Mining is an important industry. It has deeply shaped California, from the Gold Rush days in San Francisco to today's extraction of tech-essential minerals like

Mining is an important industry. It has deeply shaped California, from the Gold Rush days in San Francisco to today's extraction of tech-essential minerals like lithium. While we can criticize parts of the industry, and lots of what happened in the past, we can't ignore its contributions to innovation and progress. While this article implies that mining under this law is the wild west, its much more complex. Transitioning from a claim to an actual mining operation (digging and extracting minerals) involves more oversight than the staking process (which is antiquated), including environmental reviews and other regulatory hurdles. A trust fund, containing billions of dollars paid for by these miners, is set up to support the cleanup of mining areas. The notion that today's mining operations can just neglect their obligations is mistaken. While reform is needed it's not accurate for this article to use pre-regulation abandoned mines as a benchmark for mines established post the 1981 regulations or the stricter 2001 standards set by the Bureau of Land Management.