For over 20 years, the Cascade Forest Conservancy (CFC), a conservation nonprofit based in Vancouver, WA, has worked to keep mining out of Skamania County’s Green River Valley, located in the foothills of Mount St. Helens. The group has twice successfully sued to cancel permits for exploratory drilling, but now a new mining attempt has surfaced from Canadian-based Cambria Gold Mines.
This time, the CFC is seeking a more permanent solution.
CFC’s executive director Molly Whitney and policy manager Ashley Short attended the June 30 meeting of the Skamania County Board of Commissioners to ask elected officials for a statement of support “in protecting this area from an open pit mine.” The group has two main goals: Growing their base of roughly 100 local entities who’ve stated their opposition to mining operations in the area, and advocating for a permitting process that is transparent and allows for public input.
However, Skamania County’s commissioners questioned the local benefits of preventing the area from being mined.
Commissioner Rob Ferris raised concerns that restricting this mine for environmental reasons could shut down other economic opportunities. “You get one action in, you get your foot in, and then where’s it going to stop?” he said.
Commissioner Asa Leckie had more specific feedback for the conservancy. He noted that a large portion of the county’s land is federally-owned, already putting heavy limitations on how resources can be extracted from the area.
“What other options, besides resource extraction, are available to Skamania County for economic drivers?” he asked the CFC representatives at the meeting. “Because right now, tourism is not paying a living wage.”
But the CFC is skeptical that the proposed copper mine would be a strong economic driver for Skamania County. The group’s presentation to the commissioners included data from a third-party report that suggests the presence of an open pit mine would decrease the number of visitors to the area, and noted that local economies of mining communities become tied to global mineral prices.
“Generally, if global prices are strong, the mining operations can have a short-run positive impact on the community,” CFC policy manager Short told the commissioners: “But if the prices are weak, the impacts can easily turn negative.”
She said studies that focus specifically on this tend to find “the negative effects on employment during the bust period outweigh any positive outcomes on the boom period.”
Cambria Gold Mines’ vice-president of projects, David Thomas, disagrees with CFC’s assessment. Drawing on his 40 years in the industry, he said he has “dealt with mines of similar size and scope, and every one I’ve built up has been a great success economically and created vibrant life in the community. So I wouldn’t expect anything different [here],” he told Uplift Local in an interview.
Economic issues are not the conservancy’s sole concern, however. CFC’s presentation to the commission cited a number of additional negative impacts they foresee if a mine were approved for the area, such as:
- Displacement of trails and camps by the mine’s presence. About this, Short said “this natural gateway would be replaced with a scar on the landscape.”
- Impact to local tribes who see Mount St. Helens as their traditional cultural property. Both the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and the Cowlitz Indian Tribe oppose the current effort to open a mine in the area, and have assisted CFC with legal opposition in the past.
- The creation of large “tailing ponds,” which are pools of mining wastewater. Typically these are held by dams built of dirt and rock. If the dams failed, and wastewater got in the nearby Green River, CFC says it would pollute local water sources and have a substantial negative impact to local fish and wildlife. An independent study cited by CFC indicates this kind of mining pollution is “nearly universal” in all mines the study analyzed.
Short later told Uplift Local that the Green River Valley presents additional, specific risks for mining. The close presence of Mount St. Helens, still an active volcano, means the risk of seismic activity is high. Additionally, the local climate is significantly wet, increasing the risk of leaching from the dams blocking the trailing pools, and local fish are sensitive to dissolved copper at levels below standard regulatory thresholds.
But Thomas said those worries should be addressed at a later date. He emphasized that Cambria’s current focus in the area is exploratory drilling and this may not lead to developing a mine.
He said he would ask opponents “for their support in letting us do prerequisites and come to the table with all the facts” about the mine, natural resources, and economic benefits.
“Environmental protections can be put in place to ensure that, if there was ever a mine developed, that it would do no harm to the environment,” he said.
CFC’s past efforts to stop exploratory drilling include successfully suing mining companies in 2014 and 2021, showing improper analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to win the suits. But Whitney, the group’s executive director, told county commissioners that “it’s a game of whack-a-mole” to keep up with mining companies seeking new permits.
So the CFC has begun to seek more permanent solutions. In 2023, the group successfully advocated for a state declaration of the Green River as an outstanding resource water, giving it protection against pollution. Now, concerned this alone is not enough to stop mining efforts, the conservancy has been seeking a formal mineral withdrawal: a complete removal of any mining rights for the area at the federal level.
Whitney says those efforts have been slowed by the current presidential administration, which recently restored mining rights to an area in northern Minnesota and changed NEPA rules to reduce required environmental reviews, making litigation to stop mining more challenging. Meanwhile, Cambria has submitted another round of proposals to drill in the area.
Ultimately, Skamania County commissioners did not commit themselves at the June 30 meeting to any action one way or another, instead anticipating more discussion. Both the Commission and the CFC expressed a commitment to maintain an open working relationship. Cambria’s Thomas, who attended the meeting but wasn’t on the agenda, so was not allowed to speak, told Uplift Local that his team also plans to keep in touch with commissioners but had no plans for specific public presentations.
Leckie, who brought up restrictions on timber harvesting, a loss of school funding and the county’s aging workforce during discussions of the proposed drilling, summed up the scenario as “Skamania County is locked in a box with very few options.”
Whitney agreed with Leckie that these are real challenges, but had this direct response: “I don’t think putting an open pit mine in your backyard is going to solve any of that.”
For more info on their presentation and the response from the commissioners, read full notes from the June 30 meeting of the Skamania County Board of Commissioners by Gorge Documenter Caroline Elliott.
Swen Carlson
Swen Carlson is Uplift Local's Community Editor in Oregon. He has lived in The Dalles for the past decade and got his start in journalism with Uplift Local's Gorge Documenters program.
