I was listening to an old Neil Young and Crazyhorse album, minding my own business and trying to simply enjoy the music and not get stirred up about anything in particular. Occasionally, for sanity’s sake, a person just has to pull back from controversy and misinformation and the manmade world as we know it and listen to music or watch the clouds change shape in the skies above.

I was doing just that when good old Neil Young and Crazyhorse sang “Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)” and I was immediately urged to never stop spreading the word that we can’t own this world.
The peril of possession is another of our human follies, something our large brains should have figured out by now, but by and large we haven’t.

“Oh, Mother Earth, with your fields of green, Once more laid down by the hungry hand, How long can you give up and not receive, And feed this world ruled by greed.”

Staring at me from the kitchen table was an open Northland Reader, page 25, August 1 edition, a full-page ad from Water Legacy regarding sulfide mining and the Polymet proposal near Hoyt Lakes.

I have determined that in Minnesota there can be no maybe about copper-nickel-sulfide mining and our water resources. The people of the state simply have to decide if mining in sulfide-bearing rock will or will not be allowed. There is no maybe that one project, say Polymet, will be allowed and another, say Duluth Metals, won’t be allowed. Greed and the lure of jobs versus the environment doesn’t work that way.
This is obviously made more difficult when the agency that oversees mining, the Department of Natural Resources, also oversees the conservation of said lands in question.

It is a simple choice, the yes or no, but one that will set a course for environmental protection in this state. The state has to find the gumption to say no, we can’t allow sulfide mining in this state, no matter that the investors and proponents of copper-nickel mining will say that they can develop a plan to safely treat waste water in perpetuity and create jobs. Mining greed and environmental promises simply don’t match up.
Once again the bargain for Mother Earth goes one way, giving up what you won’t receive.

All the mining activity will take place in the headwaters of the Lake Superior basin or the headwaters of the Hudson Bay drainage that flow directly through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. When you tear a hole in the ground or plan to mine under a lake, waste always spills and the air gets fouled.   

Some of my friends in Ely actually believe that sulfide mining can be done cleanly, which is an oxymoron to begin with. Billions and billions of gallons of water will be drawn for decades from a landscape that will be criss-crossed by new roads and rails and other manmade intrusions that locals will only see once those lands are lost, subjugated by industrial, commercial, and residential development.
“Oh, ball of fire, in the summer sky, Your healing light, your parade of days, Are they betrayed by men of power, Who hold this world in their changing hands.”   


I have just returned from Naknek, Alaska, where another significant sulfide mining venture is in the works. The Pebble Mine has been proposed by a host of investors, its site located in a basin at the headwaters of the Kvichak and Nushagak rivers, two of the six main river systems in Bristol Bay at the head of the Bering Sea. We happen to fish the Kvichak tides. Fully half of the world’s sockeye salmon return magically to Bristol Bay every year, a small indent in a northern sea coast blessed by the fact that large lakes exist in the river watersheds to nurse the millions and millions of returning fish.

Consider that sockeye salmon spawn from northern China to the Siberian coast, from the lower half of Alaska’s west coast and around the Alaska Peninsula to Kodiak Island, Cook Inlet, and Kenai, through the Gulf of Alaska and the Southeast to British Columbia and Washington and Oregon, and you get an idea of how important a fishery is found in Bristol Bay, how many fish flood the rivers.

Investors, ruled by greed and the promise of jobs, want to open an open pit mine in the headwaters of those two rivers, mine for copper and nickel and other precious metals, draw billions and billions of gallons of waters from the watersheds, and say, just like the investors in Minnesota say, they’ll tend to the waste into perpetuity.

Once again Mother Earth will be asked to give and not receive. Once again whole landscapes will be subjugated and lost forever to industrial, commercial, and residential development, the fate of the salmon held in a poker game played and betrayed by men of power.

“Oh, freedom land can you let this go, down to the streets where the numbers grow, Respect Mother Earth and her giving ways, Or trade away our children’s day.”

Just say no to sulfide mining.