The U.S. Forest Service Offers Sonoita Residents The Best Chance To Stop By Jeff Smith AMERICAN SMELTING AND Refining Co., ASARCO, came to my neighborhood last Saturday to lecture my neighbors on the many and wondrous benefits of mining in general, and the specific upside of having an open pit mine in the Rosemont district, north of Sonoita and adjacent to State Highway 83. Call us a bunch of slow learners, but nobody was buying what ASARCO was trying to sell. You may have caught the highlight reel on the telly at 6 and 10. What ASARCO intended to be received as a friendly and hospitable open house, in which we, the local yokelry, would be made to feel like guests (in our own county fairgrounds), turned into an angry confrontation (and a virtual, made-for-TV media event) because we wanted our questions answered, and ASARCO didn't want to answer them. "That's not what we want to do," sputtered Dale Dixon, a mining engineer and point man for ASARCO on this project. But it's what WE want to do, answered the crowd of about 150, in one voice. Dixon and his staff of ASARCO soldiers and public relations mercenaries had no contingency plan for this. They stonewalled, got irritated, and essentially stepped on their dicks. ASARCO's entire game-plan, to this point, had been a disaster. At the first hint of developing the Rosemont ore body, ASARCO had floated the notion it would be an underground mine. That sufficed to calm and quiet local opposition. It is obvious now, and should have been then, that this was a lie and ASARCO knew it. Other mining companies had owned these claims previously, and for decades the mines have had leisure to contemplate how to get the goods out of the ground. They've done this sort of thing before. So when ASARCO showed up in Sonoita last Saturday and said they'd only just realized it had to be an open pit mine, and that they still don't have a mining plan and cannot answer any specific questions as to what will go where and how much water will be used, how much pristine mesquite, oak and pine woodland will be destroyed, how many square miles of tailings dumps will litter the landscape like a big greasy shit...anything of a factual nature specific to this proposed project...well the good ladies and gentlemen of this northern Santa Cruz County community simply did not believe them. Especially in view of the fact that ASARCO was quite free with its rosy estimates as to benefits of the project: 1.5 billion tons of recoverable copper, half a billion bucks to build the mining facilities and another billion dollars to operate it over its productive life, 650 local people (emphasis added) employed at the mine. This last datum troubles me: I don't think we can provide 650 able-bodied, sufficiently stupid boys and girls to work this mine. Me, I'm a gimp and largely useless. Mickey McArthur is a retired captain of industry and probably doesn't want to swing a pick. Jonathan Lunine already has steady work in the planetary science racket. And the local cowboys aren't cowboys because the pay is so great--they do it for love. And you know what else? I bet most of those 650 local people are already local to ASARCO's mines south of Tucson and west of Green Valley. So ASARCO isn't fooling anybody with their blue-skies bullshit, or their thousand-dollar life membership in the local volunteer fire department, or their free donuts. But does it matter? Given the fact that ASARCO owns the ore body and, according to the Mining Law of 1872, can use whatever public land it needs to get the copper out, crush it down to ore and smelt or leach it into copper, does the company need to give a thought to the future of Sonoita, northern Santa Cruz and southern Pima counties? Evidently yes, because ASARCO is hurrying to make a land swap with the Forest Service for 13,000 acres of public land, to make it easier to develop the proposed mine. They could do it without the swap, but the swap would make it simpler, and--significant datum--if the 1872 mining law ever is rewritten, ASARCO would have a hell of a lot more latitude with the Rosemont project if it owned all the land, rather than having much of it still under public ownership. And that 1872 mining law is long overdue for an overhaul. What the locals need to do to save their neighborhood is work on the U.S. Forest Service, which still manages these public lands ASARCO wants to trade for. Last I checked, the Forest Service still works for us. And the people of Pima County and the City of Tucson must be brought into the fight. Look to the southeast: There is where your summer winds and rains come rolling over the Santa Rita Mountains. There is where much of the subterranean water begins flowing toward Tucson. Picture this in your mind with the dust and sulfur smoke from a major new copper mine puking into the air. Suck on a copper penny for a moment and imagine the tang on the palate and in the nostrils of sulfurous air and arsenic-laced groundwater. Hey: this mine might end up in my backyard, but it's in your county and your watershed.

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