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COMMENT DEADLINE: May 14, 2013

Email your comment today: comments-southwestern-cibola@fs.fed.us

Please Help Stop Uranium Mining on Sacred Mt. Taylor http://my.firedoglake.com/wendydavis/2013/04/27/please-help-stop-uranium-mining-on-sacred-mt-taylor/ By: wendydavis   April 27, 2013  To the Navajo (Diné), Mt. Taylor in northern New Mexico is the southernmost of the four mountains that describe the cardinal points of their ancestral sacred lands, Dinétah, the others being the San Francisco Peaks, Blanca Peak, and Mt. Hesperus, the highest peak we see out our bedroom door as we greet the new day.  To the Navajo, the volcanic mountain is known as Tsoodzil, or Turquoise Mountain, and in their cosmology, is home to holy people Black God, Turquoise Boy, and Turquoise Girl.

To many Southwest tribes, but especially the Zuni, Hopi, Acoma and Laguna, Mt. Taylor is also sacred, and used for ceremonial purposes, including gathering medicinal plants, planting payos, or prayer sticks…and more.

In 2009, the mountain was given awarded Permanent Traditional Cultural Property Designation by the New Mexico Cultural Properties Review Committee.

This week, the Cibola National Forest Service (CNFS) issued a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for a uranium mine that violates its own Forest Management Plan and current standards of historic and cultural preservation.  The Cibola Forest Circus folks are calling their crushing, ruinous deviation a “Project-Specific Forest Plan Amendment.”  Yes, quite specific.  Here’s the deal:

Roca Honda Resources, a partnership with Strathmore Minerals in Canada, and Sumitomo of Japan, is intending to mine 2.6 million pounds of uranium ore per year at an average depth of around 2500 feet. ……

If you’d be willing to take a couple minutes to register your objections to the plan, this page has talking points, but in addition, they’re asking allies for three things:

1.) Urge the Forest Service to deny Roca Honda’s Plan of Operations

2.) Urge the Forest Service to choose the “No Action” Alternative for the DEIS

3.) Urge the Forest Service to reissue a new DEIS because the current one is inadequate

They’ve chosen to go with bureaucrat-speak rather than the ‘WTH are you talking about, ya great idjits? No Nukes, No Way!…that I might actually prefer.  But feel free to comment as you will…

My guess is that Forest Circus will end up okaying the ‘scaled down version of the plan’ based on my many encounters with similar ‘choices’.  The compromise one is the one they probably know they’ll approve, but the ‘scaled down version’ wouldn’t look much different than the radical approval one.  If you choose to register your objections to the plan, thank you in advance.

COMMENT DEADLINE: May 14, 2013

Email your comment today: comments-southwestern-cibola@fs.fed.us

Letters can be mailed to:

TRAVIS G. MOSELEY
Acting Forest Supervisor,

Cibola National Forest and Grasslands,

2113 Osuna Rd. NE,

Albuquerque, NM 87113

or by fax to 505-346-3901

April 29, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general