The Editor:
Let's talk about the water. And talk we had better or our water will be gone. This isn't just happening tomorrow, it's happening right now.
Vale wants to suck out 10 million gallons of Katepwa water each day for its solution mine they've started at Kronau. My math figures that amount is nine to 10 per cent of the present overflow at the Katepwa spillway. With 50 per cent of the flow having to legally go into Manitoba, that 10 per cent is actually 20 per cent of our usable water.
But that's not the only mine jumping on this bandwagon for Qu'Appelle Valley water. There are at least four more mines being considered in the vicinity for the immediate future so that will solve the water problem because there won't be any left for our use in the Qu'Appelle system. This is Steven Harper's vision of growth and prosperity?
When all our usable water is gone and there isn't even enough water to keep these mines going, then what? Multinationals' usual practice when facing exhaustion of resources is always economic. Minimize their losses by deserting the location, the local economies, their employees and the environment leaving nothing but post-mining devastation in their wake. Then what drives our present government's sacred economy?
Once the water is saturated, in solution mining, to the point it is useless even to the mines, their answer is to frac it back into the earth. Unless your brain is totally dead from artificial entertainment and consumerism, surely we all have to recognize how brilliant fracking is? Violently fracturing the substructure of the Earth with toxic waste under pressure? Fractures that either drain or invade existing aquifers with caustic poisons, fractures that invade the weaker underground structures like your water well, eventually making its way back to the surface, exposing itself as flames coming out of your water taps, as burning your skin in bathing, as in eating things it touches, as in contaminating the vegetation real water is supposed to nourish? As being forever threatening to life?
Wake up people; this is happening now. It is selfishness beyond inhumanity that we will stand in that stupid, suicidal Canadian complacency, on the fence, as usual and slough this disaster off on future generations. If that is to be this generation's legacy for our kids, then it is only justified that we should all burn in the same hell we are passively allowing to be created for those generations to come.
Greg Chatterson,
Fort Qu'Appelle
