Wisconsins Mining Sellout - Deeply flawed mining legislation proves state is for sale to any bidder
By: Jim Lundstrom
A recent Associated Press story on the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians’ opposition to Republican-driven legislation to allow a coal king’s mining company to rape the pristine Penokee Mountains in northern Wisconsin to mine low-grade iron ore directly upstream from the Bad River Reservation was headlined “Wisconsin tribe threatens Walker jobs project.”
Now if the subjectivity of the copy editor who wrote that headline were leaning the other way, the headline might have read, “State lawmakers conspire with mining company to commit genocide against Bad River Tribe.”
But Lawrence University Geology Professor Marcia Bjornerud believes a more truthful headline would have read, “Tribe tries to save Wisconsin from itself.”
Bjornerud is the lead researcher and author of the July 2012 report Geochemical, mineralogical and structural characterization of the Tyler Formation and Ironwood Iron Formation, Gogebic Range, Wisconsin, prepared for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.
“We have a plethora of defenses in our war chest...wrap your minds around the fact that this is not going to happen.”
Bad River Tribal Chairman Mike Wiggins, repeating at a
Lawrence University forum what he had said to Democratic
legislators and the lone Republican holdout, Sen. Dale Schultz
of Richland Center, on the proposed open pit mine in
the Penokee Mountains.
As stated in the report’s overview, its purpose was “to provide baseline geologic information about the physical and chemical character of the Ironwood Iron Formation, a potential mining target, and the overlying shale or slate, known as the Tyler Formation, in the Gogebic Range of Iron and Ashland Counties, Wisconsin.”
“The reason I got involved, I know the rocks,” Bjornerud recently told the Scene. “It’s an amazing place. Lots of diverse things going on. I’ve had ongoing projects in the area for about 10 years, and before that had taken field excursions looking at the rocks. One of the reasons I’ve been involved is that I really do know the geology of the area quite well.”
But there is a more sinister reason why Bjornerud and two Lawrence colleagues did the science and wrote the report, a reason that brings to mind McCarthy-era repression.
“In terms of publishing detailed analyses of the rock chemistry, that fell to a small liberal arts college because no one else was willing to do it,” Bjornerud said. “A lot of the people at the UW system schools either didn’t know a lot about the area or didn’t feel comfortable sticking their necks out. Even the people at the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey were reluctant to speak because the Legislature provides their funding. The real irony is that the one state agency that should have provided geological information did not feel it could do that because its very existence might be threatened.”
It is strange that the Survey did not weigh in on the mining legislation since that is its purview, at least according to its mission statement:
“The Survey conducts earth-science surveys, field studies and research. We provide objective scientific information about the geology, mineral resources, water resources, soil, and biology of Wisconsin. We collect, interpret, disseminate, and archive natural resource information. We communicate the results of our activities through publications, technical talks and responses to inquiries from the public. These activities support informed decision making by government, industry, business, and individual citizens of Wisconsin.” (wisconsingeologicalsurvey.org)
Well, if a state agency funded by the people of Wisconsin is afraid to do its job, and that job is left to a small liberal arts college, then we should respect the work done by the Lawrence geology team because it was done at no personal gain and for the benefit of the entire state.
Yet mainstream media has been dismissive of the report. Bjornerud names a major chain that owns many area dailies.
“With the blink of an eye, some temporary politicians are going to change things forever.”
Bad River Tribal Chairman Mike Wiggins
“They said, ‘The state says the Lawrence University report is not authoritative’,” Bjornerud said. “I’m wondering, who is ‘the state’? Who said this? I’ve put my reputation out there by doing this. It’s good work. I stand by it. And the only reason I did it is because there was a vacuum of information.”
Her work has led Bjornerud to the conclusion that the Penokee mining project and the proposed legislation to help it along are wrong.
“It’s bad in so many ways, from the revenue standpoint, the way that’s structured for the local communities,” she said. “I can speak most authoritatively from the geology and environmental sides, but I think there are many, many different kinds of things wrong and illogical also about the bill. One of the real puzzles is that we’ve known about this formation for more than a century and none of the taconite producing companies have ever been interested in this site.”
