"It Is Sacred"

I sat through nearly nine of the twelve hours of testimony that was given yesterday to a subcommittee of Wisconsin State Legislators whose task is to pass mining legislation that has been written by, for the very first time in state history, the regulated industry. An entity that goes by the name of GTAC had a representative there to speak as well, but virtually nothing he had to say made any sense to those who know the history of mining in the state. I have participated in several rounds of public comments, working through the legislative process to help craft regulations and assisting in educating the public about the nature of trying to mine in sensitive areas and the headwaters of river systems that we all hold in common as citizens. What was just as stunning now as it was thirty years ago, when I began my own involvement in environmental issues, was the absolute disconnect between those who believe in their dominion over nature and those who realize that we are integral to the ecology of Mother Earth. The outright lies, about the nature of the geology, the proposed changes to wetlands protection, the air and water quality that mining would affect, the number of jobs that a mine would "create" and the impacts on local communities were bad enough. Serious questions arise about the validity of any position taken by the corporation, (GTAC) because they have already acted in ways that would normally be prosecuted.
It is an crime to tell someone that if they do what you want them to, something good will happen and if you do not do what they want, bad things will happen. When they ask for money, that is called extortion, organized crime is often prosecuted for engaging in this type of crime. Racketeering is enlisting enough people as to control a market. I see no reason why enlisting the government to help steal from the public should be any different from using any other group of organized criminals to do so. What will be stolen, in this case is two-fold. First off, by having a mining company re-write the laws, the company has already stolen our democratic process. The sham of only allowing twelve hours of testimony to be heard from the public, hundreds of miles from where the mine would operate, with only two business days warning has also stolen rights that belong to the public and have been well-established by time-honored practices that have served us well since Wisconsin has been organized as a state. The second thing that has been stolen from the people of Wisconsin are the laws that have sought to protect the environment from mining interests, who leave social distortion, cultural mayhem and environmental destruction in their wake. This assault on state law also renders useless, the hundreds of thousands of hours spent crafting the laws than now partially protect state resources like clean air and water.
I am writing in parlance that the average person might understand, but the deepest assault is a bit more esoteric. First, the history buffs and folks enamored by the "good old days" spoke about the need to recover the boom times that mining provided the north woods. What these people forget is that instead of prostrating themselves to set dynamite in warrens of tunnels, or shoveling the ore into carts, the way mining used to take place, modern mining allows a single guy in a truck to cart away more pulverized rock powder in a minute than a whole community used to be able to produce in a day. Forgetting the fact that the geology that led to mining certain parts of our state was the exact same geology that led to the end of mining, did not seem to be enough, the supporters also had to parrot back the same ignorant statements that they rest their arguments upon. One supporter hastened to say that the town of "Wakefield gets it's water from the (now-closed) Montreal mine". This may be true but has absolutely nothing to do with the proposed mine that lies under sulfide bearing rock that will be blasted to powder, creating acid mine drainage in the next watershed over.
The people who clung to the "jobs" issue failed to mention that the problems that they have always had with shrinking population is that the first extraction was the forest itself, then the mineral wealth under their feet. They do not understand that the low-grade ore that is left is just that. One person "in favor of the mine", bemoaned the "fact" that their children will all have to move away if they want to get jobs and another said that six homes on one lake alone had been foreclosed on and were now sitting empty. Hmmmm, sounds like a vacation retreat center about to happen, but that would require a bit of investment and commitment to finding creative ways of making a living. There are many flourishing vacation rental businesses across the north...One wondered if their children just wanted to get away from the land of not much to do. One fellow who, as I recall, was a school board chairman, said that if just six families would move into their school district it would help the school to hang on in spite of dwindling enrollment and plummeting state aid. Keep in mind that these same voices doubted the integrity of the science behind the opposition to the mine and the sentiment that most folks spoke out about that was we need to take our time and protect the environment, rather than bowing to corporate power and promises.
This is the second round for this law, even though it was reintroduced this session as AB 1 and SB 1, none of the prior testimony, which ran 348 against environmental destruction to 24 in favor of mine development, will be allowed to be considered in the new fight spear-headed by governor scott Walker, to reduce the effectiveness of Wisconsin state law.
Two particular interactions during the hearing yesterday were most telling, one was the question, late in the day by the committee chair. "Why is this issue more important in Ashland County than in Iron County?" Iron county is not even in the watershed that would be affected by acid mine drainage. 2/3 of the proposed mine and all of the acid mine drainage would be in Ashland County. To date, there has not been a single public hearing on this issue there. Secondly, and perhaps most sadly, was the representative who spoke against changing the current laws. You would think that someone who wants to protect the state would have a better grasp on the situation. They said that the wild rice which grows in the floodplain of the Bad River is "almost sacred" to native people. Luckily, there were folks close by who chimed in, "It IS Sacred!" Several times during the hearing, the relationship between the sanctity of the land and sacred rites and/or objects came out. Just the sheer amount of TNT that would be used to blast the rock to the consistency of talcum powder would unleash a toxic legacy that would last beyond seven generations. I am sorry if I misquote Mike Wiggins, but he said something like, Imagine wiping the Vatican from the face of the earth, that is what the headwaters of our reservation are to us.
Several times, it was brought to light that the rights of native populations were guaranteed by a government much older than that of the State of Wisconsin. The treaties entered into by their nations and the nation of the United States of America explicitly state that there is a responsibility of the federal government to assure protection of the resources upon which their culture, their nation, and their subsistence way of life depend. Because of these treaties, the relationship between the people and their land may not be taken for granted, cannot be infringed and certainly by this understanding, must not be ruined by releasing toxic substances into the air or water of one nation by negligence or design by the other. The air, the water, the earth, rock and the intact ecosystem upon which life thrives is sacred. This needs to be made clear to the temporary custodians of our state. Our interest is in protecting this land forever.

