Some area residents were unhappy with Rick Nolan’s responses at his public forum at UMD on Saturday, November 16. Although the public discussion that was to end with a question and answer period was to focus on climate change, the most pressing environmental matters that Minnesota faces were reportedly brushed over. Namely the issues of the Keystone XL Pipeline and the potential for sulfide mining in Northern Minnesota were not very high on the agenda for Nolan.

After nearly two hours of dialog with Nolan and panelists including UMD’s biologist, Dr. John Pastor, Dr. Tom Johnson and Dr. Christina Gallup, both well educated in the field of paleoclimatology, Gary Cerkvenik or Silicon Energy and Julie Pierce of Minnesota Power, the public was finally allowed to submit questions. Rather than a “town hall” or open discussion, questions were to be submitted on a card in writing. “The only questions that he was willing to answer were shuffling through these cards and looking for something he was already prepared to talk about. He tried to tell us that the tar sands were not an issue that he needed to talk about at all because it was Canada. I brought up the point that, if tar sand oil is being rammed through our community in a big leaky pipeline, then I guess it is our issue,” said Yasmina Adalis.

Local activist, Jesse Peterson, also had complaints about the forum. “In a folksy manner he said to us, now Canada up there, they don’t always do what their big brother to the south would like them to do, but the tar sands are a Canada decision. What our decision is whether that oil is going to moved by a pipe line, a truck, or by a train. I have no power over if they do the tar sands but I’m going to make sure that it travels in the safest, most environmentally friendly way…in that statement, I called him out and it’s a perverse logical fallacy, by admitting to having power over how it’s transported, he’s admitting that he could stop it from being transported at all.”

We had to remind Peterson that there is a lot of money that has been invested to assure that the pipeline happens and even though not more than two weeks go by where there isn’t some sort of environmental impact from pipelines bursting and leaking out filthy tar sand oil on to people’s private land which is often covered up and when it’s found out,  it gets minimal media coverage. A North Dakota farmer’s field was thoroughly soaked with around 840,000 gallons of oil on to his wheat crop earlier this year, just one of dozens of incidents in the last year. The break will leave the land useless for years. Plans for pipelines that will be laid in by companies such as Enbridge are planned for all over the Nation, but particularly around the basin of Lake Superior.

Another threat that the Northland and Lake Superior faces is sulfide mines that are also spurned by corporate money to come into the area. The promise of jobs is why law makers want to push these projects through. Rick Nolan has supported the H.R. 761 bill which passed the House in September of this year. The bill is named the “National Strategic and Critical Minerals Production Act of 2013” and will, according to Nolan, “streamline and standardize a broken mining permitting process that is delaying projects with the potential for thousands of good paying jobs, and billions of dollars in economic development, across Minnesota’s Iron Range.”

Issues like environmental issues used to be more bipartisan, but in this day and age, both Democrats and Republicans want to deal with oil and mining companies in Minnesota, the primary issue being jobs. Even more liberal politicians such as Al Franken have stated that, “mining is a true Minnesota tradition.”

What they seem to be forgetting is that areas such as Ashland, Wisconsin, had much more of a population during the lumber boom in the early 1900s. If lumber was an ever lasting commodity, the area would indeed be bigger and thriving. The problem is is that laying in pipeline is temporary work, mining responsibly is temporary work. Mining everything there is to mine will end up in an environmental disaster in a long enough timeline, because like the Deep Water Horizon incident, sloppy regulations to get fast profits will end badly. Although there may be insured trusts to handle some of clean up, these will only go so far. It’s also easy to forget that we sit on the largest fresh water body of water in the United States. Minerals, food and oil are all needed by everyone in our current society, but no one will escape the need for water.