Never you mine

Last evening I went to a public meeting, sponsored by the Eastern Shore Forest Protection Assn. (the gist of the name, anyhow) about a strip mine being planned for the small community of Moose River Mines, an old gold-mining town once-famous because a failed rescue there was the first event ever covered live by the CBC.
The proposed new scar + tailings + cyanide +++ endangers a significant watershed, the opponents told us, a lake-and-river system that runs all the way to the Atlantic. Straight through an area that has been proposed as a park and wildlife preserve.
The meeting was remarkable (and so I'm writing about it a little) in the quality of the presentation, in the calm and pleasant way Association members marshaled their facts, in their polite, determined, and firm ("there are no evil people in this room", one of them said, "but..." and then proved otherwise) way they dealt with the company representatives, who scrambled from half-truth to bad science to outright fibbing (and do they ever hate it when someone asks how much money they are going to make!). And in the complete absence of political representatives of any sort from any level (it was by-election night, but still you'd think the NDP at least could send someone to something so genuine and local and right. And where were the Greens?). And in the presence of Dollie Bellemore -- closer to 100 than 90 -- and her two daughters, who with steel in their voices told the executives exactly what they would never do to the place they had lived all of their lives. And in one of the local guys standing up and reciting from memory an Alice Walker poem about the poverty of gold.
There's something exhilarating about people who believe in what they see and feel, about honest skepticism, about memory (who knew Westray still looms so large?) and genuine, rooted progressive sentiment.
Did I mention I enjoyed it a bit?
Ken