Will the Great Lakes become a nuclear dump?

No way!

But unless we join together and make our voices heard, the Canadian government will build a site right on the shores of Lake Huron to store radioactive waste from 20 nuclear plants for hundreds of years.

As if that wasn’t bad enough: Oil company Shell Canada wants to build a giant refinery along five miles of the St. Clair River that will process 250,000 barrels of heavy crude oil daily – and put one of our most important waterways at risk.

Lake Huron and the St. Clair River provide drinking water to millions of Michigan citizens. They are an important waterway that carries trade and commerce on the Great Lakes, creating jobs and opportunity in Michigan. Putting a dangerous nuclear dump and a highly polluting oil refinery along these bodies of water threatens our health and quality of life.

Instead of treating us like a good neighbor and the Great Lakes State, Canada is treating us like the Great Dumping State.

The nuclear waste site and the oil refinery pose a real danger to our families today and for generations to come.

Click here to say no to Great Lakes dumping

We need a new shade of green
Jeff Gibbs

We live in a lite-green time. And it’s not working.Despite corporations, politicians and quite a few citizens being obsessed with going green our national, regional, and personal emissions are going up, up, and away. Every nation that signed Kyoto, including — yes, the supposedly eco-friendly Europeans — are headed in the WRONG direction: their greenhouse gases are rising. Indeed, the renewable energy revolution is so not working that Europe is rushing to build dozens of coal and nuclear-fired power plants.
We were told that if environmentalists got into bed with corporations, that if we all just did our one little thing, that if we changed our light bulbs, bought a hybrid car, and supported alternative energy, that things would begin to turn around. It hasn’t, and it won’t. If every person in the country did every suggestion in Al Gore’s film, it would only achieve a 22% cut in greenhouses emissions—and some scientists say we need a 90% cut to save ourselves.
The lite-green time is full of hope and talk of sustainability, opportunity, “positive solutions.” “Green is the new green” they say. We CAN have our planet and eat it too! There is “no conflict between the economy and the environment.” Well news flash: all that stuff you consume comes from SOMEWHERE on planet earth. And all the pollutants spit out when the stuff is made, transported, consumed, and thrown away, go somewhere on planet earth.
When we eat sushi, endangered blue fin tuna die.
In a day’s worth of flying, your seat on that plane consumes more fuel than an SUV driver does in an entire year.
Every time you flick on a light switch, fire up an iPod, or turn on your computer to write, a mountain in West Virginia is dying so that we might have the miracle of electricity.
So there is indeed a conflict. We can’t have it all. We can save the planet or our lifestyles—not both.
So what is it that keeps us from leaping into action given the dire environmental dilemmas we face?
One strong factor is the mixed messages of the lite-green movement. When Al Gore says change your light bulb while taking flight after flight and limo ride after limo ride—he is sending us a double message. I would prefer that my drug counselor not have a needle sticking out of his arm.
The lite-green movement plays on a basic human need. We all want to feel optimistic. But optimism at the expense of making a real plan to save ourselves is the opposite of hope. It’s ultimately suicidal. What is keeping us from robustly challenging the plans put forth that say we can sequester the carbon (unproven) offset of our flights (doesn’t work) or run civilization on windmills or ethanol? (Ethanol = food riots and gas is still double the price.)
For me, real hope comes from a full assessment of the mess we’re in. How else might we make a plan to save ourselves? You don’t say “I don’t want to know if I have cancer unless you have a solution” or “I am not going to turn around and see if my house is on fire unless you hand me a hose.”
Real hope also comes from community. By community I don’t mean “localization.” That’s good, but it’s not going to save us. For me the emotional, spiritual and mutually supportive aspects of community are what’s important. It is the coming together for mutual aid and support. It is the banding together to deal with a powerful threat–even if the threat is ourselves. AA comes to mind as quite good at this.
So instead of a lite-green movement, I propose a new shade of green: dark green. Healthy nature is dark green, not the pale green of trees struggling to survive in a dryer, hotter, more polluted world.
The first step on the path to recovery—of becoming dark green–is acceptance. Humanity is in a real mess and there’s a good chance we’re not going to get out of it alive. This really sucks and avoiding talking about it only makes it worse. Of course, those who really don’t want to give up their sushi or flights or electric toys or leaf blowers and weed whackers won’t want to hear any doom and gloom, because it might ruin their buzz and insert some guilt to that magical journey to India, China, or South America.
But through acceptance, and openness, and making plans to save ourselves that actually stand a chance of working, dark greens begin to transcend the doom and gloom, just as cancer patients report the freedom and hyper-reality that come from facing the disease square on and alcoholics in recovery find a heavy burden lifted and spirits soaring.
Earth First’s motto is that action is the antidote to despair. I think that’s right but the action must be paired with a full understanding of what’s called for in these times. And to the extent that our lifestyle is addictive (and it’s VERY addicting) ,we all need to get into a recovery program of sorts to even think straight about this. Otherwise our actions—whether spiking trees or ethanol or flying about the planet complaining that fossil fuel use is killing us—may be misguided or even make things worse.
Now I am not expecting tons of other folks are ready to be dark greens. The lite-green movement will not go down easy because none of us want this amazing ride we’ve had hepped up on fossil fuels to be over.
If so email me. We have to talk. Time for the dark greens to come out of hiding, stop being depressed, and help lead the way toward a real plan to save ourselves, or at least make what is waiting for us when the oil, gas and coal run out and the planet falls apart, more humane.
In crafting a way that we might survive this and save as much of this glorious, amazing, full-of-life planet we live on as possible, I find a deep amount of hope. And after all that is the only task before humanity, whether we know it or not: save the planet, or lose everything.

