Romanian Villager Sends PBS Message in Bottle to Debunk Anti-mining Documentary

August 22nd, 2007 11:00 AM

On the heels of last night's PBS broadcast of the biased "documentary" titled "Gold Futures," which portrays the Romanian village of Rosia Montana as a pristine rural village threatened by a behemoth gold mine, village resident and blogger Gheorge Lucian is preparing to send PBS a message in a bottle - literally.

Lucian, as seen on this YouTube video, has collected samples of the highly polluted river water that flows through Rosia Montana from the now-closed former communisty-run state-owned gold mine, an environmental disaster zone that would be cleaned as part of the development of a new, modern, state-of-the-art gold mine in Rosia Montana.

He intends to send a bottle of the water - it's orange - to PBS.

According to the Environmental Impact Assessment of the proposed gold mine, the river water currently - as a result of the old, environmentally dangerous mine - contains 64 times the legal limit for iron, 110 times the legal limit for zinc, 3.5 times the legal limit for arsenic, and gets its reddish orange color from cadmium.

Canadian mining company Gabriel Resources - the company behind the mining project that the environmentalists are trying to halt - would clean up river and old mine as part of its project.

Far from the pristine village as portrayed by PBS, Rosia Montana is an environmental disaster now - that's the message of Gheorge's bottles of river water.

Lucian is featured in the documentary Mine Your Own Business, which exposes the anti-progress agendas and the deceptions and lies at the core of environmentalist groups' opposition to the proposed new gold mine in Rosia Montana.

In addition to being a great bit of theater, Lucian's YouTube video and blog show the increasing power, not just in America but globally, that is in ordinary folks' hands to challenge the bias and deceptions of large mainstream media outlets like PBS.