#Just gold deeper voice series#

And we could bring all the things we learned as an organization to the table. “This involves permitting from the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy. It was a different kind of fight than the battle against ACP, according to Oba. Thankfully, there were people like Stephanie able to provide additional help.” “We weren’t prepared to jump right back in to mount a campaign against this. “It was bad news, quite simply,” says Oba. “Now they have some cash, and we’re concerned they’re going to start doing even more exploration.”įriends of Buckingham wasn’t looking for a new fight.

“We know that Aston Bay just sold some of their rights in Canada - mineral or leasing rights,” says Stephanie Rinaldi, Barlow’s neighbor who is working with Friends of Buckingham to oppose the possible mine. Map created by Dan Shaffer of Allegheny-Blue Ridge Alliance. Map shows Aston Bay’s area of gold exploration interest in between the Union Hill and Yogaville communities. Aston Bay has leased mineral rights on around 11,000 acres of Central Virginia forestland owned by Weyerhaeuser, a real estate company that harvests timber. That peace and quiet could be shattered if Aston Bay, the Canadian prospecting and mineral exploration company that’s been doing exploratory drilling around Buckingham for several years, moves forward with a mine near his property. “We like the peace and quiet out here,” he says. That’s when Barlow realized that having gold under his property - or anywhere near his property - could ruin his life. All these hills and trees you see would be gone.’” We’d buy your property, level your house. “I didn’t know anything about gold mining. “I asked the geologists how they would get to the gold, if they would sink a shaft,” he says. “At first, it was, ‘Like, wow, wouldn’t it be cool if we had a vein of gold under our property?’” says Barlow, a retired electronics technician who moved to Buckingham County in 2012.īut the more he thought about it - and the more he learned about the kind of open-pit mining that would be used to extract the gold - the more concerned he became. When he first heard there might be gold near his property from two Canadian geologists who showed up at his door asking if they could take samples from a creek on his property, Paul Barlow was actually a bit intrigued.

#Just gold deeper voice series#

“We were elated and exhausted with word of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline cancellation,” says Chad Oba, president of Friends of Buckingham, a group that spearheaded local opposition to the pipeline.īut any hopes that the group and others in the area could stand down after Duke Energy and Dominion Energy announced they were canceling the controversial project in July 2020 - largely because of increased costs from a series of lawsuits forcing the pipeline to adhere to environmental regulations - were dashed when disturbing news of a potential gold mine in the county came to light. It should have been a time for the Buckingham County, Virginia, environmental community to celebrate and recuperate from a bruising but successful battle to stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and a compressor station planned for Union Hill.