Actually, it's more like 15,000 lakes, but ten-thousand is a nice even number with a long history, which rings. People remember it. I grew up on the shore of Lake Carlos, one of a chain of lakes in west-central Minnesota, where three major ecosystems come together: the Eastern deciduous, the prairie and the northern spruce and pine. I am old enough to remember a comparatively sleepy lake, more fish houses on the ice in winter, than boats in the summer. Boats the last two decades inundating the lake, followed closely by zebra mussels. The usual residential “home” building orgy. They say silver carp are coming, to extinct native fish.
If that isn't insult enough, the
polluting of the sacred waters of this state, a Canadian company
named Poly-Met wants to open a copper-nickel sulfide mine, in
northern Minnesota, not far from the beloved Boundary Waters
Wilderness. There is a boom-worthy amount of copper-nickel, they say,
and there are a dozen corporations or more, many of them
international, lining up behind Poly-Met, to pick at the carcass of
the iron-ore Boom, that went mostly bust.
The trouble is, these copper-nickel
deposits are tucked in sulfide, which turns into sulphuric acid in
contact with air and water, leeching thereafter, wherever water will
go. The waters have heretofore been more pristine, in the northern
part of the state, less population, less top soil, less farming.
What we know is, and everyone involved
acknowledges, including Polymet, it is something like a 20-year potential boom. Water
flowing from these sites, containing sulphuric acid and heavy metals, has to be
filtered by reverse osmosis. If you have ever bought a gallon of such
water, you know it is something like $2/gallon (and they don't start
with sulphuric acid in the base.) The trouble again is, this would
have to go on for something like 200-500 years.
Five-hundred years is 25 generations.
More than twice as long as America has been a Nation. Anyone care to
ask what they have to say about filtering sulphuric acid from
a few hundred million gallons of water from a dozen or more sites,
every year, for 450 years? I can say that I speak for them, when I
say they would rather not. They tell me, most of that time, they
won't be able to. Even if they could, why should they have to? Who
are you....
Polymet readily acknowledges, that
mining will take place for 20 years, and filtering of waters will
have to take place for 200 years, in their recently released
environmental assessment. You can be sure if they are saying 200, it
will be longer. What poverty of care for the earth or even our
children or their children, we show, what delusion, to take seriously
such a corporation when they assert they will be around even 40 years
from now, to manage their mess, 20 years after income from the mine
has ceased to flow? What madness is this, to think that after 40
years when all the principle players in this are dead or dying, the
people in the midst of life then will be happy to clean up, for the
whole of their lives, OUR mess?
Not that I am surprised, this being up
for debate, those with the most to gain of course making no mention
of such generational responsibility. “Why would we pollute this
place? We live here?” False premises – you ARE going to pollute
the place, as soon as you start drilling, and it will not stop until
the whole thing is naturally played out, 500 years after you open
that wound. You won't and really can't stop that, any more than
anyone is going to remove the zebra mussel from Lake Carlos. If you
are going to move boats from one infested lake to a clean one in a
different watershed, you can't stop the spread. If you don't mine you
won't pollute.
But what does anyone expect, in a state
where we are holding nuclear material by the hundred ton, on a
flood-plain island in the Mississippi River (Prairie Island), if we
are talking generational injustice? Anyone care to ask what posterity
would have to say about that?
Everybody of course knows this is
WRONG. But when money is involved, nothing is sacred, and nothing
else matters. The only thing in the country that is truly holy, is
the Dollar (but even that now, we have defiled.)
All of this against the bank-drop of
the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic Partnership trade pacts,
negotiated in secret, attempted to be fast-tracked into law without
consulting Congress, by the Obama Administration. If the rumors about
these trade pacts are true, mom who's toddler jumps in the creek and
is burned by sulphuric acid, can go talk to that corporate tribunal
in Brussels, if she has a problem (or presumably, similar corporate
minions stateside.) Brussels tribunal is not going to support local
concerns, over Intl corporate “persons.” Leeching sulphuric acid
into the waters will be effectively legal (just as it is currently
legal that the Feds can disappear the protesters, if they deem
them threats to “national security”. Seriously, is there a
greater threat to national security now, than corporations, central and TBTF banks, gov run amok?)
But then, if the rumors are true and
America loses reserve-currency status of the Dollar, people will be
begging for economic progress even if that means sulphuric acid in
the waters, and all of this will be fast-tracked, to hell with
anything but making it like it was when credit flowed in the streets.
But you can't go back. You can't get
the zebra mussel out of Lake Carlos once it's there, you can't get
back the reserve-currency status of the Dollar once you've lost it,
you can't really fix Prairie Island nuclear facility once it has gone
critical, and you can't really prevent sulphuric acid from leeching
into the waters once you've opened up a sulfide mine.
Which is why these nickel-copper
sulfide mines cannot open. And there is a chance yet, to prevent
them. The State of MN is taking comments, holding meetings. Please, let everyone
know about it. Use every channel. Be like water with the message.
This sulphuric acid could leech into the Great Lakes, so this is an
issue for the entire watershed, on both sides of the Intl border.
This can be stopped. It is only one thing, in a long list of
grievances, increasing pressure on the ecosystems of the earth, but
it's an important one. If we defile the waters of the Land of
Ten-Thousand Lakes, this way, what hope is there, after the
indifference that surrounds the Fukushima debacle, that this will not
cascade, this defiling, everywhere on earth, everywhere in America? There is already a very lengthy list of lands that remain defiled, that remain poisonous, that next to nothing is being done about.
Human beings are 70% water. What we
taint the waters with, we become. Treating the waters as sacred, we
heal Life.
There are 25 generations, waiting.
Speak up.
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