So why is the Cline Resource and Development Group of Florida interested in mining the site under the name Gogebic Taconite, of GTac?
“GTac does not really exist. If you try to find information, there’s nothing,” Bjornerud said. “There was a storefront in Hurley. GTac is owned by Christopher Cline, a multi-billionaire coal man, big climate change skeptic and big supporter of right wing causes. He is not a known player in taconite. No one knows anything about GTac. They are a complete blank, a black box, yet the whole state of Wisconsin seems ready to rewrite laws as they ask us to and do whatever they’re saying. It’s Orwellian.”
The low grade iron ore the company says it wants to mine – Bjornerud puts it in the 10-15% iron content range – is steeply inclined at an angle of 60-65 degrees. That, she says, is why taconite mining companies such as U.S. Steel, Minntac and Cleveland Cliffs Corp. have never been interested in a Penokee mine.
“It’s just never been economic,” Bjornerud said. “It’s not a high-grade deposit. There are just more easily accessible ore bodies in the Iron Range in Minnesota and the Marquette range in Upper Michigan. The demand for iron ore has never been that strong. Even now, just a month ago, Cleveland Cliffs in Marquette laid off a very large fraction of their workforce because the market for taconite has dropped.”
“The whole thing is about keeping everything obscured, muddied, dirtied and very fast, so no one can get a good look at it as it’s going by you. We have some issues with that.”
Bad River Tribal Chairman Mike Wiggins
All of which she said had her and other geologists at an annual meeting of the Institute on Lake Superior Geology – a professional group founded in the 1950s by iron and copper mining companies – scratching their heads over the proposed project and asking, “Is this really a serious project? No other company ever thought they could make it economic.”
“The reaction among many geologists is befuddlement, not quite understanding where this is going,” Bjornerud said. “The two disparate conclusions we reached as possible explanations, first of all, it may be economic. If you can roll back every single environmental regulation you can and essentially put the cost of disposal of a colossal amount of mine waste on the public by allowing mine waste to be dumped on natural areas, wildlife refuges and other areas that it had not been previously legal to dump. Or, perhaps this is a sham project. GTac doesn’t have any serious interest and it’s simply a way to roll back environmental regulations for future things that we don’t know about. I honestly don’t know which way to read this, but the geological consensus, it’s not an effective deposit, it’s never been economic, there’s no market pressure now or in the foreseeable future.”
* * *
Gov. Walker has pointed out that Wisconsin has a miner on its flag and, so, the extension of his thought seems to go, Wisconsin should have mining. Someone should have explained to him that the miner is an anachronism, a symbol of the state’s past, not necessarily a harbinger of the future.
The general area where an open pit taconite mine is proposed in Ashland and Iron counties is not new to iron mining. Lawrence University Geology Professor Marcia Bjornerud said iron mining took place in the Ironwood and Hurley areas in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
“In that case they were deep-shaft mines that were following really high-grade iron ore, 50% to 65% iron by weight, really rich ore, what’s called natural shipping ore,” she said. “That was the old heyday of mining in Wisconsin. All of those enriched iron ores were mined out in the 1930s or ’40s, or earlier in some cases. Lots of abandoned mines are older than that.
“So what remains is what mining geologists call taconite, which isn’t really a rock type to a geologist, but means there’s quite a bit of iron compared to the other rocks, but it also has a lot of silica in it. The grade of the ore that remains is in the range of 10% to 15% iron. In the 1950s there was a huge breakthrough in technology that was developed in Minnesota that allowed that kind of low-grade iron formation to be exploited by crushing it, magnetically separating, and then combining the pulverized parts of the rock into little marblized pellets by putting a little bit of clay in them and then baking them at a low temperature. That’s what taconite is, the processed ore.”
