Special to Enviroblog by Dusty Horwitt, EWG Analyst
Within moments of taking office, Secretary of the Interior-designate Ken Salazar (D-CO), has an opportunity with the sweep of his pen to protect the nation's most treasured national park and drinking water for 25 million Americans.
The Bush administration has spent the better part of the last 8 years giving gifts to the mining industry, including allowing a surge of uranium claims to be staked along the north and south rims of the Grand Canyon and along the banks of the Colorado River that flows through the canyon. The number of claims within five miles of the National Park has shot from 10 in 2003 to over 1,100 in 2008.
The Colorado River provides drinking water for residents of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego and other areas. The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves Las Vegas, and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves Los Angeles, San Diego and other Southern California communities, have written to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, expressing concern about the impact such mining might have on Colorado River water quality. .
Even Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano wrote Kempthorne expressing her own concern and requested that the Secretary withdraw land around the Canyon from new mining claims. And the House Natural Resources Committee passed a legally binding resolution last summer calling on Kempthorne to withdraw the land. Yet Kempthorne and Bush ignored them all.
The Secretary of the Interior has the power to withdraw the land on a temporary, emergency basis under federal law (43 USCS 1714(e)).
Given the toxic legacy of uranium mining in the southwestern United States and a report just last month by Abram Lustgarten and David Hasemyer in the San Diego Union Tribune that scientists believe that uranium mining would inevitably contaminate the Colorado, Secretary-designate Salazar should bar new mining activity on about one million acres of federal land around the Grand Canyon. The action would be quick - applying pen to paper - but the results would be far reaching, helping to protect one of the 7 natural wonders of the world and the Colorado River from the environmental destruction of further mining operations.