Thank you for a well written and detailed article on the Walz directive to temporarily protect the BWCA. As you know, this controversy has been a continuing story since October, 2013 when State Auditor, Rebecca Otto, forcefully opposed opening the state to copper-nickel mining and was the lone vote in the state’s Executive Council against it. From that point on , she was pilloried and the office stripped of many of its powers. And those acts of retribution were led by her own party.
In July of 2016, former Vice President Walter Mondale wrote a commentary in MinnPost warning that the BWCA could not be saved unless we were willing to protect the entire Lake Superior watershed. In another commentary published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune , he wrote that “ sulfide ore mining has never-never been undertaken without serious environmental consequences. “
Additionally, the Minnesota medical community , including members from the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota, have been publicly petitioning the state for well over a decade to include a Health Impact Assessment ( HIA ) study as a requirement for a mining permit. However, the Dayton and Walz administrations chose to do nothing, absolutely nothing except make false promises. Just read Walker Orenstein’s article on this in MinnPost (August, 2019 ).
This policy of stonewalling the public was, in fact, the policy of our state government and fully embraced by both parties and all too accepted by the media. Consider this: the Governor and Legislature have refused for well over a decade to hold a single public hearing on ANY legislation that would update our antiquated mining laws in order to protect our state’s drinking water.
And , for the past eight years, my colleagues and I have been writing commentaries published in a variety of newspapers around the state with a simple message - large campaign donors are driving our policy decisions. Interestingly, not a single elected official has publicly protested our declarations.
Just ask yourself:
“ Why is the State of Minnesota processing a mining permit for one of the world’s most corrupt companies, Glencore? “
This is not a trivial or minor concern. Rather, take notice that the discharges from Glencore’s proposed New Range Copper Nickel Mine will flow south of the Laurentian Divide into Lake Superior and the Great Lakes thereby contaminating the drinking water of some 30 to 40 million people with arsenic and mercury. This will be cataclysmic.
Wikipedia has some 27 paragraphs on Glencore’s illegalities and yet there has not been a single legislative or executive public hearing on this. Not one. How is it that an international mining conglomerate that pled guilty to bribery of public officials and market manipulation in a United States Federal District Court and agreed to a fine of $1.1 billion can be so welcome in Minnesota?
What is even more perplexing is that candidates for our state’s leadership positions can plead for more time to think about this. What precisely do they need to think about?
No, the future of our drinking water must be a very public issue and fully aired throughout our state. Certainly, all sides should be able to at least agree on requiring an independent Health Impact Assessment on all endeavors that threaten our dwindling supply of healthy drinking water.