Celebrate!

Saturday, Japan is shutting down the last nuclear power generating station. Unlike the US, their licensing process includes an annual review in which public opinion is taken into account. Here, in America, we license our nuclear facilities for twenty years, often rubber stamping their permits with callous disregard for public opinion. When TMI (Three Mile Island) blew, our bucolic world in rural Pennsylvania was dosed with rad waste and the cover up continues today. Officials still claim that there was no reason to worry although massive quantities of radioactive material had been spewing from the plant for over two weeks before the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) was notified of a problem at the site. Allowing corporate interests to police themselves has not worked in Japan, nor has it worked here in the US. We just have a better handle on how to squelch public opinion. The last nuclear protest that I participated in was "overseen" by at least three dozen police from several jurisdictions. There were also intimidating and threatening gestures and actions from a handful of local residents who screamed insults and slogans that made my skin crawl. hearing of an entire nation banning together to practice true enlightened action in the face of evil and unconscionable danger makes this world citizen proud.

There is little that can be said about the ways we have chosen to do business in our neck of the woods. When the public began to understand that nuke waste is dangerous for tens of thousands of years and requires armed guards around the depots where it is stored, basically forever, the phrase "nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter." began to be bandied about. I'm not sure about you, but we still have a meter on our house. When increases in cancer were understood to be the result of being dosed with fallout, it was immediately compared to the radiation you would receive from sun tanning (which was thought to be "healthy" back then) or (for those with a desire to enter the "jet set") the amounts of radiation you would receive from taking a trans-Atlantic flight. If public opinion hovered just above fifty percent against, the next straw was added to the back of the public. Many who live in the townships that do have nuke facilities pay no property tax. Who wouldn't like that? The fact that no one will ever want to buy your house if it is in the shadow of a hazardous waste production facility, even knowing that they would pay no taxes on the property for life, makes no difference to those who have been convinced of both the need for and the safety of this insane way of making electricity.

I have readers in Japan, for them I say Bless You! Their public opinion has pushed the hand of government further toward sanity in one brief year than hundreds of thousands of protesters have done in the US in my fifty year lifetime! Even when what we warned about came true, the nuclear disarmament crowd was marginalized and the nuclear power opposition was painted as unpatriotic Communists (when that was the worst word in our political dictionary) or Socialists today. Caring about everyone as much as we care about ourselves is antithetical to capitalistic values I guess. I thought that we were a country of freedom but that our freedoms ended where they imposed on the noses of our neighbors. Not so in the case of generating electricity. We allow our freedom to flip a switch to impact hundreds of generations who have not yet been born. They will inherit the waste that has been created today with no means of paying back the bitter cost of stupidity with which we saddle them with our waste. Even as a child, I understood the odd disconnect between those who advocated for nuclear energy production and the facts. for all the touting of nuclear energy as "carbon-neutral" that claim is bogus. I have written of this before, so if you understand, jump ahead a paragraph or two. The litany of carbon-fueled activities and processes that are required to produce electricity through nukes is almost unfathomable. whether the Japanese understand it or not, they have taken a bigger step toward sustainability than they could possibly imagine.

