{"id":27444,"date":"2017-10-30T16:56:50","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T21:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27444"},"modified":"2017-10-30T16:56:50","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T21:56:50","slug":"in-photos-the-canadian-mining-boom-youve-never-seen-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27444","title":{"rendered":"In Photos: The Canadian Mining Boom You\u2019ve Never Seen Before"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Photos: The Canadian Mining Boom You\u2019ve Never Seen Before<\/a><\/h3>\n

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\u201cIf you\u2019re in Vancouver this is way out in the middle of nowhere, but way out in the middle of nowhere is our\u00a0backyard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those are the words of Frederick Otilius Olsen Jr., the tribal president of a traditional Haida village on Prince of Wales Island,\u00a0Alaska.<\/p>\n

When I met him, he had travelled to Ketchikan, Alaska, to meet with officials about the risk posed by the mining boom across the border in British\u00a0Columbia.<\/p>\n

He stood on the boardwalk overlooking Ketchikan\u2019s fishing fleet and waved his hands animatedly while he told me about how his culture \u2014 and southern Alaska\u2019s economy \u2014 depends on\u00a0salmon.<\/p>\n

The week before, I\u2019d spent several hours flying in a small fixed-wing plane over B.C.\u2019s mining boom to capture never before seen images of the province\u2019s largest and most remote\u00a0mines.<\/p>\n

Door removed, I captured hundreds of frames as we passed over the Red Chris copper and gold mine, which began operation in late 2014. Its tailings pond and dam rises impossible and angular out of a soft, sloping\u00a0valley.<\/p>\n

Set within the vast and largely intact headwaters of northwestern B.C.’s greatest wild salmon rivers, the Red Chris mine is just one of 10 mines either in operation, in development or in advanced exploration stages in this\u00a0region.<\/p>\n

It is owned and operated by Imperial Metals, the company responsible for the Mount Polley mine disaster<\/a> in central B.C. If the name seems familiar, it\u2019s because in 2014, a tailings dam at Mount Polley collapsed, resulting in one of the worst environmental disasters in Canadian history. All told, 24 million cubic metres of contaminated mining waste flooded into a lake \u2014 \u00a0a source of drinking water and salmon-spawning ground that feeds the Fraser\u00a0River.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Photos: The Canadian Mining Boom You\u2019ve Never Seen Before   \u201cIf you\u2019re in Vancouver this is way out in the middle of nowhere, but way out in the middle of nowhere is our\u00a0backyard.\u201d Those are the words of Frederick Otilius Olsen Jr., the tribal president of a traditional Haida village on Prince of Wales […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[94,103,5317,16784,16785,1482,16786],"class_list":["post-27444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-british-columbia","tag-canada","tag-desmog-blog","tag-garth-lenz","tag-imperial-metals","tag-mining","tag-red-chris-mine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27444"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27445,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27444\/revisions\/27445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}