Thoughtful Response

I got this long, thoughtful email from Ranae Hanson in response to my post about my experience at the DFL Caucus earlier this month.

Gratefully I read your words about the caucus and your thoughts about the anti-sulfide mining issue. I'm writing this evening anyway because I just have to get some words of gratitude back to you. Not often do I read someone who expresses the complexity of this issue.

I'm from Babbitt, still live part-time at our family home (a little cabin-like place, but all the home we had) on Birch Lake. We are right in the middle of sulfide-mining territory. I am also an environmentalist. I'm an ecofeminist--teaching that at MCTC.

To be against sulfide mining if you are in the city or in the tourism business or a "party-line" liberal is relatively easy--such mining is obviously polluting and dangerous. To be for mining is relatively easy if you are from Babbitt or another Range city (not Ely, which isn't so much a Range city as a tourist town). My nephew and his wife work for Polymet Mining on a project my brother directs--it's a demonstration project to use biological methods (bacteria) to remove sulfide from mining-impaired waters. Many, many natural and mine pit lakes need this. I have in my wallet a security pass to go onto Polymet property to help now and then on the project. Would my environmentalist companions be horrified? I dare to talk to some about it, but the conversations have to be more than a few minutes; just to say that I associate with Polymet can turn some away.

Without Polymet funding there has, so far, been no way to try to clean up the serious problem of the sulfide-laden waters. Yes. This is complex.

I've sent my brother, Jeff, the link to your words. He may post a response. I hope he'll find a way to respond because he knows better than I do what the possible economic benefits of widespread water clean-up work might be for the Range. It needs to be done, but I don't think it will be done unless there is a coalition of groups with money to do it. Mining companies will probably necessarily be part of that coalition.

A lot of tree-planting needs to be done. A lot of deer should be shot and eaten to save the moose (my opinion, but backed by science and by native species studies). A lot of work to help the trees and animals of the area adapt to climate change needs to be taken on. Where would this money come from? There is not a lack of necessary, essential work, but we humans have not figured out how to support the people who would do that work.

Shoreline restoration, containment of invasive species--those are things I wish to work on and I do in a small way on my small bit of woods when I can get a bit of time away from my job and life down here. A WPA project, several, to do this work would be spectacular. This is what I think people need to be employed at--saving our lives and the land.

But we don't have money for everything. Actually not for much.

If we do not want sulfide mines, we need to also give up the things that we get from sulfide mines: solar panels, catalytic converters, cancer treatment drugs, dental crowns, diabetes-control devices (I became Type 1 diabetic a year ago; my CGM uses a copper filament that needs to be replaced with a new one every six days) . . . Are we willing to do without these things? I hope I would be, but so far I'm not willing to be the only one in my peer group who does without them. If we don't want to do without them, are we willing to continue to be the privileged few who get them, or do we want to do a great deal more mining so that people in general around the world can have these things? If we are willing to be the privileged few, are we willing to continue to let South Africa lands and people and northern Russia lands and people be exploited, probably destroyed, to provide us with these minerals? There are not many more sources. We could mine the coast of Alaska. Is that less precious than the lake I grew up on?

I love that land as I love my children and my parents. But the choices are harder, much harder than easy for-mining or against-mining resolutions imply.

Thank you, thank you for seeing a great deal of this complexity. Thank you for caring about the people who live near that mining question. Thank you for daring to stand alone and in a place of discomfort.

Yarn Shop Hop For Me

I used a driving route planner to figure out how to get to the nine shops I want to visit during the 2016 Minnesota Yarn Shop Hop. Since it happens opening weekend of MSPIFF, I do everything in one day. I visited all 17 shops last year (this year there's 16), and want to revisit my favorites.


According to the planner, my shortest route is 137.47 miles, and will all-in-all including take a little over four hours. And here it is (for my own reference as much as yours):

Steven B Yarn, 35th & Chicago
Linden Yarn & Textiles, 5814 Excelsior Blvd, St. Louis Park
Twisted Loop Yarn Shop (It's in a library of all places), Prior Lake Library, 16210 Eagle Creek Avenue, Prior Lake
3 Kittens Needle Arts, 750 Main St., Mendota Heights
The Yarnery, Victoria & Grand
Darn. Knit. Anyway., 423 S Main St, Stillwater
Lila and Claudine's, 86 Mahtomedi Ave, Mahtomedi
All About Yarn, 455 99th Ave, Suite 180
Coon Rapids
Crafty Planet, 2833 Johnson Street NE, Minneapolis

Not sure this will be good for The Year of the Stash, but I will try to be good. I will remember that I ended up de-stashing two of the three things I got at last year's shop hop.

Things I do want to get:

• project bags
• stitch markers
• cool tools
• a measuring tape I can attach to my purse tool kit
• same with a needle gauge
• a gleaner (I think I saw one at either Lila and Claudine's or Darn. Knit Anyway last weekend for the yarn bowl adventure)
• Hiya Hiya needle accessories

me & art: a pretty good list

1. Art and I have had a tenuous relationship. Art the creative endeavor, not the person.

2. Students, take out your texts. Answer all the problems correctly, in the correct order, and in less than 20 minutes. If you can't do the problems in 20 minutes or if you get anything wrong, your work will be worthless. Worthless.

3. I wasn't read-to as a child by my parents, so I made up my own bedtime stories based on the muffled television shows I could hear from my bedroom. I'd spin tales starring John Boy, Bob Newhart and Barnaby Jones. Most of the time, they came to rescue me from my life by revealing that I'd been stolen from my real parents.