First of all, massive amounts of fuel (carbon-based) need to be spent securing title to land that is "appropriate" for siting a facility that will be dangerous, works best near an inexhaustible source of water and requires sturdy bedrock to support the massive weight of a reactor core and the attendant containment facilities. Ideally, it would be near points of use, to keep transmission line costs down, then the construction requires hundreds of thousands of tons of limestone to be baked in kilns (also using carbon based fuel) for the cement that holds concrete together. Conventional fuels (read, carbon releasing) are pumped in to the facility in the form of backhoes, bulldozers, trucks, rock crushing and screening operations and you also need to keep the lights on in the design and drafting facilities. flying your representatives around to secure permits and lobby for leniency amongst the regulating agencies expends more jet fuel, etc. Riding herd on public opinion has a very real cost as well. Going to several dozen public hearings, putting out ad campaigns and negotiating settlements to placate local and regional opposition can require many resources and also hinge upon cheap carbon-based energy.

Then, there is the cost of fuel for the process. Naturally occurring "ore" is getting less and less available and what we have is at ever lower concentrations. Massive mining operations are required to get the raw material for fueling up a nuclear generating station. Once mined, again using carbon based energy, the ore must be crushed, refined, concentrated and transported from facility to facility to accomplish each of these critical steps. The next part requires even more energy and is called enrichment. This is what we are so mad at Iran for doing today. Massive centrifuges must be made to spin for years to extract enriched fuel for the process. These centrifuges are best energized by electricity, produced mostly from fossil fuel in our country. Finally the fuel needs to be pelletized and transported to the reactor.

When I was a child, I envisioned the entire process as similar to winding up a rubber band powered balsa wood airplane. The only difference is that the order of magnitude is much, much greater. The propeller is so much harder to spin that we scar the land as we spin it. We hemorrhage massive amounts of fuel in winding up the mechanism. We scar communities and create massive monolithic concrete structures that must eventually be disposed of as hazardous waste. Even during the period of "free flight" there are risks and costs that make the whole process seem more like a bad acid trip than I can express in mere words. I have always understood the threat from these facilities as equal to, if not greater than, the threat of nuclear weapons. Like the person driving while texting, you never know when their destructive power will be unleashed. At least with weaponry, you have to decide when and where to unleash the deadly power, accidents can happen any time, any place. Add to this the long-term consequence of producing extremely long-lived waste and you can see the whole house of cards come crumbling down.

What we were never told is that the entire charade began because we needed some of that waste to refine again, rendering even more of the landscape inhospitable for hundreds of generations, to get weapons grade material. Instead of just enjoying the "free flight" during the years of electricity generation, the whole game was to make the ultimate weapon. The gods and goddesses are smiling on the land of the rising sun. Today, tomorrow and for centuries to come we must continue to celebrate Japan's good sense and compassion. Not only for their people, but for the people of the entire planet! At their peak, the (I believe) 54 nuclear generating stations (I have also heard the number fifty) provided 1/3 of Japan's demand for electricity. In spite of this fact, the people of Japan decided to stop throwing money and their future down the rat hole of this dangerous and short-sighted form of electricity generation. The rest of the world needs to follow their lead and develop alternative and less destructive means of meeting our needs. Conservation, efficiency improvements and alternative methods of production are readily available to us all and we need to begin spinning the wheel in the directions we want to go, not backward to a time of decadent ignorance and the immorality of subsidizing dangerous and deadly industries that leave our children with unrivaled debt.

We all need to celebrate the wisdom with which Japan is pursuing sustainability. We also need to keep pressure on our own leaders to eliminate this relic of cold war thinking. No one is better off under a system that puts our nation and the rest of the planet under threat of catastrophe. Radiation from Japan is already here. Even though the government is trying to downplay the facts, we need to understand that the massive bolus of radiation that continues to leave Japan is not "less dangerous" because we are finding isotopes with short half lives. In some ways, that is indicating that the problems are far worse than we can imagine. Short half life materials, detectable over a year later indicate even greater and more concentrated plumes entering the atmosphere than we had calculated. spread the word, we have finally come full circle in the nuclear age. I personally find it somewhat ironic that the first place on earth to be decimated by nuclear attack has gone through a process that led them to fully embrace the devilish technology and then commit to ending the nuclear nightmare once and for all in just two or three short generations. This is the blink of an eye in the time span of radioactive waste and needs to be celebrated by every man woman and child on the planet!

