Opinion: Ghost towns, past and future
By ERIC BAERREN
Mt. Pleasant Morning Sun Columnist
Published Friday, February 23, 2007
One of the most interesting things about Michigan history is that the Upper Peninsula used to be more populated than it is today. It’s not hard to understand why – when the mines and lumber gave out, so did the people.
My dad used to hunt for the U.P.’s old ghost towns, one of the few people who used an SUV for off-road travel (considering how poorly they’re constructed, I’m surprised he didn’t get stuck). You have to go off-road to get to most of them, he’d tell me, because they were built along now-abandoned railroad lines, back when trains were the most reliable way to move people and resources. They are the graves of a boom-and-bust economy.
Michigan was built on booms and busts. Early citizens of the state sawed and hacked their way through a seemingly endless supply of white pines. American prosperity was built, at the time, on a foundation of Michigan wood. The automobile has allowed us to forget this part of our state’s history, but the memories return with the auto’s fade.
In the Upper Peninsula, there were the copper mines. Like a poorly managed forest, the mines have a short life span. Once you extract all of your minerals, the mine shuts down and everyone employed at it is either let go, or has to move on to new mines.
As a tool of economic development, they are without rival as an act of short-sighted madness.
Some of you might be vaguely aware of a proposed new mining project in the Upper Peninsula. Called the Eagle Mine project, a company called Kennecott plans to mine nickel in the little bulge northwest of Marquette and southeast of the Keweenaw Peninsula. Kennecott itself is owned by a British firm, Rio Tinto.
The mine has of course divided the community, and much of the opposition is centered on the environmental damage the mine would cause. The damage, and there would be damage, would come from exposing sulfites to the air, which would lead to sulphuric acid run-off in local streams and rivers (it would also stain the river an yellowish-orangeish color called ochre).
The problem is that the nearest river, one very close to the proposed mine project, is a prime trout spawning bed; and the nearby plains are a recent new home for the Kirtland’s Warbler (Michigan’s best known endangered songbird, and more deserving of the title “state bird” than our friend the robin).
But, the real question isn’t just about trout and birds versus economic development. It’s about one kind of economic development versus another. Just as the Upper Peninsula’s undeveloped forests, beaches and rivers attract tourists, the Kirtland’s Warbler draws bird enthusiasts from all over the nation. This means fulfilling an important component in virtually everyone’s economic redevelopment plans – tourism (Dick DeVos campaigned last year on the need to re-energize it; and it has a prominent part of the governor’s plan). Tourism doesn’t just provide jobs and money, it’s also a self-sustaining industry as long as you don’t monkey too much with the product – the undeveloped forests, rivers and beaches.
The mine project would create hard jobs, and provide good paychecks in a struggling Upper Peninsula. According to company estimates, the mine would generate 150 jobs and about three times to provide those people with services.
Jobs are the only things that the mine would provide. Western civilization will not fall without the nickel from this mine. And, the question is how we weigh those jobs against what we might lose in embracing a new wave of boom-and-bust mines.
Here, the graves of old Upper Peninsula boom towns that went bust with the lumber and copper industries gave out provide us with reminders of the short life expectancy of something as purely extractive as mining.
It’s expected that Eagle Mine project would be the first of several (the company hasn’t said so, but it owns mineral rights to at least 460,000 acres in the area; and there are other mining companies looking to start operations in the U.P.), but if they’re like the Eagle Mine project, each would last for about 7-10 years. That’s less than half the time it would take an average worker to pay down an average mortgage. A boom-and-bust economy of this nature thus provides no incentive for long-term community building, which is why you can still find ghost towns on long-abandoned rail lines.
What impact this would have on local tourism is really anyone’s guess. The area that would be developed for mine operations would require a great deal of infrastructure – rebuilding railroads, hard asphalt roads, etc… – that would remain after the mine itself was closed.
That raises the question of whether it’s wise to sacrifice long-term sustainability for short-term boom. The time when we can conveniently overlook this question ended a long time ago, and it’s time for us to think seriously and strategically about the future. The answer calls to us from the hidden graves of deserted lumber and mining towns.
Eric Baerren is a Morning Sun Columnist who also runs the blog Among the Trees.
