there at that time so I, under the guise I guess of some important person, 

 who I certainly wasn't, attended this thing. One of their primary 

 concerns that day and they discussed it for some two hours or longer, was 

 the jrfecessity for them to justify or develop the rationale to justify strip 

 mining western coal. This was frightening to me. Just as indicative 

 though of the forethought that has gone into the problem that we are all 

 faced with here today and the time frame that has been addressed to this. 

 At that same meeting there was discussion concerning the need to supress 

 any significant alternate sources of energy until the development of coal 

 had been allowed to run its economic course. It would be disasterous for 

 the federal government to promote a program encouraging industry to 

 invest billions of dollars to convert our coal resources to all forms of 

 energy and then jerk the props out from under them in ten years or so 

 and leave them sitting there with a bunch of great white elephants in the 

 northern Great Plains. This is a real instance in my life... I've wished 

 many times that I would of had a tape recorder sitting there so that I 

 could have recorded it because I have presented this to some of those 

 public figures in different situations across the country since then and 

 they emphatically denied it, but I guess that this is one way to remain a 

 public servant. 



One thing that they didn't talk about to any great degree that day 

 was the potential for impacts on agriculture in rural life in western 

 America and what might be done not only by industry and government, 

 but by everybody involved to mitigate these impacts. This obviously was 

 the least of their concern at that time and I think its only been through 

 the actions of concerned people, environmentalist if you may, people 

 involved in all aspects of government, people involved in varying life 

 styles that are impacted by this thing, who have gotten involved and made 

 an issue out of this whole concept. 



I mentioned earlier I think there are probably four areas that are 

 involved as impacts in a situation such as my own. The first one that I 

 would talk about is the environmental impact. There are several items 

 involved in this and I think probably the one that comes to most of your 

 minds first off when you talk about strip mining is the destruction of the 

 land and the reclamation programs that are involved in the restoration of 

 that land. At the airport in Billings yesterday I was visiting one of the 

 fellow Hereford breeders who had been down to the Range Experiment 

 Station sale in Miles City, and he is a quite prominent oil man and that 

 makes those Hereford cows do awfully well. But anyway, we were kind of 

 having an exchange of ideas on this whole thing. I told him where I was 

 going and what I was doing and he was very intelligent and quite 

 articulate and he couldn't understand why, if they are reclaiming the land 

 that there was any conflict between agriculture and energy development. 

 So I sat him down like a first grade student and explained basically what I 

 am going to tell you here right now. 



I think that how the physical aspects of strip mining affect a rancher 

 depends entirely upon the geographical and logistical location of a mine 

 operation within an economic unit. If you have a small area of land out on 

 the corner somewhere that's really not very valuable to you--it's away 

 from the water holes and kind of dry area anyway and doesn't raise much 



