Golden State about to outlaw gold prospecting?

The state built on a gold rush is about to say, in its bureaucratic way, that fish are worth more than gold.

The reason for this mammoth fight is … salmon.

At the centre of the battle is suction dredging, today’s mechanised version of gold panning.

Up to 4,000 people in California use suction dredging to extract gold.

It involves motorised rigs which act like giant vacuum cleaners, sucking up mud and gravel from the bottom of a watercourse and then using gravity to sort tiny quantities of gold from the rocks and dirt.

Environmentalists say the technique disturbs riverbeds where fish such as pacific salmon lay their eggs.

Advertisement

The environmentalists won a two-year moratorium on the dredging during the Ahnuld years, which they have extended into the future via bureaucratic tricks:

But opponents of dredging, with the help of Democratic state assemblyman Jared Huffman, have managed to amend California’s proposed budget in a way that will extend the moratorium for at least five years, and maybe forever.

A paragraph in the document was changed to ensure that the Department of Fish and Game cannot spend any money reissuing dredging licences until 2017.

People in the gold business are not too happy about the amendment.

Rachel Dunn, an amateur prosector who runs Gold Pan California in Sacramento, said: ‘It’s crazy. It’s a circumvention of due process, in which a cheap political manoeuvre has been used to circumvent science.’

Typical. Folks who hope to continue oil drilling out in West Texas, where a lizard threatens to halt the whole thing, should take note of this tactic. You won’t get a vote, just a notice that what you’ve been doing for years or decades, or more than a century, and which provided for your family, is now illegal.

Advertisement

Recommended

Trending on PJ Media Videos

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Advertisement
Advertisement