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.