In the Beaverhead National Forest, which is part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, more than 99 percent of the legally available lands have been opened to oil and gas development. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of America's premier wild natural treasures, is threatened by oil industry efforts to gain access to drill in the last stretch of Alaska's north slope that is not already open to oil and gas development. Mining Mining on public lands is governed by an 1872 law designed to encourage the development of western lands. Mining companies can stake claims anywhere on federal public land unless the land has been formally withdrawn from mining. Mining operations disturb soils, denude the area of plant life and in other ways destroy wildlife habitat.
Mining companies use deadly cyanide to extract gold from ore.
Mining effluents have contaminated more than 12,000 miles of rivers and streams and 180,000 acres of lakes in the U.S., and there are at least 50 billion tons of untreated mining wastes across public and private lands. Sixty of the toxic dumps on the federal Superfund list were caused by mining operations. To add insult to injury, taxpayers subsidize this environmentally devastating industry because multinational mining companies take billions of dollars worth of valuable minerals from our publicly owned lands without paying any royalties to the Federal Treasury. Grazing fees are so low that the BLM does not even make enough revenue to monitor the damage, let alone restore the land. Damage from overgrazing includes soil compaction, soil erosion, eradication of plant species, competition with wildlife and siltation and pollution of streams and ponds.