Mining Impact Quotes

Mining is like a search-and-destroy mission.

The coal mining industry is very destructive and it doesn't have to be.

Tourism is important because it can create sustainable local economies. I'd much rather have 1,000 tourists going up the Tambopata than 1,000 gold miners.

The story of mountaintop mining - why it happens, and what its consequences are - is still new to most Americans. They have no idea that their country's physical legacy - the purple mountain majesties that are America - is being destroyed at the rate of several ridgetops a week, by three million pounds of explosives every day.

Well I'm not convinced that expanding uranium mining is in the best interests of the country and the best interests of its environment.

From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins.

In order to produce enough gold to create a wedding band, … a mine would have to extract tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds of ore. … each mine produces thousands of tons of waste rock and other materials. The end result is that mines across the West create millions of tons of waste. This waste is usually stored on the earth's surface in vast piles that may be hundreds of feet high and cover an area the size of several football fields.

With the mining sites, I found a subject matter that carried forth my fascination with the undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty and its environmental politics.

What turned me into an environmentalist, on my eleventh birthday, was seeing the first strip mine.

In the central Indian state of Orissa, mining has scarred the landscape, and it is already too late to secure most of the traditional elephant corridors.

I should say that Canada is one of the major criminals, not just the tar sands and so on, but even mining throughout the world, a lot of it is Canadian. It's extremely destructive, so an important thing for Canadians to do is curtail the predatory and destructive behavior of their own government and corporations. A carbon tax is one way of doing it.