Living history
It is hard to find a difference between the most recent mining controversy and the one we lived through in the 1990s.
By
Spencer Black
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The assembly bill did not reduce any environmental standards, and this is simply false. The defeat of the bill was due entirely to partisan politics which included one Republican who didn't get his majority leader position and was kept from offering an amendment to Walkers budget repair bill. The county of Iron is now busily collecting recall signatures for our own senator, Bob Jauch, who failed to represent the interests of the area.
All economy is ultimately based on taking resources from the earth and transforming them into products useful to people. This is the only way that physical wealth is created and a wealthy society is better able to care for the environment than a poor one. If the mine was run entirely by robots, it would still be a major asset to the area and the state. You simply cannot have the distribution of wealth until you have the creation of wealth, and our society is suffering as a whole due to the lack of this basic realization.
-Gary Glonek | Montreal, Wi | March 25, 2012
"The assembly bill did not reduce any environmental standards, and this is simply false."
It also did not add any environmental standards or provide adequate oversight to a mining activity that is unprecedented in our state. I agree with the tribes when they say to the mining companies, "show me a clean mine...and they never can."
Also, "You simply cannot have the distribution of wealth until you have the creation of wealth.."
Our problem is not one of "wealth" being non-existent. It is that it is in the hands of a tiny fraction of the now cliched 1% who *do* seem to have the magical ability to make money from money without producing what you call "real" wealth or anything else useful to life.
Raping the Earth is not a good solution to our problems nor the path to a better life. When will people realize that humans are only one "nation" among many nations of being that we share this living planet with and that all life is a interdependent wholeness?
-John Davey | Kendall, WI | March 25, 2012
Semantics, Gary. Reduce and exempt. The bill exempted taconite mining from regulation under the current restrictions. And as I saw & heard 2 geologists testify the tailing piles would produce sulfuric acid in the millions of gallons which would pollute the Bad & Tyler Forks Rivers and thus Lake Superior which does not regenerate/renew itself for decades. Also destroyed would be The Kakagon slew which is a uniquely important wetland to the wild rice which sustains the Bad River Ojibwe people both as a food source, a cash crop and their very reason for living on Lake Superior in Ashland county. Partisan politics? No genocide!
- Jim Limbach | Stevens Point | March 31, 2012
As Mr. Glonek suggested, it is clear that the ecology of this continent was in a complete shambles prior to the arrival of European wealth, since the people who lived here before then were too poor to be able to maintain the natural systems we work so hard to support in our modern industrial economy.
-Dan Roesinger | Hurley, WI | April 1, 2012
