Tyler Forks River, Tributary of the Bad River, near LCO Harvest and Education Camp. Photo by Carl Sack

As close followers of the Reader know, the mining industry has its guns aimed at Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota with projects that threaten to permanently damage Lake Superior. The proposal for Minnesota even promises to contaminate the pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness with persistent acid mine drainage.
In Wisconsin, a new firm called Gogebic Taconite Mining company (G-Tac) purchased the support it needed in the State Legislature to pass what you might call the Bad River Watershed Destruction Act. The Bad River and its magnificent Sloughs feed the South Shore of The Great Lake.
The Cline Group and corporate lobbyists with Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce were the deep pockets behind the pollution-friendly legislation. The industrialists doled out $15.6 million to the Republican-controlled State House and Republican Gov. Scott Walker between 2010 and June 2012, according to the watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. The mining deregulation forces outspent Wisconsin’s conservationist majority by 610 to 1.
According to the group Defend the Bad River (DBR) in Odanah, G-Tac’s mountain top removal-style open-pit mine plan threatens downstream communities “because it is very likely that the mine would unearth extremely dangerous substances, contaminating the Rad River, Lake Superior and underground water sources.” G-Tac’s idea is to tear the top off of a 4-to-7 mile long stretch of the Penokee Hills.
On May 16, the company filed an application for a permit to drill core samples inside the Penokees. The Dept. of Natural Resources has only 10 business days to review it. Eight sites are being targeted for drilling — the largest to be 1,400 feet deep — and all of them pose risks to groundwater.
If ever operational, heavy mine wastes from the extraction would be dumped directly into wetlands of the Bad River Watershed which purifies the waters of sacred, Treaty-protected fishing grounds and wild rice beds.
But as the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council notes, G-Tac is “losing the battle for public acceptance of mountaintop removal mining in the Penokee Hills.”

Groundswell of mine opponents gaining allies

At every public hearing on the Iron Mining bill, vast majorities of citizens and tribal members spoke against the deregulation scheme. Mike Wiggins, Jr., Chairman of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, reminded the crowds, “We live our lives through our Ojibwe identity, the harvest of traditional foods and connections we have with our ecosystems.”
The Bad River Band has been fighting the strip-mining proposal for two years, but has redoubled its efforts since G-Tac and its Madison cronies rewrote mining law, exempting iron mining from protecting water quality, private property and human health. According to DBR, the legislation was opposed by all the Indian tribes in Wisconsin and by 62% of Wisconsin citizens.
DBR’s philosophy is to partner with other tribes like the Lac Courte Oreilles Band, with municipalities and local governments, conservation groups – like the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters – and community groups in northern Wisconsin and beyond.
Public opposition to the strip mine proposal was in view all over Ashland and Iron counties over Memorial Day weekend. A Friday night fundraiser at Bad River for the Penokee Hills Education Project drew over 150 supporters who ponied up a couple thousand bucks to help spread the word about open pit mining and its record of out-state profiteering via ecological self-harm.
On Saturday, the Lac Courte Oreilles Band launched its Harvest and Education Camp inside the Penokees just outside of Mellon. The camp is in Iron County in Ceded Territory where hunting, fishing and harvesting rights are guaranteed to the Ojibwe forever. The rustic, shady camp was a-buzz throughout the sunny weekend with campers, visitors, reporters and friends of all ages who helped harvest ramps and fire wood, build trails and shelters, and make plans for the long haul.
Of course the G-Tac plan will be held up for years – like the failed Exxon Crandon project before it. Exxon’s pollution threat helped create such broad-based citizen and tribal opposition in the 1990s, that its mining plan was stopped and the state enacted the Mining Moratorium Law — 27-6 in the Senate, and 91-6 in the Assembly — 15 years ago. It’s this moratorium that the new bill managed to weaken and sidestep.
But opposition is winning friends. Even attorney George Meyer, a former Secretary of the Wisc. Dept. of Natural Resources and current director of the Wisc. Wildlife Federation predicts that the new bill — which allows mining companies to destroy wetlands by filling them with waste — invites lengthy lawsuits, because wetland destruction violates a separate state statute and because tribes have the power to regulate water quality at the federal level beyond the state’s control.
Meyer told the Milwaukee Journal last December that the US Environmental Protection Agency “will lean over backward” to support Bad River because of the federal government’s trust responsibility with Native North American Indians.
G-Tac lobbyist Bob Seitz has said that his company’s first priority was to pass the deregulation bill and to “worry about tribal concerns later.” You could say he got the last part right and can start worrying.
— John LaForge is Co-director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin.