Jobs? YES! Environment? YES! How?

Before we forget, since it's clouded in again and is starting to snow a little, today we were/are grateful we got to see the sun.  We're also grateful that Ron Madore at MinnPost did the research and wrote the kind of piece we've been contemplating since Tuesday, It’s hard to find much of a ‘green wave’ in this year’s voting on ballot initiatives.

We were particularly interested in, and disappointed by, the two initiatives relative to mining:

Montana voters rejected a measure to deny permits for hardrock mines that lack features “sufficient to prevent the pollution of water without the need for perpetual treatment.”...

Mining interests in Alaska, meanwhile, helped to beat back a protective measure for salmon streams by a nearly 2-1 margin.

Meanwhile, here in our own portion of the North Country, the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, Duluth for Clean Water, Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, and WaterLegacy to request that the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency suspend permits for the PolyMet proposal until a court rules on whether the state should consider the possibility of a larger mine plan in its environment review.

a path is made by walking

Photo by J. Harrington

And if it's possible for a project to be even more contentious than the PolyMet NorthMet mine proposal, a federal judge has ruled that the Keystone XL pipeline needs a more thorough environmental review.

All of the preceding, and numerous other issues, have us again contemplating whether society can't devise a better, more efficient and effective process for developing and permitting, and monitoring the operations of projects that have the potential for significant environmental impacts. That's getting to be almost everything these days. We aren't opposed to development. We are opposed to the wrong kind of development in the wrong place at the wrong time based on decisions with greater proportions of politics than science and equity.

Let's start with four basic principles from what's known as The Natural Step:

"In a sustainable society nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentrations of …

1. … substances extracted from the Earth's crust;
2. … substances produced as a byproduct of society ;
3. … degradation by physical means;...and in that society...
4. people are not subject to structural obstacles to: health; influence; competence; impartiality and meaning-making."^[3](Missimer, et al.,2015)

The first principle clearly relates to mining. Natural Step Canada has a presentation that begins to answer the question "Is there Mining in a Sustainable Society?" The presentation dates from 2013 and there have been additional tools developed since then. We'll consider some of those tools another day. They help to address where, if at all, mining should be allowed.

any water pollution from PolyMet would end up here, in Lake Superior

Photo by J. Harrington

We're back at this theme because we are starting to think that the way many of the issues and questions have been raised about pipelines and mines and tar sands and protecting the environment in which we live have been framed in ways that almost beg for negative responses. We don't believe that we have to keep repeating the same failed approaches. Thus, we're back to the basic "It's not a question of jobs versus the environment. It's how do we have both!"

Milton by Firelight

By Gary Snyder

Piute Creek, August 1955

“O hell, what do mine eyes

          with grief behold?”

Working with an old

Singlejack miner, who can sense

The vein and cleavage

In the very guts of rock, can

Blast granite, build

Switchbacks that last for years

Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves.   

What use, Milton, a silly story

Of our lost general parents,

          eaters of fruit?

The Indian, the chainsaw boy,

And a string of six mules

Came riding down to camp

Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.   

Sleeping in saddle-blankets

Under a bright night-sky

Han River slantwise by morning.   

Jays squall

Coffee boils

In ten thousand years the Sierras

Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.   

Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees.

No paradise, no fall,

Only the weathering land

The wheeling sky,

Man, with his Satan

Scouring the chaos of the mind.

Oh Hell!

Fire down

Too dark to read, miles from a road   

The bell-mare clangs in the meadow   

That packed dirt for a fill-in   

Scrambling through loose rocks   

On an old trail

All of a summer’s day.

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