This is a virulent attack on those scurrilous blogs and websites that are devoted to attacking mining in all its forms. I refer to the three worst offenders that you can examine at these links:

Mining Protest & UBC Action Camp

MiningWatch.ca

CorpWatch

Attack was my objective when I started writing this piece. But I changed my mind as I read their articles. Am I a turn-coat? Did their fine writing influence my sober perspectives? I remain appalled by their focus, their skewing of reality, and their one-sided perspectives. But I am sympathetic to their role and I want here to celebrate their existence.

You see I carry the baggage of my upbringing. A victim of nurture if not of nature. I was brought up on a mine on the
Witwatersrand, that premier gold mining district. I was brought up by parents who earned their living on mines, and I am the grandson of miners killed in the South African mines. My sacred places are the slimes dams and uranium-bearing sand dumps of my youth.

Only at university did I realize that our society was tightly controlled by the government who limited access to free thought and censored our every reading. I felt a growing disgust at the constant propaganda they threw at us to justify their racial system and their control of our every action. I awoke with horror when fellow students from families richer and more educated than mine were spirited away at night from our university residence by the security police—the only crime of these students I admired being to oppose the regime and call for fundamental human rights.

Now I know that the only chance for a decent civil society is aggressive and ongoing opposition to the powers that be. This opposition does not have to be aggressive. I have never voted for a politician who had the slightest chance of winning. I write what I believe in the hopes that it shines even a dim light on things that are that should not be. And I must support those other folk who believe more radically than me and write more vigorously than me on the actions of miners that they see as wrong.

Only exposure of mal-practice and malfeasance has any hope of extirpating the sore. Only a free press can assure us of liberty. And my heroes are those venal lawyers ready to attack at every turn those who denigrate people or the environment. I may not and most often do not agree with them or support their actions and aim, but I am also a true believer in the adversarial system that somehow brings a balance of action and mal-action. I am a true believer in the genius of the power of the commons, that market place of debate and discussion of the many sides of every argument that somehow seems to locate the proper. These scurrilous anti-mining blogs are, in my opinion, a vital part of the free market of ideas and of the relentless pursuit of villains who bring discredit on all of us, including the good of the mining industry.

My gut instinct as a father and grandfather who has feed his family by working long years in the mining industry is to shut down these sites. To censor their hysteria and to shut them up so we can get on with life. But my intellect tells me this is just plain stupid. I must support them and hope that they can effect beneficial changes that I have not the perspective or invective to undertake.

Thus I conclude: power to them; go read them; and enter into intelligent debate with them; and better still fix the evils they expose.