Open letter to Wes Larson:
I write this letter with a great deal of anger and disappointment. In your letter in the August 5 edition of the Yukon News, you somehow found the nerve to label Capstone resources an “environmental terrorist.”
Mr. Larson, if you do not like the way mining is done in the Yukon, then I suggest that you stop using products that came from a mine and move to some part of the world where there is no mining industry. You cannot turn on a light switch, turn up a thermostat, flush your toilet or start the engine in your fossil-fuel- powered automobile without committing an act of environmental terror.
The fact that since the day you were born your entire life has depended on the mining industry makes you every bit of an “environmental terrorist” as Capstone Resources, Teck Cominco, Alexco Resources, United Keno Hill, Anvil Range, Cyprus Anvil, Treadwell Yukon, Whitehorse Copper, Yukon Consolidated Gold Company and hundreds of other mining companies that have provided employment for generations of Yukoners over more than 100 years.
The fact that you have children means that they too will have to depend upon the mining industry that you hate so much. The Yukon mining industry has fed and clothed me since birth. You are ignorant of reality enough to say that mining is “literally destroying my children” yet you are only furthering the need for mining in the Yukon and elsewhere merely by having children, so the next time you summon the nerve to accuse the Yukon mining industry of “destroying my children,” I highly recommend that you take a look at just how much the lives of your children (and everyone else you know) are totally dependent on the mining industry.
Mining makes life for your children possible, whether you care to admit it or not.
Mr Larson, if you like, I would gladly speak to my employers to arrange for you to come for a tour of Minto mine so that you can meet face-to-face with the hardworking Yukoners that you dare call “environmental terrorists,” or would you prefer to continue to make your ignorant hypocritical criticisms from the comfort of you living room? I am a proud Yukoner. I was born here, I will die here, I will be buried here and I am very disgusted at having to share my much-loved Yukon with such an ignorant hypocrite as you.
Until the time comes when you can prove your environmental purity by removing from your life, and those of your children, all products that came from a mine (especially mines in the Yukon), you should be hanging your head in environmental shame.
Jon Wilkie
Dawson City