Virginia Uranium Inc: Good Land Stewards?

Here’s a fabulously preposterous line from a full page ad released in the Danville Register and Bee on 9/28/2011 by Virginia Uranium Inc.:

For our company, stewardship of the land is more than a corporate principle; it is a deeply ingrained way of life that has sustained six generations of farmers, each striving to pass on this land in a better condition than they found it.

Better condition than they found it? How exactly do you dig up tremendous swaths of land and uranium ore and expect to leave the land “in a better condition?” Virginians in particular, and Americans in general, have seen this marketing game played before by natural resource pillagers, claiming on the one hand ideas of stewardship, intergenerational justice, and corporate social responsibility while kowtowing to the scriptures of capitalism. In effect, the consequence of the latter is a complete negation of the former, the complete dismissal of public-faced claims of stewardship.

Virginians should not and do not buy the land stewardship argument because it assumes that companies like Virginia Uranium Inc. will be willing and able to spend millions of dollars and years of time  to clean up the environmental mess that it will inevitably leave behind. How many mining companies have been such rigorous stewards of the land? No, fellow Virginians, let’s not be fooled by this lofty rhetoric. Let’s turn our attention to renewable sources of energy, not deadly ones.