Ignored by the Media

Thanks to the concentrated media spotlight stemming from the scandalous nature of the Flint water crisis (of which I talked about in my first post), almost everyone has heard about the plight of the predominantly low income inhabitants of the Michigan town.

Thanks to the lack of attention from the main stream media (that some say arise due to the long term effects of social bias), I'm sure almost nobody has heard of the long standing water crisis plaguing Native Americans in the west and south west regions of America.

The nuclear arms race of the Cold War caused a drastic and frightening increase in the production of nuclear weapons in America. In the 1960's America had a peak stockpile of over 30,000 nuclear warheads.

Nuclear Arms Race Warhead Arsenal
Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

And in order to produce all of these weapons, uranium is needed. Lots of lots of uranium. And in order to ensure that there was enough uranium to produce all of these warheads, light regulations from the 1800s were still in place that did not take into account the dangers of mining things like uranium. The most impactful of these is the General Mining Law of 1872, which made it so that mines did not have to "undergo reclamation or remediation", which pretty much means that mine owners did not have to clean up after themselves. Already this does not seem like a good idea, and then when you consider just how much uranium was coming out of these mines, the whole situation gets much worse.

Uranium production in tons per state
Image Courtesy energy.gov

Some of the abandoned mines that resulted when the US got less 'nuke crazy' are just that: abandoned. The owners didn't have to clean up, so they just stood up and left, leaving radioactive waste and gaping holes in the ground. Take this abandoned mine in San Juan County, Colorado. The bright yellow waste water that leaches out of the mines is referred to as "the yellow monster" by the Navajo people who live near them. At a October 2008 House Oversight Committee hearing, a local, Ray Manygoats recalled how his sister accidentally "walked through one of the open ponds near the mill and burned her feet." He now suffers from numerous health problems as a result of his life near the mine.

Image Courtesy of Reuters

This radioactive waste can find it's way into the drinking supply of the people who live nearby, leading to uranium concentrations four times the federal limit. While much of the uranium one takes in is excreted, a portion of it remains in your body, causing kidney damage. Acute exposure to the metal causes other health effects like significant weight loss or hemorrhages.

In addition to these abandoned mines, there is still uranium mining going on in northwestern Nebraska using a technique called in situ leaching, which is injecting oxygenated water into the ground to dissolve the ore, and then bringing the uranium-water solution back to the surface to extract and process the metal. The safety of such a technique is currently being debated (it is questionable whether mining operations can capture all of the solution), but a nearby group of the Oglala Lakota people are saying it is responsible for high rates of cancer and kidney disease.

And it doesn't stop with uranium. Other mining operations that procure metals like copper utilize acidic solutions to most efficiently and quickly gather ore, and the waste of these operations can leach into water, leading to disasters like the Gold King Mine spill in 2015, which turned an entire river bright yellow.

Animas River in Colorado
Image Courtesy of Jerry McBride

The Native Americans have been hard at work protesting the issues at hand, but provisions that allow for continued as well as new mining operations on federal land continue to be slyly tucked into large documents in order to sneak them past Congress and the tribes. For example, a provision allowing for the creation of the "continent's largest copper mine" in a national forest in Arizona (which was protected Apache land) was sneaked into a document that funds the Pentagon.

The main stream media decides not to cover much of the plight of the Native Americans who are trying to prevent such measures to occur. Not even large protests in Washington DC get any media coverage. This is contrast to the huge media outcry brought by the Flint, MI crisis. I won't get political about whether this is due to long standing discrimination or mainstream media's love of a juicy story, but it certainly shows that there are crisis' happening right now that receive little to no coverage, and therefore little to no acknowledgement.