Nature’s laws trump economic principles — a rule of thumb often ignored by policy makers.

Mining provides many rueful examples. It’s a dirty business to extract minerals from Colorado’s mountains, yet the state often underestimates long-term risk for short-term gain. Sometimes the long-term risk is very long term, even geologic in length.

An example is the Summitville Mine disaster. Gov. Roy Romer wanted to secure jobs for Rio Grande County. In the 1980’s, he allowed the Summitville Consolidated Mining Co., a subsidiary of Canadian Galactic Resources Ltd., to mine for gold and silver in an open pit operation using sodium cyanide to leach minerals from ore above the Alamosa River.

The mine closed in 1992. Its heap leach pad and damaged pad liner leaked about 85,000 gallons of contaminated water into nearby creeks, killing trout downstream.

Although Summitville took out 9,155.8 kgs of gold and 9,947.3 kgs of silver, it declared bankruptcy, leaving its mess behind. The state allowed the mine to secure its bond with mining equipment. That didn’t nearly cover the $155 million Superfund clean-up plus $1 million annual ongoing costs for water treatment, now powered by solar panels.

Slow forward to the 3 million gallons of Gold King Mine sludge that flooded the Animas River, also known as the River of Lost Souls. Gold King filled with contaminated water due to cement plugs that stopped up polluted water at connected mines, including the Sunshine Mine, owned by the Kinross Gold Corp. from Canada. The mines are among more than 200 abandoned sites in the Animas headwaters.

The state has a mine severance tax for environmental clean up, but, according to state documents, budget shortfalls sent the money to other uses. Originally, a water treatment plant at the Sunshine Mine cleaned the polluted Sunshine water. When the mine closed, the treatment plant, by then uneconomical, also shut down. No private or public sources anted up to keep the plant running to protect downstream economies from mine water pollution. And then the Gold King plug gave way from the massive water pressure.

The EPA has taken the hit for the Gold King flood, though the disaster was just waiting to happen. EPA worried about the plugs from the get-go. In 1996 the agency wanted to use Superfund money to clean up the sites. The Silverton community rejected the idea and the Romer administration didn’t provide a consent letter for EPA to act.

Quick and dirty solutions rarely fix up nature. Our current Gov. Hickenlooper drank from the River of Lost Souls to assure the tourist and agriculture industries downstream that the river water is safe. Navajos, whose livelihoods depend on the river and whose view of nature is, well, more of nature, are not confident. Their lawsuit will probably cost taxpayers many millions.

After these events, it’s time for Colorado to act on Nature’s Law of Prepositions: what man does to nature must exceed in value what man gets from nature plus what it costs to take care of nature when all the doing to is done.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform. She is a candidate for a seat in the Jefferson County School Board recall election.