Yukon Government Opens Vast Wilderness to Mining

[n2doc]

Tom Clynes
for National Geographic
PUBLISHED JANUARY 24, 2014

Canada's Yukon Territory announced on Tuesday that it has opened one of the largest unbroken wilderness areas in North America to mining and mineral exploration.

The government's decree stunned indigenous leaders, who support a 2011 plan developed under Yukon land claims treaties that would have maintained the wilderness character of 80 percent of the area, which is known as the Peel watershed region. The government's new plan all but reverses that figure, opening some 71 percent of the watershed to mining.

The Yukon features some of Canada's highest peaks and largest glaciers, as well as tremendous expanses of lake-dotted tundra, boreal forests, and wetlands. (See "Yukon: Canada's Wild West" in the February issue of National Geographic magazine.) It's also rich in wildlife, with extreme seasonal shifts that beckon vast herds of caribou and other animals into motion. Larger than California but with only 37,000 inhabitants, the territory has been mostly empty of humans since the Klondike Stampede ended in the 1890s.

In recent years a new gold rush has brought a spike in population and prosperity to towns like Whitehorse and Dawson. But the rush to exploit the Yukon's minerals—which also include zinc, copper, iron, and uranium—has unearthed growing tensions between government and mining interests on the one hand, and conservation and indigenous First Nations interests on the other.

more

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140124-canada-yukon-peel-watershed-wilderness-mining-first-nations/

Money Uber Alles

[notemason]

1. One day soon

we will be powering without fossils and they will look back and wish they had not raped their treasure.

“take the only tree that's left and stuff it up the hole in your culture” ---Leonard Cohen