photo by Carol Walker

Join us this evening as Carol Walker and Debbie Coffey, both wild horse advocates, document the wholesale obliteration of America’s wild horses.  The claim by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forestry service that the wild horses need to be eradicated, saying that they are destructive, is in stark contrast to the issue of abandoned mines.

In Oct. 2019, William Perry Pendley, who is exercising the authority of the Director of the Bureau of Land Management, told the Society of Environmental Journalists in a meeting in Colorado that wild horses were the biggest problem facing federal public lands in the West.

However, the BLM has estimated that there are about 500,000 abandoned mines in our nation.

The Government Accountability Office (the GAO) stated that in just the 13 Western states, the inventory puts abandoned mine estimates at 620,000.

As of January, 2017, lands administered by the BLM contained 52,381 abandoned mine sites, of which 80 percent require further investigation and/or remediation.

So what is the real problem?  Wild horses? Or abandoned mines that pollute water resources among other things.

TO LEARN MORE:

March 2020  Government Accountability Office on Abandoned Hardrock Mines.                                                                                                                                                                                                         July 2011 Government Accountability Office report on Abandoned Mines.                                                                                                                                                                             July 2008 Department of the Interior Inspector General report on Abandoned Mines.  Click here.