Letter to the Mining Journal, 2-10-2012
To the Journal editor:
Marquette County Road 595 is being built because of the mine at Eagle Rock. If there were no mine, there would be no road. It is a road for the mine, a haul road.
Kennecott needs to step up to the plate and do what is right, and it is the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s job to make them follow the law. Continue reading
Jogging down the stairs at Heathrow Airport to the underground train running to London, I carry in my overnight luggage a small container of wild rice, formal letters from the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, and a document signed by a hundred faith leaders. My twenty-eight-year-old traveling companion, a local organic farmer, writer and activist, carries in his duffle bag—along with a newly purchased bargain-basement suit—a bottle of homemade maple syrup and seven packets of background information on a controversial proposed sulfide mining project near our homes in Northern Michigan.
It’s April 2008 and we travel with support from a number of Michigan-based nonprofit groups, arriving in England a couple of days early f
or the annual general meeting of one of the world’s largest multinational mining corporations. For twenty years Rio Tinto has been listed as a top choice for investors on the London Stock Exchange. The company also has been documented as being responsible for some of the worst environmental and human rights violations that exist in the modern mining industry. We’re here because they’ll soon be coming, dependent on final government permits, to our neighborhood.
The most important piece of news yesterday, this week, this month, and this year was a new set of statistics released yesterday by the Global Carbon Project. It showed that carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010. In fact, it was arguably among the most important pieces of data in the last, oh, three centuries, since according to the New York Times it represented “almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.”
What it means, in climate terms, is that we’ve all but lost the battle to reduce the damage from global warming. The planet has already warmed about a degree Celsius; it’s clearly going to go well past two degrees. It means, in political terms, that the fossil fuel industry has delayed effective action for the 12 years since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It means, in diplomatic terms, that the endless talks underway in Durban should be more important than ever–they should be the focus of a planetary population desperate to figure out how
it’s going to survive the century.
350.org
Opinion
October 31, 2011
by Eric Hanson
Wisconsinites have a deep affection for our pristine waters and a history of applying due diligence and reasonable prudence while questioning ill-conceived industrial projects that threaten that water. Think of the memorable citizens campaigns that blocked Exxon’s proposed mine on the Wolf River and Perrier’s plan for massive water withdrawals from the Mecan River watershed.
Read post… http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/rushing-mine-permits-puts-water-at-risk-132959503.html
By Jon Magnuson , The Mining Journal, 9-18-11
This past week The Mining Journal reported as a lead story Inghan County Judge Paula J. M Manderfield’s denial of a request for an injunction to stop Rio Tinto’s Kennecott Minerals Company from dynamiting Eagle Rock, the entrance to the proposed controversial sulfide mine in Powell Township.
By C.A. Arneson | Monday, Aug. 29, 2011
It was bad enough when the U.S. Supreme Court bestowed corporations with personhood – but under the guise of the title Chamber of Commerce, Minnesota now has its own corporative dictator. And Minnesota’s dictator wants sulfide mining at all costs – including the permanent degradation of Minnesota waters.
By: Bob Tammen, Duluth Budgeteer News
We care about our watershed. The Lake Superior Watershed Festival brought out hundreds of visitors to Lake Superior College Saturday to learn about threats to Lake Superior. One of the biggest future threats will be copper mining in the Duluth Complex of minerals. Mining promoters have an impressive array of talking points. Unfortunately, they don’t have a scientifically acceptable mining plan.
Polymet’s draft environmental impact statement got the lowest possible rating from the EPA, which issued a letter detailing the Continue reading
Written by Jon W. Magnuson
Lutheran pastor , Lutheran Campus Pastor (ELCA) at Northern Michigan University
Director, The Cedar Tree Institute
For the last seven years here in Marquette County we have been part of a Divine Drama. An ongoing heated dispute around a decision whether or not to allow an international mining company, with one of worst records of environmental pollution and violation of human rights in the world, build a sulfide mine on the Yellow Dog Plains. Even now we hear their 100 ton double-axel trucks relentlessly pass through our city streets, haunting us day and night, as if making us believe that nothing can stop them.
When this is all over and done, it will all be about a choice. And whether or not we thought we had one. Well, we do.
I have a friend Kathy who spent two years in women’s prison in Virginia. She told me that the most important thing she learned there from another older wiser inmate is that even when one is incarcerated, one always has a choice: Whether to speak to speak or not to speak, whether to show kindness in difficult circumstances, to be generous with your few possessions, to live out a life of hope, compassion, justice. I’ve talked to many citizens in our community who have expressed their opposition and disgust to Rio Tinto’s sulfide mine. But many of them feel that nothing can stop Kennecott.
