The Civil War changed everything about America, and not just in the states that saw the most fighting. Wartime government contracts helped make a few men—J. Pierpont Morgan, Jay Cooke and Jay Gould are among the most famous—extraordinarily rich. But mostly it ruined, both physically and financially, tens if not hundreds of thousands more.
The war was not just an eastern and southern affair; one of its legacies was to help enable American hegemony over the desert and intermountain West. The same conflict that finally ended chattel slavery and gave birth to the extraordinary democratic promise of Reconstruction facilitated the further subjugation of the indigenous peoples living on western lands.
It was in this context of desperately needed economic opportunity, the desire to settle the West’s vast landscapes, and dismissal of native sovereignty that congress passed the General Mining Law of 1872. The law codified existing informal systems of acquiring and protecting mineral claims on public lands. By providing dirt cheap mineral rights it encouraged the development and settlement of publicly owned lands in the western United States.
Amazingly, in our age of highly technical resource extraction wrought by richly capitalized corporations, the law still governs the mining of valuable minerals from public lands. And, even more astonishingly, it does so at 1872 prices. Corporations thus gobble up mineral rights on public lands—over 3 million acres worth—for five dollars or less per acre. And the gold, silver, copper, platinum, and uranium extracted from our public lands? Those go to the extractors for free. It is as if the hardrock mineral market is still dominated by lone, grizzled miners prospecting with a pan, pickaxe, and mule.
The public treasury does enter the equation, however: taxpayers often pay for the environmental legacies of mining operations, including the tens of thousands of large mines that scar the landscape and the many thousands of miles of streams poisoned by acid-laced runoff. (The General Mining Law does not cover fuel minerals such as coal and natural gas; those resources generate a paltry 8-12% royalty to the public treasury.)
This extraordinary bonanza of corporate welfare competes with recreation, conservation, scientific research, agriculture, and indigenous rights in the struggle over whether public lands are used for the public good or for private gain.
A key law for the public good has been the Antiquities Act of 1906—formally, the Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities. The law gives the president the ability to protect “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” by granting them monument status. Though the law was written to give the president latitude in such designations, it was assumed that it would be used narrowly to protect archeological sites and the like. But President Teddy Roosevelt immediately realized the law did not constrain the president in any meaningful way and he used it to set aside wide swaths of land—including, in 1908, over 800,000 thousand acres that formed the Grand Canyon National Monument. President Woodrow Wilson granted the Grand Canyon National Park status in 1919.
When Teddy Roosevelt saw the Grand Canyon in January 1908, he declared that the “Grand Canyon fills me with awe. It is beyond comparison—beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world…Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity, and loveliness. Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”
Developers of all stripes never felt that awe nor cared if their children’s children might experience the canyon’s sublimity. In 1963, the Bureau of Reclamation, caught up in the frantic craze of western water development under the leadership of the irascible Floyd Dominy, proposed two dams that would flood the canyon: one at Marble Canyon, another at Bridge Canyon. The purpose of the dams was to provide hydroelectricity to power water uphill through a canal that would eventually irrigate the Phoenix area. Cheap power was more important than the supposedly protected canyon.
The Sierra Club, led by its own irascible force of nature, David Brower, managed to stop the project. But it cost the organization: congress, aghast at its political involvement, rescinded the Sierra Club’s tax-exempt status. Yet conservationist arguments carried the day. The canyon won further protection in 1975 when congress passed the Grand Canyon Enlargement Act, which added two adjacent national monuments and other nearby public lands to the Park.
The lands comprising the greater Grand Canyon National Park ecosystem are legendarily rich in uranium. The uranium industry calls the 1000 square miles north of the Grand Canyon to the Utah border the “Arizona Strip.” A common rock formation in the Arizona Strip is known as breccia pipes. Breccia is an Italian word for broken rock— the pipes are vertical shafts of broken rock laden with uranium ore.
Mining these shafts creates two immediate environmental problems. The geology allows for disturbed uranium—which is water soluble—to penetrate deep aquifers, endangering biologically vibrant springs as well as water sources used for human consumption. Second, much of the mined materials are simply left in large piles of tailings that leach into waterways and disperse airborne uranium pollution.
Nor has the uranium mining industry respected park lands or native rights. To cite just one example, the Canyon Mine (recently renamed, in an apparent attempt at public relations, the “Pinyon Plain Mine”) sits less than 10 miles from the rim of the Grand Canyon—and it sits on ancestral lands of the Havasupai Tribe. Moreover, the Canyon Mine threatens to contaminate an aquifer that feeds into Havasu Creek—the sole source of drinking water for the 426 permanent residents of the Havasupai Reservation.
