. And let the rest of us listen to and question all the arguments and try to develop informed, perhaps even educated, opinions.
Putting warring sides in a room ahead of battle and expecting them to agree to “objective” information about their conflict is necessarily an exercise in futility. It’s naïve to think otherwise.