I am here today to remind us we can choose to be victims or to engage and speak out for what we believe. Back in 1978 Lois Gibbs, then a twenty-three year old housewife with no college education and two children back in Love Canal, discovered she was living with her neighbors on a toxic waste dump in New York State She organized her community and neighbors and forced one of the largest oil corporations in North America to clean the damage that was poisoning their families. Last October, she came and spoke to us here in Marquette. We stood up and cheered. She’s well known across North America fighting on behalf of poor communities, hotel workers, churches, kitchen workers, and immigrants.
In 2004, 100 leaders of ten faith traditions in Marquette, Baraga and Keweenaw Counties signed a petition that, based on studies of the impact of the proposed mine,
and standing in solidarity with of one of the oldest recognized Native communities in Northern Michigan (The Keweenaw Indian Community) formally stated their opposition
to Kennecott’s Eagle Rock mining operation. That position remains unchanged.
There is a better way. Those gathering here today are lifting up a voice that our waters and land are not for sale to those who carry the threat of poisoning our children and grandchildren. Many of us in the faith community are committed to work with the Marquette Chamber of Commerce to renew their efforts to build a solid green economy. This is finally not about money and jobs. It’s about dedicating ourselves to a vision of a green economy where we work together to build new opportunities for employment, where our waters are protected and our children’s health is safeguarded. We can do that by saying “No” to Rio Tinto and it’s subsidiary company Kennecott.
This is a good fight. In the days and weeks ahead I will be personally supporting, along with a hundred other leaders of the faith community, Scott Rutherford’s hunger fast, a sacrament of protest to protect and to build a better and more beautiful, morally sound, and healthy vision for our grandchildren. Our prayers surround you Scott.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is an account in Genesis of God giving his Chosen People a list of Commandments. Among them it is written, “Thou shalt not steal.” At the end of that account, Moses words ring out, but this time now for us all across the lands of Northern Michigan, through our homes, across the Great Lake of Superior, over our gardens, our schoolyards, over our forests and streams,
“So I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse Therefore choose life that you may dwell in this sacred land, loving the Lord your God for the length of your days.”
This is that moment. Our day. Our time.
7/9/11
Another opinion
May 29, 2011
The Traverse City Record-Eagle
The history of natural resources is simple. They vanish rapidly when they become commodities – even when they seem in unending supply.
In Michigan, it took less than a century in the 1800s to devastate fish populations of the Great Lakes, cut down primeval forests, shoot millions of passenger pigeons to extinction and annihilate sturgeon.
As millionaire Chicago fish dealer Alfred Booth said in 1885: “It did not take long for capital to see the rewards which might be gained by reaping the fields which Nature had so abundantly supplied with a crop that cost nothing for the sowing or raising, and but little for the reaping.”
Booth was talking about fish but his words apply to any abundant natural resource of the 1800s that was cut down or slaughtered and shipped off to far-away markets.
Fresh water from the Great Lakes apparently has become the region’s last “free” crop to extract, sell and export.
This is what the Great Lakes water fights of the last three decades really are about. It’s an important battle and will have great impact on the region’s future.
It is why governments, municipalities, elected leaders and individuals must become better stewards and more educated about the important role the Great Lakes, with 94,676 square miles of surface water, play in this region’s life, economy and natural world.
It is why fresh water must always be seen, protected and managed as a “public commons” by those who live around it – not international corporations and Wall Street.
Water is a vastly different natural resource than timber, wildlife, minerals and other natural resources. Humans, animals, plants and ecosystems cannot survive without it.
This is why fresh water, lakes, rivers, streams and navigable waters long have been protected by law and regulations for the common good.
To legally identify water from the Great Lakes as a “commodity” sets up a legal framework that would allow it to be siphoned off and sold for use outside the Great Lakes basin.
Current attempts to dismantle state and federal protection laws enacted in the 1960s and 1970s are an outrage given the history of these freshwater seas.
Traverse City has become a center for water advocacy, thanks to conservation lawyer Jim Olson and many Michigan residents. Olson was the attorney in the nine-year case of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation vs. Nestle Waters of North America in Mecosta County.
He and other water activists who formed Flow for Water are vigilant sentinels for the Great Lakes and have done much to educate the public in annual conferences like “Saving the Great Lakes Forever,” held at the State Theatre and Northwestern Michigan College earlier this month.
