An archaic act of largesse

Imagine this: You've got a couple of unfulfilled ambitions. You haven't been able to get to where you want to be in life. Something - family history or obligations, business failures, your inability to get a loan - has held you back.

Unwilling to accept all of this, you take off. Light out for the territory, as they say. You scratch around on a desolate scrap of land until you find gold, or silver, or a valuable mineral. You plunge a couple of stakes into the earth. Now it belongs to you - and so, once again, do your dreams.

This probably sounds a little fantastic. After all, we live in Silicon Valley, where it seems like the only wilderness we have to fight through is the tangle of electronic wires pooling on the floor. But something of that fantasy must still live in us as Westerners - why else would it have taken so long for our leadership to decide it was time to reform the General Mining Act of 1872?

If you've never heard of the Mining Act, prepare to be disturbed. According to its summary, the Act "provides that all valuable mineral deposits in lands belonging to the U.S., both surveyed and unsurveyed, are free and open to exploration and purchase by U.S. citizens ... the lands in which the minerals are found are open to occupation and purchase by U.S. citizens."

Furthermore, as currently interpreted by the federal government, the law means that mining is the "highest" use for public lands. In practice, that has meant that mining companies - many of them foreign-owned - have trotted off with billions of dollars in gold and other minerals from public land in the last several years. They've left American taxpayers to clean up their abandoned mines (more than $275 million for three mines alone that closed in the 1990s, for instance) and deal with the impact of poisoned streams, blasted mountaintops, and a cratered landscape. About 40 percent of Western waterways' headwaters are polluted by mining - and the cost of cleanup could total $32 billion or more.

Mining companies don't need to worry about that. Don't think they pay into the Treasury for their privileges, either - miners don't pay taxes on what they take away. In fact, Congress gave them a tax break worth $823 million for this decade.

It's like a bad dream. What's worse is that even reasonable attempts at reform have met with failure. Late last year, the House passed a bill that would impose some basic environmental protections as well as a royalty on hardrock mineral production, similar to the ones paid by the coal, oil, and gas industries. The bill hasn't gotten past the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid comes from Nevada, which accounts for 87 percent of American gold production. Other senators have been fumbling and bumbling along, offering amendments to water the thing down, mumbling about being fair to businesses that have watched the price of gold skyrocket to nearly $700 an ounce and the price of uranium triple over the past three years. Pitiful.

I believe that our leadership has managed to get away with this for a couple of reasons. The first one, and the most obvious, is that citizens haven't been paying attention. Now that they finally are - now that companies are attempting to open mines just a few miles away from major urban centers or national parks - the second reason may be a psychological one. Maybe Westerners - and that includes Californians - just aren't ready to let go of our romantic image of the lone miner with a pan in his hand.

I'll confess that there's a little part of me that still likes that image. Some days, when I'm at the end of a very long work week and have a weekend full of housecleaning and grocery shopping to look forward to, I like to think about what it would be like to make a big score. Maybe not in gold prospecting, but maybe the modern-day, generation-appropriate equivalent (the Internet startup, the hedge fund) that might work for me. Surely I'm not the only one out there who feels that way.

I can't be, or otherwise we'd have a 1972 General Mining Act. Or a 1992 General Mining Act - something, anything, in the last 136 years that offered a pragmatic response to the environmental degradation and financial absurdity of American mining practices. How long will our dreams and fantasies be more valuable to us than our reality? Probably as long as we're all still imagining our big score.