Editor:
The Citizens in Support of Crowsnest Coal are genuinely frustrated at the lack of commerce, shortage of new well-paid jobs, and lack of a diversified tax base, beyond property taxes, which many foreign resource companies don’t pay anyway.
The solution to their frustration, however, needs to be long-term, sustainable, and environmentally respectful for all generations of people, flora and fauna. The mining companies’ plan will inevitably involve scraping, drilling the land, leaving gaping holes, new erosion roads, and sludge behind, while diverting water to facilitate the cheapest way to extract profit for their company and shareholders.
This will be all our future generations’ legacy since the company likely considers costs to the environment an externality to be ignored in the discredited, defective calculus of trickle-down economics, not creating long-term jobs and not adding long-term investment in the local economy.
Coal mining isn’t the answer to reclamation. It's the problem.
The history of coal mining isn’t to fix a problem, but to create a mess and leave it. The economics of tourism speaks louder than coal mining since tourism fosters generational sustainability, minimizes long-term damage/costs to the environment, creates a paid tax base and clean jobs built on local and foreign currency, and respects the landscape for future generations’ continued economic benefits.
Remember lessons learned from the Nordegg coal company departure 60 years ago on a $10 million provincial government loan, paid through your provincial taxes. Talk to Nordegg volunteer firefighters fearing for their lives that a wildfire will engulf the coal dust scattered landscape and buried in unmapped closed tunnels on the mine site in an uncontrollable catastrophic inferno.
History in this province demonstrates short-term economic gains produce disastrous long-term economic and environmental pain for current and future Crowsnest generations.
Jim Gough,
Canmore
