A Pit of Iniquity in Wisconsin

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:

…after the recent passage of a bill that would allow for the construction of what could be the world’s largest open-pit iron ore mine…the $1.5 billion mine would initially be close to four miles long, up to a half-mile wide and nearly 1,000 feet deep, but it could be extended as long as 21 miles.

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 100^th 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….