The Redhunter

I first heard about this film, Mine Your Own Business, over at Michelle Malkin's Hot Air (I think that's where I saw it). Today Peter Suderman wrote an article about it over at NRO, and in a comment on The Corner linked to Mary Katharine Ham's video above.

Here are two excerpts from Suderman's review

Mine Your Own Business looks primarily at ongoing efforts to stop Canadian company Gabriel Resources from building a gold mine in Rosia Montana, Romania. The region is poor, with many people still residing in tiny, Communist-era block apartments and forced to use outhouses in a place in which freezing temperatures are common. Most anti-mine activists, of course, live far away, surrounded by modern comforts. But despite this, they claim to know what the locals want.
...

Environmentalists, of course, talk endlessly about preserving traditional ways of life, but locals don’t want to preserve poverty and hardship. They want a chance to provide a more comfortable existence for themselves and their families. McAleer catches Francoise Heidebroek, who works with an anti-mining NGO, claiming that Rosia Montana residents would “prefer to ride a horse than drive a car.” When McAleer asks locals if they’d prefer to clop about in freezing temperatures on a horse, they just laugh at him. Heidebroek, it's useful to note, sequesters herself away in the modernized capitol city of Bucharest. If she wants to saddle up every morning, well, I say good luck. But there’s no reason that her equestrian whimsy should force actual Rosia Montana residents to do the same.

The point should be clear by now; a mining company wants to start a mine in Romania, the locals are thrilled with the idea of real jobs, and some Western environmentalists want to stop the mine.

The Good Side of Environmentalism

Let's get this part out of the way right now so you wont' think I'm a troglodyte.

In June of 1993 I went to Russia for about 10 days with my parents. We spent most of our time in Moscow, taking the night train to St Petersburg where we spent two days. I'd say it was a vacation, but given the near third-world status of the place, more an adventure than anything else.

Every fourth car, it seemed, spewed visible black or blue smoke. The entire city of Moscow stank of pollution. Trash seemed everywhere. We were told before going not to drink the water. You get the point.

It was enough to make even the most hard right capitalist into an environmentalist. It certainly made me appreciate the air-quality standards we have here in the United States.

This to me is good environmentalism. Clean water, clean air. Emissions control on cars and factory smokestacks. Recycling. Not dumping your motor oil into the sewer. Regulating the use of fertilizer so that we don't have so much of it in water runoff that goes into our streams and rivers. I buy into all this.

Yes I know that surface ("strip") mines can harm the environment unless there are serious reclamation efforts. Rainwater can mix with minerals turned up in the mining process, and the resulting runoff can be toxic. I get it.

Bad Environmentalism

I'm not going to get into it here, but obsessing over global warming is bad environmentalism. Environmentalists hurt their own cause when they tell us the world will end unless we adopt the Kyoto Protocols.

I do not buy into the notion that all surface mines are bad and must be stopped. I do get it that in Romania they don't have our laws, and that the company that does the mining might well get away with things that wouldn't be allowed here. And from what I understand much pollution actually comes from third-world countries precisely because of a lack of strict laws regarding the environment.

But I also think that we can have our cake and eat it to. The people of Romania need jobs. Their life as it is now stinks. It's a question of trade-offs; improving the lives of the people in Romania versus risking some environmental problems. The question, I suppose, is whether the proposed mine would actually harm the environment as much as the environmentalists say it would. I don't know, and I don't know if the film Mine Your Own Business addresses the issue.

In short, bad environmentalism is when it devolves into bananna thinking; Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

I would not be unsympathetic to the environmentalists as much if they concentrated on ways to build(?) good mines and factories that had a minimum footprint on nature. My perception is that they're often mindlessly opposed to just about everything. This mine is probably something they ought to let through.