The mine proposed by Gogebic Taconite would extract the low-grade ore from their 60% to 65% pitch in the rock by blasting through layers and generating mountains of waste rock.
“To me the big issue that the public hasn’t really heard about is the huge volume of waste rock, both from the overlying rock, which contains sulfides, and also by the nature of taconite processing, about two-thirds of the rock is waste rock, so even in the iron formation, most of the rock is going to be left in big piles around the mine. It is a huge amount of waste rock, no matter how you look at it. It will utterly change the landscape and the hydrology.”
In and around the proposed mine site are 815 acres of wetlands connected to designated waterways, four Class II trout streams, one Class I trout stream, two lakes designated Priority Navigable Waterways, and the Bad River watershed, which leads to Lake Superior through the Bad River Reservation.
Being directly downstream from the proposed mine, the tribe refers to the mining plan and Republican legislators’ push to roll back environmental standards through the mining bill as genocide.
Bjornerud agrees. “There are finely disseminated grains of pyrite and other sulfide minerals in the overburden rock that you have to remove to get to the iron formations. But even apart from that, just the sheer volume of the waste rock and the fact that you have to blast it and it’s going to be in fine, broken up pieces, the suspended sediment that’s going to be flowing into the Bad River from the waste piles which will all be stacked right near the headwaters of the river, that alone would devastate the wild rice crop.
“It means a complete change in the tiny scrap of land they still have as their own,” Bjornerud said. “It would almost certainly damage one of the last continuous wild rice sloughs of any size in Wisconsin. This is a cultural thing we should protect. ”
Bjornerud pointed at a division between the tribe and other communities that will be downstream from the mine, and other northland communities that hope to benefit from jobs.
“There’s an interesting difference between people in Ashland/Bayfield and Ironwood/Hurley,” Bjornerud said. “Ashland is im-mediately downstream. Ashland’s mayor, Ashland County, Mellen, Anderson Town-ship, which is where the mine would be, the local leaders have come out against the mine, primarily for environmental reasons but also for economic reasons. They can’t afford it the way revenue sharing is written now and the way that the tax revenues are being organized. The taxes would be on net profit rather than net tonnage, and there will be no profit from this mine for years and years and years. Small communities will have to provide infrastructure with budgets that are just minuscule. At least in the current iteration of the bill, they will get 60% of the net revenues, someday. Forty percent will go to the state coffers. I think in the original, last year’s bill, it was even worse. But it is still not to the benefit of the local communities and the people who are most directly affected, which would include the Ashland/Bayfield/Mellen/Anderson Township people, do not want this bill in its present form. It’s the Ironwood/Hurley people, who live about 15 miles to the northeast, who maybe would benefit from the jobs but not the problems that come from the development that are most vocally for it.”
But, surely, there are provisions in the mining bill to protect our natural resources.
“The mining bill has just completely unscientific provisions for managing how the hydrology is changed,” Bjornerud said. “It allows wetlands and even small lakes to be filled with waste rock, as long as there is mitigation, which can include the creation of wetlands or small water bodies anywhere in the state, which anybody understands is not an appropriate equation. That’s not the way hydrological systems work. It’s like saying Joe needs a kidney and a kidney has become available so we’ll give it to his cousin. It just doesn’t work.
“That idea is incredible to any of us who have any idea how natural systems work, and it is a travesty in the fact that we have fairly enlightened, scientifically based legislation in Wisconsin now,” Bjornerud said. “This bill has a sinister one-line sentence close to the end that says, if this bill is in conflict with any other state statutes, the bill trumps those statutes. One sentence completely overturns 40 years of carefully crafted legislation that’s been done in consultation with the DNR and other scientists. It’s just very disheartening.”
How could such bad legislation be passed by the Assembly and moved on to the Senate for its vote? Bjornerud fears that some of our elected representatives are either inept, out of their depth or worse.
