“Most mines are invisible except from the air.”
– Bill Black
Missing, she said, are the “voices of the people with concerns about the mill, and many facts that still deserve attention”. For example
…when the government tried in 2015 to impose just a few modest restrictions on Northern Pulp in a new industrial approval — to reduce the amount of water it could use and to cap production limits – the mill filed papers to take the government to court. In the end, the government caved and the restrictions in the industrial approval were removed….In recent months, the Northumberland Fishermen’s Association and the Friends of Northumberland Strait have made a strong case for a much more comprehensive environmental assessment of the effluent plans than the province has agreed to, and a treatment facility that would not put any effluent into the Strait.
View: COMMENTARY: Pulp mill’s dark side gets short shrift
(Chronicle Herald Jan 19, 2018)
The diffuser for the new treatment system would be about here
Click on image to enlarge (from Google Earth)
Fishers are concerned about impacts of this invisible item on lobster, crab, scallop, herring, and mackerel fisheries.
…think of the nightmare scenario if one lobster caught close to the effluent outpour, or one that travelled from there (they can travel as much as 250 kms in a year), ended up making someone sick or was tested and found to contain toxins: disaster. And make no mistake about it: it wouldn’t be a Pictou County or a Gulf of St. Lawrence lobster; it would be a Canadian lobster.
View LETTER OF THE WEEK: Trashing my place of business
(Chronicle Herald, Jan 20, 2018)
And now columnist/business person/might-have-been-premier Bill Black has joined both the Mining Association of Nova Scotia and Industrial Forestry in their concerns about the well-being of rural communities in Nova Scotia (and just incidentally, the well being of some up-scale urbanites).
View BLACK: Let’s stop hugging trees, start embracing industry
Chronicle Herald , Jan 20, 2018.
It might have been called “out of Sight Out of Mind”. Says Black
Most mines are invisible except from the air. Few Nova Scotians would know about the 40-hectare gypsum mine employing 100 people a few miles east of Highway 102. It and similar projects employ progressive reclamation schemes using overburden from new areas to backfill areas where the resource has been exhausted.
‘Wonder when these progressive businessmen will urge MANS to start cleaning up its image and our land by filling in and re-vegetating the persistent scars of older mines across Nova Scotia. That would employ lots of those rural people they are concerned about.
Or if Sean Kirby, executive director of the Mining Association of Nova Scotia, is thinking about that as he once again (and again and again, like an old stuck record) makes his case to open up protected areas in Nova Scotia to mining.
View OPINION: Inflexible land protections rob Nova Scotians of economic opportunity
Chronicle Herald Jan 20, 2018