From the Friday, August 29, 2008 online edition of the Hungry Horse News . . .

Potential mining projects in the Canadian Flathead seem slowed for now, but a new project just outside the Flathead is in its early stages.

A British Columbia representative last week told the Flathead Basin Commission that little has developed with proposed mining projects. At the same meeting in West Glacier, representatives from a third company explained plans for a mine near the Canadian Flathead.

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Another in a series of articles about Glacier National Park by Michael Jamison, this one discusses threats to the park, including things like climate change, nearby resource extraction and even road paving. From the Wednesday, August 20, 2008 online edition of the Missoulian . . .

One hundred years ago, when Glacier National Park first became a park, grizzly bears roamed along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, north into Canada, south into Sun River country, west to the Cabinets and east onto lowland plains.

Wolves wandered, too, and wolverines and big bull elk.

They had no idea someone had drawn a new political boundary onto their landscape.

They still don’t.

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From the Wednesday, August 6, 2008 online edition of The Guardian, a widely-read British newspaper . . .

It has been called one of North America’s wildest places. Just north of the US-Canada border, the wooded slopes of the Canadian Rockies channel unpolluted water into a valley that remains free of human development. Grizzly bears, cougars and wolverines prowl the banks of the Flathead river. Outside of a national park, there is probably no wilderness like it on the continent.

But outside of a national park could mean outside of legal protection. Somewhere in the workings of the British Columbia government, an application from global energy company BP is working its way around civil servants’ desks. In it, the firm outlines a proposal that has horrified local environmentalists: the installation of up to 1,500 gas wells covering an area of 500 sq km (310 sq miles) amid the lush 1,580 sq km wilderness of the Flathead. Some time during the next six months, officials may give approval to the project.

“There have to be some places on the planet where you don’t go for energy production,” says Jack Stanford, a biologist at the nearby University of Montana. “This is one of them.”

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“Montana’s News Station” (a collection of 7 TV stations, including KAJ in Kalispell and KPAX in Missoula) has been doing a series of short segments on the proposed Cline Mine and BP coalbed methane projects in the Canadian North Fork and Elk Valley areas around Fernie, BC. They even managed to get a news crew into the area around the Cline Mine site. There are four videos posted as of today, with more scheduled. Viewing the videos requires the Internet Explorer web browser.

Link to the videos . . .

From the Monday, July 21, 2008 online edition of the Missoulian . . .

Polite diplomacy appears to be trumping the historic conversation of conflict between Canadian officials intent on mining energy resources and downstream residents worried the development could taint Montana waterways.

“The nature and the tenor of the discussion are absolutely changing,” said Louisa Willcox, senior wildlife specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I think it’s become far more civil, courteous and honest – and hopefully more productive.”

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