“I attended the (mining legislation) hearing in Madison on Jan. 23,” she said. “I sat through that all day long. My main impression is that most of the legislators don’t actually understand what they are voting on, which is very disheartening. It is a complicated bill and there’s a lot of technical information, but it’s their job to know what they are voting on for us. Dale Schultz of Richland Center, he is the one Republican senator who voted against it last time, and he’s holding his ground. All we need is one Republican senator to say, this is not the right thing to do. I’m still hopeful that might happen.
“All it would take is one person to slow the freight train down a little bit. I think if it passes, and I think if it went to the floor today, it probably would, but if it does, the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission does have the legal resources behind it to challenge it in court and they will fight it. They can’t not fight it. It’s too much of a precedent for treaty rights in the ceded territories. What will happen then is, unfortunately, this deepened polarization. I don’t want that to happen. I want this in some way through the legislative process, that they come to their senses…
“Or the dystopian version: Let it pass. Let GTac pretend it’s going do this and then let them be revealed for what they are. But I think they could do a lot of damage before the curtain was pulled.”
* * *
Bad River Tribal Chairman Mike Wiggins says you don’t have to look too hard to find the flaws in AB/SB 1, the mining legislation that would open the door to an open pit taconite mine on ceded territory, upstream from the home of the Bad River Tribe and the only remaining extensive coastal wild rice wetland in the entire Great Lakes Basin.
“With the blink of an eye, some temporary politicians are going to change things forever,” Wiggins said. “Here’s why we view the activities taking place as an imminent threat. Current environmental language says ‘will not harm.’ AB/SB1 changes that to ‘will not significantly harm.’ Translated to me, that means, ‘We will hurt you or we will harm you, and then we will debate the word significant.’ For us that is an imminent threat, one worthy of all hands on deck, and all resources to the defense of our little home because it’s all we got.”
Wiggins and several other tribal members took to the road in February to tell their side of the Penokee mining legislation story. It’s an old story, one that’s been repeated ad nauseum in the Manifest Destiny of the United States – just one more blatant act of genocide on Native Americans
“When I said to Republican legislators this mining operation is going to be genocide, there were some shocked faces,” Wiggins said at a presentation at Lawrence University in Appleton. “Some people came up to me afterwards and said, ‘How is this going to kill your people?’”
Wiggins said he could have brought up sulfuric acid runoff that kills the ancient wild rice beds and mercury contamination of the Lake Superior fishery, but instead he said, “If you look at the legislation, the ability to contaminate groundwater has been extended and can never be diminished. Guys, we’re 75% water. We’re about to pass mining legislation that allows mining companies to pollute water that is under earth, with no dialogue, no public input, really, except some hastily thrown together meetings. The Penokee Mountains are the recharge station for the groundwater underneath our homes. Penokee mountain aquifers, the groundwater, surface water, all of that is real, when you think of that stuff being catastrophically impacted, it makes that connection to genocide pretty real. Talking about the contamination of groundwater aquifers seems insane. Water is critical to understanding our opposition.”
Wiggins points to the only economic study conducted for the project, the laughably one-sided NorthStar economic analysis that failed to take many factors into account, not the least of which is what Wiggins describes as “environmental carnage” to an area described by just about everyone as pristine.
“Their environmental carnage is going to last 1,000 years,” Wiggins said. “The Bad River rolls out into Lake Superior. Just a few miles off where the Bad River meets the lake is a fish refuge. That fish refuge is there for a reason. It’s an incredible resource that contributes millions to the economy every year. That has a benefit. Is it part of the NorthStar economic analysis? The environmental carnage is not being talked about. The legislation is unbelievable.”
The fast-track legislation is particularly troubling to Wiggins.
“The Republicans are pushing this so fast, so fast, that it seems like they don’t want people to truly examine it, think about and thoroughly vet and get into deeper issues with the legislation. The mining company, the way they’ve crafted this bill for the Republicans, they don’t want anyone to go into detail and thoroughly vet their project, because what’s going to happen? We’re going to find threats to public health are very real.