What Is At Stake?

The largest wetland complex on Lake Superior is at risk and the native people who depend on it for their survival are threatened by the development of a strip mine in Northern Wisconsin. Despotic mining interests from Florida seek to strip mine low grade taconite ore to be processed and shipped off to produce iron. The boom and bust cycle of metal prices has led once again to greed and corruption of our good sense as well as the erosion of our values. More iron and steel are rusting away across the Northern tier counties of Wisconsin than will ever be produced by the mine. The depression that has been caused across the Northwoods is the result of just this sort of extractive approach to economic activity and the last thing the region needs are 700 short term jobs that leave behind the legacy of toxic waste and dislocation caused by extracting the very things that make people want to live and vacation here.
The wild rice beds, (menomin) that form the basis of a culture that has been relatively stable in spite of the onslaught of white "civilization", are part of the prophecy that led these native people on their westward trek centuries ago. The grass that grows on water has not only been repeatedly harvested year after year in an unbroken chain of events since the Ojibwa came to this area, but the nutrient rich grass has flourished under their care as well. The drainage basin that feeds the marsh lies exactly where the proposed mine would be. The ore body that interests the mine owners is only part of the body of Mother Earth that the native people recognize as life giver and sacred being. If the rice beds form the heart of their culture, the water that falls upon the Penokee Range is the blood. The interactions between the atmosphere and the living cycles of life in this region are undeniable. Cursory glances over the maps of the area show that the Penokee Hills are riddled with streams and rivulets that are fed by lake effect snows during the winter and localized thunderstorms during the rest of the year. The rice and the people depend on this very wet area to feed them, nourish them and allow them to sustain not only themselves but one another. An example of the timeless symbiosis of an intact culture is at stake. The fact that the greed inspired "developers" are interested in digging a 900 foot deep hole, 23 miles long and four miles wide in this relatively unpopulated area makes the damage that they plan all the more heinous. By poisoning the wetlands and removing the mountain tops, the entire future of the native people will become untenable. It would be like poisoning all the cattle of the west in terms of our culture, or making all the wheat, corn and soybeans that we base our culture on dangerous to eat. The fact that we may be doing just those things is not a reason to allow the damage to occur but rather a wake up call for us to stop poisoning ourselves.

Don't take my word for it, check out what the Nature conservancy has to say about this most recent attack on the Penokee Range.
When I rode my bicycle around the Great Lakes in 1987, there were hundreds of environmental disasters that I could point to around the lakes, hundreds of examples of what not to do. In my way, I took the trip to share ideas about sustainability with the people who have to live with those disasters day in and day out. Back then, I didn't use those words exactly, I called it living better lifestyles with less negative impacts. The same message needs to be heeded today, especially by the multimillionaires that are proposing this strip mine, their friends in the Wisconsin  Capitol, and the people who worry about long-term unemployment across the Northwoods. The reasons for the unemployment, that is endemic to the area, is rooted in the fact that extractive processes in the past are still affecting those who continue to live here. This proposed mine is all the more heinous because not only the native people stand to lose the basis of their food system, but that local groups and governments have committed to transitioning to sustainability. For those of us who love the region, honor the natural cycles of both the forest and the lake, it feels like our "representatives" are trying to punish us and attack our sensibilities. Grinding the low grade ore to powder is the first step in the process. Not only is this extremely energy intensive, requiring increased electric generating capacity, (read dirty coal) but refining and transporting this material has already led to high rates of cancer and poisoning of the land with hazardous chemicals in other areas where this sort of "economic" activity has been tried. Until we realize that the ecosphere is not a bank to be raided at will, we will not stop the titans of industry from raping Mother Earth. Allowing foreign interests to dictate how we choose to make our living is tantamount to treason and this mine must be stopped. 

http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/wisconsin/mining-in-the-penokee-gogebic-range-whats-at-risk.xml