“Too many people see the Great Lakes as a big dollar sign,” keynote speaker Maude Barlow said. “This way of looking at nature as a resource for us is failing the Earth.”
She’s right. The history of the Great Lakes’ natural resources proves that.
Sessions like this month’s conference – organized by Flow for Water, the Great Lakes Water Institute at NMC and Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation – keep water issues in public focus.
Without them, people might lose sight of what these great bodies of fresh water mean to Michigan, the United States and the world.
The lakes clearly need strong advocates, stewards and leaders at the grass-roots level all along their shores.
Recent water politics and court decisions show us that the federal and state governments, big business, and the Michigan Supreme Court have little interest in saving Great Lakes water.
© Copyright 2011 The Traverse City Record-Eagle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
http://www.miningjournal.net/page/content.detail/id/562863/Preserving-the-Great-Lakes-up-to-the–people.html?nav=5003
May 19, 2011 http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/122260424.html
Should the state’s regulatory authority over the metallic mine permitting process be dramatically reduced to accommodate the wishes of a mining company to receive a permit in record time? This is not a hypothetical question.
Gogebic Taconite (GTAC) has met with several legislators about its proposed open pit iron ore (taconite) mine along the border of Ashland and Iron counties to push legislation that would drastically speed up the mine permitting process.
The present review process, which was the result of hard-fought environmental battles in the 1970s, can take several years, depending on the complexity of the mine plan and the potential environmental impacts of the project. However, Sen. Rich Zipperer (R-Pewaukee) and state Rep. Mark Honadel (R-South Milwaukee) plan to propose legislation that would reduce the review to 300 days. GTAC President Bill Williams told a reporter that his company may abandon its plans for a $1.5 billion taconite mine and processing plant if the process takes too long.
Ever since a grass-roots Indian and environmental alliance defeated a proposal to build a metallic sulfide mine at Crandon, the international mining industry has considered the state among the least favorable places for mining investment.
In 1998, the state passed the Mining Moratorium Law, which requires that before the state can issue a permit for the mining of sulfide ore bodies, potential miners must provide an example of where a metallic sulfide mine in the United States or Canada has not polluted surface and groundwaters during or after mining. In 2003, the Sokaogon Chippewa and the Forest County Potawatomi tribes bought the Crandon mine property for $16.5 million and ended a 28-year conflict over the mine.
GTAC now wants to turn back the clock on environmental protection and respect for the rights of indigenous peoples. Gogebic Taconite is a limited liability company registered on the Toronto Stock Exchange and owned by the Cline Group, a coal mining company based in Florida. Christopher Cline is a billionaire who owns large coal reserves in Illinois and Northern Appalachia.
If GTAC has its way, local citizens and the Bad River Chippewa tribe, who will be most directly affected by the proposed mine, will have little opportunity to participate in a thorough review of the social, economic and environmental impacts of the project. What information might be disclosed during a mine permit review process that would be so threatening to GTAC?
Bad River Chippewa Chairman Mike Wiggins Jr. is concerned that this mine could discharge polluted water to the Bad River watershed and the tribe’s wild rice beds in the Kakagon Sloughs, a 16,000-acre complex of wetlands, woodlands and sand dune ecosystems that is one of the largest freshwater estuaries in the world.
Wild rice is a sacred plant for the Chippewa and is very sensitive to water contamination as well as fluctuations in water levels. Dewatering operations at the proposed mine could lower the water table around the mine. It was the effort to protect the Sokaogon Chippewa’s wild rice beds that propelled the Crandon mine conflict.
The proposed mine involves extracting taconite by removing about 650 feet of overburden and creating a narrow pit around 4 miles long, up to 900 feet deep and a quarter-mile wide. The overburden would be dumped in massive tailings piles along the northwest side of the Penokee-Gogebic Range and at the headwaters of the Bad River Watershed. These large tailings piles have the potential to generate acid rock drainage if sulfide minerals are present in the waste rock.
These issues need to be evaluated in a fair and open environmental review through which the public and the Lake Superior Chippewa bands have the opportunity to have full disclosure of the potential impacts of the project. Legislation that would reduce the review process to 300 days would severely limit full disclosure of these impacts and be in direct violation of both state environmental law and treaties with the Lake Superior Chippewa bands.
Zipperer has expressed his desire to have the legislation passed before the end of the current session on June 30. Why is this legislation being fast-tracked? If passed, this legislation will effectively exclude Wisconsin citizens and tribes from having a voice in one of the most far reaching environmental decisions facing northern Wisconsin communities.
Al Gedicks teaches sociology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and is author of “Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations.”