Does Minnesota really want to win a race to the bottom?

This has been, and still is, a very interesting month for Minnesota's mining stakeholders, with, no doubt, more to come:

• The Department of Natural Resources placed on public notice a draft Permit to Mine for the proposed PolyMet project.


• The Pollution Control Agency has announced public meetings to be held on draft permits for PolyMet's air and water discharges and water quality certification, and scheduled hearings but the draft permits, according to the MPCA web site as this is being written, aren't yet available for public review. (What the hell kind of a process is that?)


• The Pollution Control Agency has had its proposed "new and improved" water quality standards for sulfate disapproved by the Chief Administrative Law Judge.


• The decision upholding the Winona County prohibition on fracking sands mining is being appealed by a prospective sand mining company.

water that starts clean here

Photo by J. Harrington

Minnesota's permitting and project approval processes were developed before the state was faced with the well-known risks associated with copper-nickel mining or the disruptive implications of mining fracking sand and shipping it out of state. These, and other factors, are among the reasons we continue to advocate for a more inclusive and transparent process that can address increasingly contentious issues affecting any social license to mine in Minnesota.

We have, it seems to us, major imbalances between who benefits and who does or may suffer from the success, or failure, of these projects. We may. or may not, have some natural resources that can be developed with limited risks to people and places we value. Have we identified any such places? Do we have a framework to assess tradeoffs? Not an effective one as far as we can see. Do we have a reasonable and responsible means or method to weight the impacts of a proposed project in one watershed versus another? Issues like this appear to be a noteworthy aspect of why MPCA's sulfate standard was recently disapproved.

should still be clean when it gets here

Photo by J. Harrington

Elsewhere in the world, the mining sector is engaged in more comprehensive conversations with stakeholders about social license and community benefits. Minnesota, meanwhile, in attractiveness to mining investors, ranks below a number of other areas that hold comparable natural resources but also have what may be even more rigorous environmental requirements to be met. Isn't it time for Minnesota to start such conversations instead of trying to lower our standards to attract risky projects?

Draft of a Landscape

Juliet Patterson

after Paul Celan

              The hare’s
              dust pelt

against the juniper’s sky
              now

in the eye uncovered
a question clear
in the wing
              of the day and the predator
that writes
the animal’s luck, too.
Where is tomorrow?
Will tomorrow be beautiful?
Someone will answer.
Someone will remember
that dustcolored
              tragedy, incidental, belonging
to no one, arriving before
as a flock of cranes
protracted in a long descent
winging blind
to field—the days
are beautiful.

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