Jeff Gibbs is a musician and filmmaker from TC. Write him at JeffGibbsTC@aol.com.

How things relate to one another: The Dennis Muchmore story

by: Eric B.

Sun May 25, 2008 at 12:00:11 PM EDT

What do Cliff Taylor, the Michigan United Conservation Clubs, Nestle, Eagle Mine, and George Bush all have in common?  Why, it’s Dennis Muchmore, longtime Lansing lobbyist.

I first winced a couple of years ago when I first heard the name Dennis Muchmore, when he was named to head Michigan United Conservation Clubs.  You see, the name Muchmore, Deb Muchmore, was familiar to me as the name of the P.R. flack for the Ice Mountain bottling facility in Mecosta County. Later, she added the Kennecott Mine Project to her client list. Indeed, she and Dennis Muchmore are wife and husband.

Today, among other things (we’ll get to those later), Muchmore is the head of MUCC, an organization perhaps best known as the principle driver behind the state’s bottle deposit law.  The most notable thing about MUCC’s history has been its willingness to break ranks with … well, whomever, and go its own way.  In recent years, as some of it’s more pre-eminent presidents have passed away, the group’s reputation has become that it is essentially a tool of the Sportsmen for Bush crowd, people who say they like to kill things with guns and eat them, but that the shape of the environment isn’t so important to them (supporting President Breaks Everything He Touches is an easy fit).  Indeed, not only have the Muchmores given money primarily to Republicans (Deborah Muchmore, who used to be Deborad Wudyka back when Ice Mountain was Perrier instead of Nestle, gave two grand to him in ’04, as did he … and someone bearing the name Dennis Muchmore and listed as a consultant for DHR International gave the RNC $2,100) over the years, but Dennis Muchmore himself was a Bush Pioneer in both 2000 and 2004 (that is, he raised more than $100,000 for Pres. BEHT).  Muchmore isn’t just a Lansing lobbyist whose firm previously defeated a public smoking ban and who raises lots of money for terrible presidents while also presiding over one of the state’s most influential outdoors advocacy groups, but he’s also a vice president of a proposed ethanol project in the Gratiot County city of Ithaca.

But, why today do we concern ourselves with Dennis Muchmore?  Because he’s putting his fund raising talents to work for Cliff Taylor.  Muchmore is apparently part of the host committee (which itself includes Joe Schwarz and Tim Walberg) for a fund raising event in Jackson at the end of the month.  Speaking there will be Steve Forbes.  $500 gets you in the door, $3,400 gets you and a guest a seat at a special roundtable with Taylor.

I could leave open to contemplation of why the head of what is supposed to be the head of a non-partisan outdoors group is raising money for a supreme court candidate notable for his anti-environmental positions and reckless rulings that have given the state’s supreme court the reputation as one of the most tainted and worst across the country, but we already have the answer.  The head of MUCC is raising money for Cliff Taylor (and other Republicans) because he’s primarily just a lobbyist and is very good at it.

“A good tactic is one that your people enjoy” by Walter Wink

John Taylor is a local artist from Marquette. John is currently working on a comic book about Kennecott’s Eagle Project that he will have finished and printed in the next couple of weeks. John frequently visits our office for information and updates to incorporate information into his artwork. He is involved in Marquette Citizens for Peace and Justice and considering attending Northern Michigan University for the art and design program. Save The Wild UP strongly encourages other citizens to also incorporate their hobbies and talents into fighting metallic sulfide mining and protecting our freshwater resources. Please send pictures, explanations, or final works to info@savethewildup.org.

Meet Director Kristi Mills

I was born and raised in Muskegon, Michigan, my family spending ample hours enjoying Michigan’s natural environment. On my first visit to the UP in 1977 for an NMU orientation session, stopping at a roadside park to eat my bologna sandwich, I watched the dance of a thousand Admiral butterflies over a field of wildflowers, and I knew this place was going to change my life. Thirty years, two children, and 63 acres later I find myself constantly in awe of this beautiful place. My commitment to protecting Michigan’s resources is long standing and the recent threat of metallic sulfide mining brings me serious concern. I’m looking forward to working as Director of Save the Wild UP with the many great people who are supportive of our mission.