resource upgrade & media coverage, page-8

OK 'Plough' with a name like that I'm guessing you're a farmer or horticulturalist. Like Argenbarx I'm very much on the green side too, but it makes me really angry to hear farmers giving miners a hard time about environmental impacts. Argenbarx makes a good point,Plough begrudges Dart a pit at Unicorn that will cover an area of say, 40 hectares! Yet arable land covers 6.1%, that's 472,201 km2 of Australia, with devastating consequences including biodiversity and habitat loss, erosion, rising salinity, runoff of effluent, pesticide, herbicides, hormones and nutrients, and livestock methane emissions. Yes it will be a pit, and at the end of it one of the thousands of knolls in the area will have gone. But the environmental impacts of a modern well managed pit versus the socioeconomic benefits of a mine with a 20-50 year life in an area of underemployment such as Corryong is THOUSANDS of times more beneficial than other land uses such as farming, horticulture or plantation forestry.
Unicorn has the potential to generate hundreds of millions of dollars, much of which will flow to local workers, businesses and investors and deliver great prosperity, with an environmental footprint that is relatively insignificant.
Fair play to you Plough, but try to keep things in perpective.