“The whole thing is about keeping everything obscured, muddied, dirtied and very fast, so no one can get a good look at it as it’s going by you. We have some issues with that. Our people are connected to the land and the water. There’s a seasonal subsistence living element in our tribal members that is ancient, that is beautiful, and essentially puts a value on the ability to do this.” He says this last line as he shows slides of gill netting on the lake.
Wiggins points out that the Bad River Reservation is on 124,00 acres that has been purposefully kept relatively pristine for generations.
“The environmental stewardship and ethic we put forth in our opposition to mining is not just rhetoric, is not just trying to make noise talking about air and water and conservation, which would be nice to do anyway, it’s the reality of the walk that we walk. What I mean by that, on our shorelines and some of our waterways, what you’ll see is the absence of economic development. The shorelines as we know them are essentially containing the same views and the same power and mystery that our ancestors encountered hundreds of years ago. They carry the message, the story, the feeling, the wonder, the beauty, really, of what was there seven generations ago.
“Part of our ethic is trying to understand that places like this are so important to who we are, how we connect to our home, that a condo, a pier, a home, just don’t have a place for us. So economically, we sacrifice. That is, in a humble way, the best way I can describe some of the integrity people from our community fight for their home against fast-track legislation, lots of mining company money, and the weakening of environmental protections.”
Bayfield mayor: Yes to jobs, no to buying legislation
By: Jim Lundstrom
Bayfield Mayor Larry MacDonald is not against mining, but he does not support the industry-slanted mining legislation championed by Republican legislators under the guise of jobs in an area that desperately needs them.
“There’s not enough consensus in our area to support the legislation in any form or fashion that it is right now,” MacDonald said in a telephone call while in Madison as part of the annual Superior Days, in which northern Wisconsin officials lobby in Madison, where northern Wisconsin is sometimes forgotten.
“I would say, just in general in the Bayfield area, the overriding thought on any economic development is do no harm to Lake Superior,” MacDonald said. “Don’t threaten the air, the land the water, the people, the fish, the rice, you name it. After that, I think virtually everyone except for curmudgeons would welcome many types of economic development. To my mind, mining is a possibility. But not with the way AB1/SB1 reads at this point. It doesn’t change the standards. It just allows the mining company not to meet the standards.”
And even if lawmakers did not allow the mining company to roll back environmental laws and legislated that mining be conducted in an environmentally conscious fashion (is such a thing is even possible), the mining legislation remains flawed in a revenue-sharing formula based on profit rather than tonnage, as is the way on Minnesota’s Iron Range.
“The IRRRB (Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board), they get their funding from so many cents a ton on taconite. That is what has and does keep those communities going,” said MacDonald, whose family hails from the Iron Range.
“I think it proves you can buy a mine for $15 million. You can buy any legislation you want by distributing $15 million among elected officials in Wisconsin. Sad but true.”
Bayfield Mayor larry MacDonald, commenting on the shameful mining legislation spearheaded by Republican legislators.
But with the Wisconsin mining formula, communities would not see any revenues until the company reports profits. In the meantime, MacDonald said, “Local communities are going to be devastated by the effects. Local roads will be crumbled by the traffic and there’s no way for them to fix them up.”
MacDonald said the mining legislation is so blatantly flawed that it proves to anyone watching that “you can buy a mine for $15 million. You can buy any legislation you want by distributing $15 million among elected officials in Wisconsin. Sad but true,” he said.
What the state lawmakers have allowed the mining company to do in rolling back environmental rules is threaten Lake Superior, which, MacDonald reminds, “is 10% of the world’s fresh surface water. You put one drop of pollutant in there and it takes 192 years to get out of there. Collectively, we are afraid.”
At a recent standing-room-only hearing in Ashland, MacDonald said as many as 100 people spoke, and it was 20 to 1 against mining legislation. MacDonald said those who appeared to speak in support of mining were really saying something else.
“If you listened closely, they said, ‘We’re poor, we’re broke. We have nothing going on. This is the only thing that’s been offered to us’,” MacDonald said.