Indeed, the legacy of uranium mining in northern Arizona is a tragic example of environmental racism. The Navajo Reservation contains over 500 abandoned uranium mines. The Navajo Birth Cohort Study found more than one quarter of Navajo people endure elevated levels of uranium in their urine. Unsurprisingly, a disproportionately high number of Navajo people suffer from kidney disease and cancers associated with uranium exposure.
Despite these problems, and a mere decade after the Grand Canyon Enlargement Act, the Reagan administration opened up public lands directly adjacent to Grand Canyon National Park for uranium development. Canyon Mine was established at the time. Yet relatively little mining occurred during the Reagan era because the market for uranium fell dramatically in the wake of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.
Such instability is typical of the uranium market. Indeed, uranium markets are notoriously volatile. Not only do they suffer from the usual forces of supply and demand, but they are closely tied to geopolitical pressures.
Thus, uranium claims like Canyon Mine frequently sit idle for years—often decades—seemingly abandoned, only to be revived given favorable market and political conditions. Worried about such revivals, Obama Administration Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, citing the threats to water, wildlife, and native American sacred sites, banned new uranium mining claims on one million acres of lands adjacent to the Grand Canyon in 2012.
But in yet another example of their fanatic drive to undo anything decent that Obama achieved, the Trump administration has worked assiduously to revive the uranium industry. They did so mostly by undermining market economics to create false scarcity, drive up the price of uranium, and hence the market pressure to revive old uranium mining claims. To do so, in 2018 the administration placed uranium on a list of strategic minerals—in direct contradiction to the Defense Department’s list of such minerals. Citing that mandate the government then began stockpiling the mineral at a cost to the taxpayer of a cool $1.5 billion. Meanwhile, the administration prohibited uranium purchases from Russia and China. The planned economy approach of the Trump administration worked; uranium prices rose, despite a recent history of losing value, from $22.06/lb. in 2017 to $25.9/lb. in 2019.
The moves to revive uranium mining on lands adjacent to the Grand Canyon highlights the environmental racism of the project. Havasupai Vice Chairman Matthew Putesoy explained that, "uranium mining around the Grand Canyon threatens to contaminate the aquifer, and thus Havasu Creek, which is our sole source of public water supply in the village of Supai. But most importantly, this water played a vital role in our religion and culture. Water is so essential to our way of life and that's why we call ourselves Havasu Baaja, the people of the blue-green water."
Trump administration attempts to revive uranium mining met with lawsuits from environmental groups and indigenous nations. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court upheld the Obama administration protections, but, alas, rejected challenges to the Reagan era but newly revived Canyon (“Pinyon Plain”) Mine.
Which brings us back to the legacy of the General Mining Law of 1872. Companies are required to abide by amendments to the law and other environmental regulations, but the practice of staking mining claims and the right to extract ores from public lands are still governed by a policy derived in the aftermath of the Civil War. And that law favors mining ahead of competing uses—conservation or indigenous rights protected by laws such as the Antiquities Act—for public lands.
To make matters even more infuriating, the companies profiting from our public lands are not even American. The Center for American Progress found that 83% of companies mining or exploring for uranium are foreign owned. A Canadian company, Energy Fuels Inc, owns the Canyon Mine. This, shall we say, is a less publicized part of Trump’s “America First” agenda.
Joe Biden opposes uranium mining on Grand Canyon area lands, noting the environmental destruction and that the land is “holy to the Tribes who preserve it and call it home.” Overall, allowing new uranium claims would “drive a drill into the heart of one of Arizona’s cultural and economic cornerstones.”
Understanding why the Havasupai and Navajo face uranium poisoning from the Trump administration, then, involves not just the racism and craze for resource destruction (“development”) that characterize Republican administrations. It involves the legacy of old laws and how powerful interests exploit them. It involves looking past Republican rhetoric about “the market” to the reality of ensuring that market economics do not actually work. Just as in the Civil War, wealthy, well-connected businessmen exploit the public treasury for private gain.
The cornerstone of a healthy ecology that allows indigenous people greater control over their fate directly contradicts the Trump administration policy of using public wealth to subsidize private profit. The Biden administration should make it a top priority to undue the Trump administration’s interference in the uranium market, and to permanently protect the lands all Americans can visit and that many indigenous people call home.