One of the things about being
professionally-concerned-about-nothing-much—and writing about it—is that you
wake up in the morning and worry: what have the bastards been up to today? What
have I missed? What if, while worrying about John Dehlin and his possible
excommunication from the Mormon Church (his “stake president,” by the way,
appears still to be prayerfully contemplating the issue, and has been since
late June) the Catholic Church exonerates Jozef Wesolowski, the Polish
Apostolic Envoy to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, who greatly aided
youth unemployment—especially of light-skinned, just-pubescent males—in ways
that were both uninventive and illegal? And will they ever get the fuel rods
off the roof of Fukushima reactor four?
So today’s absolutely great news is that Google—never being
evil—will now keep track of your bastards for you! (Forget your friends—that’s
why you do Facebook…) It’s called Google Alerts, it keeps track of your bête noires, and then emails you on their
shenanigans. Here’s the link . Through this service, by the way, I can now
tell you that Wesolowski got defrocked, and has until mid-October or something
to appeal the ruling.
So now I can add Gogebic Taconite—which very worrisomely the
computer finds no need to red-squiggle, or have I written about them before?—if
not the Wisconsin Club for Growth, if not R. J. Johnson, and certainly
“governor” Scott
Walker. Then, of course, I could add a guy named Bill
Williams (sounds like an alias to me, but apparently it’s real….) Why so
many people / organizations? Because in order to flout what had been a famously
open and honest system of government, the junta
of Republican reactionaries now controlling the state of Wisconsin requires
smoke screens of Mount St. Helen proportions.
Backstory: there is in Upper Wisconsin a water and river
system called the Bad River Watershed. Here’s Wikipedia’s dispassionate description:
The
Bad River is a river
flowing to Lake Superior
in northern Wisconsin
in the United States.
It flows for 119.6 kilometres (74.3 mi)[3] in Ashland County,
draining an area of 1,061 square miles (2,750 km2) in portions
of Ashland, Bayfield
and Iron
counties. The Bad River sloughs were designated a Ramsar Wetland of International
Importance on February 2, 2012.
Lacking imagination? Check out the photo below, which I
lifted from a New York Times article entitled “The
Fight for Wisconsin’s Soul,” by Dan Kaufman:
Beautiful, hunh? But the genteel readers of this blog will
be astonished to learn that some folk are less moved by the sight of clear
waters and golden foliage—what matters to them is the very verdant green of the
US buck. Oh, and consider the fact that the watershed runs through something
called Iron County (emphasis mine). Here, drawn from a mining
company’s web site, is an example what some people have planned for the Bad
River Watershed:
Think I’m exaggerating? Consider the following quote from
The New York Times:
21
miles? The average adult walks about three to four miles per hour. So leave
your home tomorrow, Dear Reader of Unknown Location, at 8 AM. Walk in as much
of a straight line as you can until 4 PM (I’m giving you an hour for lunch).
That’s what 21 miles is.
Oh,
and 1,000 feet deep? OK, get a night’s sleep, and then run out and find a
high-rise apartment building. Step into the elevator and punch the 100th
floor. That—inversely—is how deep this pit will be.
What
effect would all of this have on the environment? Predictably, it depends on
whom you ask. The Times cites Tom
Fitz—a professor at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin—as saying that
one of the samples contains “a highly carcinogenic asbestos-form mineral.” Did
it? Well, a blog post
entitled “Tom Fitz—Douchebag of the Week” unsurprisingly debunks the notion
that there was the “asbestos-form material,” and states that the University of
Minnesota at Duluth had found no such thing. Going to a bit more nuanced site,
I found this statement:
Bryan Bandli of the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Scanned Electron
Microscopy Laboratory said he was asked by Fitz to review a sample
of what he found in the Penokee Hills. After studying the sample at the
laboratory, Bandli says the rock sample is not grunerite, and he’s not quite
sure what it is.
Why doesn’t this inspire confidence?
And why, since the University of Wisconsin-Madison has the ninth-ranked
department of geology, hasn’t someone run down some samples to Madison?
Well, it turns out that someone has—and that’s the problem.
Here’s the Macvler
Institute, which calls itself “The Free Market Voice for Wisconsin” so
beware:
Mining
supporters question its authenticity because a prominent liberal protester,
Jason Huberty, was part of the sample's chain of custody.
The sample was supposedly collected by Phil
Fauble, a DNR geologist, during a site visit on May 14th. He took it to the
Wisconsin Geological Survey, where Huberty works as a geologist. Huberty then
took the sample to the University of Wisconsin Geology Department, where it was
found to contain asbestos.
Does Huberty possess the amazing power of breathing asbestos
into stone?
Moving aside from the question of asbestos, The
New York Times also sites another professor, Marcia Bjornerud from Lawrence
University:
Before the passage of the bill, Marcia Bjornerud, a
geology professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., testified before
the legislature that samples she had taken from the mine site revealed the
presence of sulfides both in the target iron formation and in the overlying
rock that would have to be removed to get to the iron-bearing rocks. (When
exposed to air and water, sulfides oxidize and turn water acidic, which can be
devastating to rivers and streams, along with their fish populations.) Sulfide
minerals, Professor Bjornerud said, would be an unavoidable byproduct of the
iron mining. But the bill does not mandate a process for preventing the harm
from the sulfide minerals that mining would unleash.
A cursory glance of two pages of Google under the search “Marcia
Bjornerud Sulfides Bad River,” turned up—that I could see—no challenges to her
assertions.
So let’s assume—and you know I think this is crazy—that you can
dig a 21 mile pit 1000 feet deep in a watershed that feeds Lake Superior and
have absolutely no ecological implications, why would you want to? The obvious
answer is jobs, and job creation, you do remember, was what Walker’s campaign
was all about.
So how many jobs are we talking about? Well look, guys, if we
can’t agree on what a rock sample has or doesn’t have, is it likely that anyone
will agree on the putative number of jobs created? But here, from the Sentinel
Journal online is one estimate:
Backers are drawn to the economic potential of the mine,
which is projected to employ 700 people and spur thousands of jobs in
construction and spinoff employment.
Ii is worth considering that the Bad River
falls on what are “ceded lands,” and from whom were they ceded? Right, the
sovereign nations who for generations have fished and harvested wild rice
there. And here—once
again!—from The New York Times….
In the Chippewa tradition, a decision is made based on
how it will affect people seven generations forward. By contrast, the company’s
optimistic estimate for the life span of the first phase of the mine is 35
years.
In fact, the Times article I have been quoting was one of two,
and I had read it when it came out in late March. And the second article? It
was published last Sunday, and was titled “How
to Buy a Mine in Wisconsin:” you know what I had to do….
The first of which was to ponder whether the Times was
deliberately insulting the intelligence of its readers by asking—as did the
subtitle—“Did Gov. Scott Walker Violate Campaign Laws?” Guys—did it snow in
Wisconsin last winter?
But here, dear Readers, both words and my body—still plagued
with a mosquito-borne virus—fail me. Stay tuned until tomorrow for an
interesting look at what big money can do in Wisconsin….
