Mining and its Affects on the Community

• Arrandale, Tom. “Public Land Policy”. CQ Researcher Online. 17 June 1994. Rio Salado College Online. http://www.riosalado.edu/services/student/support/library/research/alpha.shtml>

Tom Arrandale, a CQ Researcher contributor from Albuqueque, New Mexico, uses     congressional hearings and senate records to provide an unbiased documentation of the raging battle over the Clinton administration’s plans to up user fees and implement stricter control in the use of public lands which yield gold, timber, and livestock feed.  In a previous report, Mary Cooper cited the opposition of residents of Washington, Oregon and northern California against stricter control and are said to be unwilling to sacrifice “jobs for owls”.

• Cooper, Mary H. “Cleaning Up Hazardous Wastes”. CQ Researcher Online. 23 August 1996. Rio Salado College Online. http://www.riosalado.edu/services/student/support/library/research/alpha.shtml>

This article discusses the positive and negative aspects of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, which is more popularly known as the Superfund law which went into effect December 11, 1980, as well as the need to improve it.  She had previously identified some of the former U.S. Nuclear Weapons Plants which became Superfund sites in her earlier report entitled “Nuclear Arms Cleanup”, published in the June 24, 1994 issue of the CQ Researcher

• Cooper, Mary H. “Water Quality”. CQ Researcher Online. 24 November 2000. Rio Salado College Online.     <http://www.riosalado.edu/services/student/support/library/research/alpha.shtml>

This article is about the success of the 1972 Clean Water Act in eliminating water pollutants coming from the most obvious point sources which are the industrial plants and sewage treatment plants.  However, Cooper contends that about forty percent of waters in the country are still polluted owing to runoffs from coal mines in the mountains, animal wastes and toxic chemicals from agricultural farms, and toxins from city street sewers.  In another article a couple of years later entitled “Bush and the Environment”, Cooper voiced the same apprehension when the Bush administration allowed companies mining for coal in the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia to dump their rubbles into surrounding streams.

• Landers, Robert K. “Is America Allowing Its Past To Be Stolen?” CQ Researcher Online. 18 January 1991. Rio Salado College Online. http://www.riosalado.edu/services/student/support/library/research/alpha.shtml>

Landers talks about how America’s past is being lost through the mining of American Indian artifacts and discusses the merits and shortcomings of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act signed by President Bush in November 1990. In a later article in the CQ Researcher, Mary Cooper writes about the American Indians’ fear “of racism by a society that can’t come to grips with its bloody past.”

• Prah, Pamela M. “Coal Mining Safety”. CQ Researcher Online. 17 March 2006. Rio Salado College Online. <http://www.riosalado.edu/services/student/support/library/research/alpha.shtml>

Using extracts from a congressional forum on mine safety as well as statements of experts and government authorities, Prah dwells on the subject of the protection of the nation’s coal miners in the aftermath of an incident in a Sago, West Virginia mine explosion which killed 12 miners.  This prompted the NIOSH, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the state of West Virginia, to co-sponsor an International Mining Health and Safety Symposium on April 20-22, 2006 in Wheeling, West Virginia.