“Many of those folks, if we could find alternative ways to develop an economy up north, instead of just relying on nothing, which is what we’ve done for anything from 50 to 100 years, since the extractive industry wore out. Environment should trump (jobs). But we’ve got to pay attention. Incomes in the area are relatively low. Unemployment is high. We need to listen to these folks who are saying, ‘I need a job. My kids need a job’.”
Perhaps the greatest insult in what will certainly go down as one of Wisconsin’s most shameful political episodes is how lawmakers have completely ignored an important component of the landscape they are prepared to defile.
“It really concerns me that our neighbors, the Native American tribes, both Bad River and Red Cliff, haven’t been listened to in any form or fashion,” MacDonald said. “They are a sovereign nation. I work with them on a semi-regular basis. Respect the rights that they have. I don’t think that’s being addressed at all.”
Binational Forum monitorsmining activity around lake
By: Jim Lundstrom
The proposed iron ore mine in northern Wisconsin’s Penokee Mountains is just one of a number of proposed mines that are being monitored on both the U.S. and Canadian sides of Lake Superior by the Lake Superior Binational Forum.
“It’s not our role to advocate for or against any one industry or, in this case, any one mine,” said Lissa Radke, who serves as the U.S. contact for the Binational Forum. “What we’re trying to do is bring sound, fact-based information to people so they can make better decisions about what happens in their community. My group has not taken a position one way or the other on mining, but they do hold as their guiding principle their 21-year-old guiding principle statement, which diverse stakeholders wrote back in 1991. Their vision statement was, water is life and the quality of water determines the quality of life. They use that as the driver for what kind of recommendations they would make to all the governments that manage Lake Superior.”
The Great Lakes Binational Forum is funded through Great Lakes Restoration Initiative grant from the Environmental Protection Agency. The group has to apply to the EPA grants about a year ahead of whatever the proposal is written for. Last year they wrote a grant to conduct three public meetings in the three Lake Superior border state on the mining issue.
“It’s a big messy picture,” Radke said. “The Penokees is just one mine the Binational Forum is monitoring. There’s a massive underground copper nickel and potential gold mine up in the U.P. Gogebic Taconite is looking at mining opportunities in the UP. They’re hoping for the next gold rush in the Thunder Bay area. There’s a very large mine proposed for Marathon, Ontario, that is causing a lot of concern. Penokee is one thing because it’s the first open pit mine in Wisconsin and will have a huge footprint, but there are many others being discussed around the whole lake.”
The Binational Forum has already held meetings in Marquette, Mich., and Ashland, Wis. Next up is the third and final meeting, “The Impacts of Nonferrous Mining in the Lake Superior Basin: Overview and Updates” on Friday, March 15, from?12:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the Mesabi Range Community & Technical College Auditorium, Virginia, Minn.
Radke said the first two meetings were overflow crowds.
“No question this has become very quickly a job vs. the environment question,” she said. “Right now what I’m seeing up here all across the Lake Superior basin and into Canada is this polarization. I think it’s based on the past history. Mining has a very large blueprint as an extractive industry.”
She said at both meetings this reasoning came up: “We are caretakers of 10% of the world’s fresh water. As people who live near or love this lake, we have the responsibility to be good caretakers. Sitting here on the cleanest water on the planet, why are we going to sacrifice that for a few jobs. A lot of questions are being asked, how come we can’t set higher standards here since we live by the world’s largest reserve of fresh water. Why not set higher standards?
“Another question we keep hearing: Really, define who is getting these jobs. One study that came out of the economic impact of mining, we keep seeing formulas that almost quantify exponentially the amount of mining jobs up her if the Penokee Mine went in, but there hasn’t been any outside analysis of that.”
Since this issue won’t be going away, Radke said the Binational Forum will seek funding for more public meetings and more webinars that allow more people to participate.
“Our website has a lot of information, especially the mining portal,” Radke said. “We have links to groups opposing mining, to mining companies, to the permitting bodies, historical sites, news sites, presentations, speakers.” Superiorforum.org.
