Revett’s Rock Creek Mine

By Special Advertiser, 9-02-07

The Wilderness Act of 1964 defines wilderness areas as places “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” If you take that definition for what it is, as I do, you will likely conclude that mining is prohibited in designated wilderness areas.  Imagine my bewilderment, then, at the proposal for Rock Creek Mine, which calls for digging and blasting under the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness of northwest Montana.  A mine in a federally designated wilderness area?  But silly me—the mine isn’t in the wilderness, it’s under it.  And thanks to the 1872 mining law, that’s permitted.  Here I thought the ground I was hiking on, all of it, all the way down to the earth’s core, was protected.

Revett Minerals, the corporation proposing the monstrous mine, is no stranger to Montanans. Their leaders launched the Zortman-Landusky mine, which leaked acids, cyanide, arsenic and lead, only to declare bankruptcy and leave Montanans with a tidy $204 million cleanup.  This time around, what do they have to say about the land we cherish? “There shouldn’t be anything sacred about [the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness]” said Doug Ward, vice president of Revett, “A wilderness area is nothing but a line on a map.” Sound like people you want to entrust our wild lands to?

If built, Revett’s Rock Creek Mine won’t only endanger the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness—it’s already threatened grizzlies, its alpine lakes, and the very essence of what it means to be wild.  After all, the wilderness is part of a larger ecosystem and damage won’t be contained.  More than 2,000 gallons per minute of clean water will flow into the mine’s caverns and tunnels; become polluted with heavy metals, arsenic, ammonia, and nitrates; then be discharged into the Clark Fork River and Lake Pend Oreille. That’s three million gallons of wastewater per day—killing aquatic life and destroying important habitat for bull trout. In the end, the people of Montana will be left with a landscape that is far from untrammeled—dried up mountain lakes, decimated spawning streams, a 300 foot-high-tailings pile and a toxic 64-acre subterranean reservoir continuously leaching and polluting forever.

But there is good news. Revett’s mine is not built yet. If you’ve ever walked through groves of cedars, forests of pine and fir; if you know the pure joy of standing in an alpine valley, surrounded on all sides with nothing but the vast and free Earth we live upon; if you’ve sat alongside a cold creek or even just looked at a mountain range from afar, you know this land is worth saving.  And you can help save it.  Learn about Revett’s Rock Creek Mine and write your elected officials in opposition to this proposal. Go to www.saveourcabinets.org now, and help ensure that one of our last best places doesn’t become a last best memory.

Jim Costello
Rock Creek Alliance