4. My real neighbors: Mr. Shoemaker who fixed televisions; Mr. Overstreet who drove a truck delivering Pepsi; Mr. Name I Don't Remember who drove a truck delivering Wonder Bread. And even though she wore steel-toed shoes to her work in a warehouse, my mother thought we were better than our neighbors because my father wore a suit, and not Carhartts, to work. And because we had a very incomplete set of Harvard Classics on our one short bookshelf.

5. Students, take out the picture you've chosen to draw. Now draw a grid on the picture and a corresponding grid on your canvas. Now copy each square exactly as you see it. Do each one perfectly, or your work with be worthless. Worthless.

6. French Club: making fondue, watching French films (not movies), and going to New York City for a Monet visit. I liked fondue, films and Monet, but I didn't understand how these would get me a job.

7. The only A's I got in my freshman year as a mathematics major in college were in French and English composition. I stayed a math major because I knew how to get the right answer in math.

8. I've always journaled. There were no wrong answers in my private pages. My partner will burn my journals when I die. She promised.

9. Last Christmas I watched my six-year-old niece Madison play with a makeup kit my mother had gotten her. She spread eyeshadow on her lips, blush on her lids and lipstick onto her cheeks. When she proudly showed my mother her face, my mother said, "You've done it wrong, silly girl."

10. A friend told me a story from my childhood where I showed up to school in second grade wearing pantyhose. When she'd asked why I was wearing pantyhose, I'd told her that proper young ladies wear pantyhose with dresses.

11. My muse is a little girl, eyeshadow on her lips, blush on her eyelids and lipstick on her cheeks, and she is wearing adult-sized pantyhose which bag around her ankles. When she's around, my creative juice moves and grooves. When she's not, well, it's all worthless. Worthless.

On Silos and Pet Causes

Tonight was political caucus night in Minnesota. People gathered in their precincts and wards by party, and we went to ward 12-3 for the DFL. Beyond the chaos, poor crowd management, crappy accessibility, worse communication, our ward did little for racial and economic justice.

Several resolutions were put forward by constituents (including one about animal traps and another about supporting without question the power of public service unions) and most passed without comment. But when one person put forward a resolution banning sulfide mining in northern Minnesota, I knew I had to speak.

I live in the People's Republic of South Minneapolis. As we headed toward Super Tuesday, I saw exactly one Hillary sign, and no bumper stickers for her, in my neighborhood. But there were lots and lots of Bernie signs and stickers and buttons and flags and I Felt the Bern. You can't turn around and not hit an environmentalist socialist lefty.

I'm one of them. Sort of.

My heart finds its home in the woods of northern Minnesota. Liz and I had our honeymoon in Ely and we've been there several times. We love the North Shore too, and don't want anything to harm that landscape. I'm also moved to be against sulfide mining because of the damage it will do in Native American communities.

And I don't support a ban on sulfide mining without a hard look at the economics of leaving an entire region out of opportunities for prosperity.

So I spoke in opposition to the resolution. I wanted it to say that we also would work to support the poor and working class people of the area in finding other ways to make a living wage.

I heard some verbal affirmation for what I was saying but the woman who put forth the original resolution refused my friendly amendment.

After the caucus closed, a neighbor named Bob (because you caucus with your neighbors) came up to me to try to convince me that eco-tourism could be a solution to the economic woes of the Iron Range by telling me a story about 20 people birding in Costa Rica who had each paid $100 to go on that particular tour.

Here are a few of the problems with relying on eco-tourism to be the sole support of a community. I take my experience from observing how Grand Marais, MN has become a booming eco-tourist town.

1) There's little cash in the community for investing in the infrastructure for eco-tourism, which requires housing, food, and culture for wealthy people who expect high-end accommodations and dining and arts. People who pay $100 to see a loon won't come if they can't have their creature comforts.

2) When a community can attract investors to create said infrastructure, much less of the money from those $100 tours stays in the community, and instead makes the outside investors more wealthy.

3) Wealth stays out of the community because the people who pay the workers who clean the toilets and wash the dishes don't willingly pay them more than the minimum wage, which isn't a livable wage.

4) It's expensive to live in or near an eco-tourist spot because as traveling there becomes more coveted, property values go up, and taxes go up, and housing costs go up. Kindergarten teachers in Grand Marais work summers as wait staff to make ends meet. Few people who live there have only one job.

5) Any wealth created leaves out communities of color and often exploits them, especially Native Americans.

6) There often aren't enough people living in remote areas to support an eco-tourist economy so migrant workers are brought in to fill menial positions. They get paid the lowest wages, and their money often doesn't stay in the community because they send money back to their families.

7) Remote areas don't have good road or other transportation access, or fast internet, keeping out other kinds of businesses that could support eco-tourism or even other kinds of businesses like manufacturing.

When I told him about these things, he said "it's a separate issue."

I'm tired of the silos of issues. We need to work intersectionally because if we only ban sulfide mining and do nothing about the economic issues in the area up there, we will be throwing poor and working class people under the bus. The DFL needs to get a clue about intersectional work.

The results are in, and Minnesotans love Bernie Sanders way more than Hillary Clinton. Our state loves economic justice. But there are many long-time DFLers who refuse to see how important that issue is, and how important it is to work with poor and working class people on economic justice. The DFL establishment overwhelmingly supported Clinton. The masses contradicted them. That's my evidence.

If we want to ban sulfide mining, we need to work side-by-side with the people on the Iron Range and in the Native American communities to come up with solutions to the economic crisis that's getting them to support sulfide mining. If we ban it without doing that, we'll be pushing them out of the voting booth, on our side at least.

Dear DFL establishment, stop being the way the Right paints us as elitists who care only about our pet causes. Let's figure out how to bring everyone into the environmentalist movement.