From: hamel@athena.cs.uga.edu (Scott Hamel)
Newsgroups: rec.backcountry
Subject: National parks to be strip mined?
Date: 28 Sep 92 21:29:16 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens


I woke up to see this on the front page of the Atlanta newspaper!


The Atlanta Constitution
Monday, September 28, 1992

NATIONAL PARKS COULD BE STRIP MINED
Owners of coal rights would reap millions!

The Bush administration is about to complete a policy change that will open
millions of acres of national parks and forests to strip mining for coal or
force the government to buy the mineral rights from the families and energy
companies that own them.

The policy change, in the form of a new Interior Department regulation due to
become final shortly after the election, would give coal companies authority
to mine a mother lode of coal that now lies beneath 40 million acres of parks,
preserves and protected lands in 24 states -- roughly 16 percent of the nation's
reserves.

Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. said that in order to prevent strip mining
in 19 national parks, recreation areas and wildlife refuges that contain coal,
the agency will buy the mineral rights from the owners.

Mr. Lujan's aides said the coal reserves beneath these lands are worth just
$11 million.  But the coal industry and the National Wildlife Federation, an 
environmentalist group, said the government would have to pay hundreds of
millions of dollars to prevent mining in the parks.

Last year, in one case alone, the U.S. Claims Court in Washington ordered the
Interior Department to pay at least $150 million to a coal company barred
from mining a protected area in Wyoming.

"It could be a bonanza for the coal industry," said L. Thomas Galloway, a 
Washington lawyer who specializes in environmental matters and is an expert
on strip mining regulations.

"They don't want to mine in the national parks," he said.  "It would be too
much of a public relations disaster.  But if they threaten to, the way this
rule is set up, the government would have no other choice but to pay them."

The new regulation, which has been in preparation for more than a year, would
eliminate protections Congress approved for the lands when it passed the 
federal strip mining law 15 years ago.

The law bars mining in national parks and national forests and on millions of
acres of private lands, except for those who hold a "valid existing right" to
the coal.  But Congress never defined that term, and the Interior Department's 
efforts to do so have been struck down twice by a U.S. District Court judge
in Washington.  

The government's unofficial policy has been to give any coal owner who had
sought to mine the coal up to the day the law was established, Aug. 3, 1977,
valid existing rights.

But a growing number of federal judges around the country have ruled that
this definition, never formally adopted, violates the Fifth Amendment, which
bars the taking of property without just compensation.

"We view this new policy as an affirmation of the Fifth Amendment and a 
correct interpretation of the surface mining law," Steven Goldstein, the 
chief spokesman for the Interior Department, said Sunday.

The department says the public lands with the richest coal reserves are in 
eight national forests in Ohio, Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky,
Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
-- 
Scott M. Hamel                                   hamel@athena.cs.uga.edu
University Computing & Networking Services       shamel@uga.cc.uga.edu
University of Georgia - Athens, Ga. 30602
***I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.  A. Leopold***