Appointed boards don't need campaign contributions

Snow showers mixed with rain. 34℉. A not atypical Spring day in the North Country. I told myself that the earth and the plants and the flowing waters needed the moisture. As the Better Half and I drove around the county getting some errands done, we saw quite a few swans, some in the air, others attracted (decoyed?) into a field of corn stubble by several wind-blown, white plastic bags now caught on the stubble stalks. The joke about Minnesota having two seasons, winter and road construction, is losing its humor, or, maybe it's just me losing my sense of humor.

The Better Half is fixin' beef stew for supper which doesn't seem as if it should be seasonable less than a week before May 1. Once again the North Country is proving how correct Thomas Stearns was when he wrote that April is the cruelest month. At  least the legislative session is winding down. With lots of effort and good will and more common sense than has been common for some time, we may yet keep our North Country from becoming a Waste Land.

There's been lots written and spoken these past weeks about justice and juries and appeals to a "higher court." A jurist has complained about members of the legislative and executive branches showing insufficient respect for "the rule of law." And yet, laws and their rules are made and interpreted by human beings, including deeply flawed specimens of the race. Much of the rule of law in higher courts is based on the collective wisdom of judges reviewing the collective decision of a jury and the individual decisions of a judge. In the end, significant judicial decisions, and dissents, are written with rationales and justifications. Much of that is lacking in many legislative processes, although there are counter examples such as the history of the Environmental Policy Act. In Minnesota, it's relatively easy to find news coverage of the legislature's elimination of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's Citizen Board some years ago, but try to find a real legislative rationale other than "no longer needed."

In our opinion, what the legislature actually did with  the elimination of an independent citizens' board was contribute mightily to the successful regulatory capture of our "Pollution Control Agency" which ultimately resulted in the contentious "permitting" of projects such as NorthMet, many of whose permits are failing judicial review, followed by a report of the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Inspector General which found that:

[EPA] Region 5 did not address all CWA and NPDES regulations during its review of a draft NPDES permit for a mine and processing facilities to be built by PolyMet Mining Inc. along the St. Louis River in northeastern Minnesota. Despite its concerns about the NPDES permit, Region 5 did not provide written comments to Minnesota, contrary to the region’s standard operating procedures and per common EPA practice.In addition, Region 5 repeatedly declined to make a formal determination under CWA § 401(a)(2) regarding whether discharges from the PolyMet NorthMet project may impact the quality of waters within the jurisdiction of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, whose tribal lands are 125 miles downstream from the site of the PolyMet NorthMet project. The tribe was therefore unable to avail itself of the NPDES permit objection process set forth in CWA §401(a)(2).

For a state in which pro-mining politicians like to cite the "world class stringency" of its environmental regulations, one of the first things to do to make sure projects are approved speedily and efficiently is to eliminate the guard dogs at the chicken house, so to speak. Regulations that aren't followed aren't worth a damn except to CYA. For the next legislative election, citizens who care about the environment, and their children's health, would be well advised to make support for bringing back an independent Citizens Board to oversee the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency staff a critical criterion in choosing who to support for House and Senate races, even if you've never eaten Minnesota's official state grain, you might want to be able to safely drink the water, eat the fish and breathe the air. At least do it for the kids!

The Waste Carpet

By William Matthews

No day is right for the apocalypse,

if you ask a housewife in Talking

Rock, Georgia, or maybe Hop River,

Connecticut. She is opening a plastic bag.

A grotesque parody of the primeval muck

starts oozing out. And behold,

the plastic bag is magic;

there is no closing it. Soap

in unsoftened water, sewage, asbestos

coiled like vermicelli, Masonite shavings,

a liquefied lifetime subscription

to The New York Times delivered all at once.

Empty body stockings, limp, forlorn,

like collapsed lungs. A blithering slur

of face creams, an army of photocopies

travelling on its stomach of acronyms,

tooth paste tubes wrung rigid and dry.

Also, two hundred and one tons

of crumpled bumpers wrapped in insurance

claims, slag, coal dust, plastic trimmings,

industrial excrementa. Lake Erie is returning

our gifts.

       At first she thought she had won

something. Now it slithers through the house,

out windows, down the street, spreading

everywhere but heading, mostly, west.

Maybe heading is the wrong word,

implying shape and choice. It took

the shape of the landscape

it rippled across like the last blanket.

And it went west because the way lay open

once again: not the same fecund rug

the earth grew when white people scraped

their first paths to the Pacific

across the waves of the inland grasses.

Outside Ravenswood, West Virginia,

abandoned cars shine in the sun

like beetlebacks. The ore it took

to make the iron it took to make the steel

it took to make the cars, that ore

would remember the glaciers if it could.

Now comes another grinding, but not—

thanks to our new techniques—so slow.

The amiable cars wait stilly in their pasture.

Three Edsels forage in the southeast corner

like bishops of a ruined church.

There are Fords and Dodges, a Mercury

on blocks, four Darts and a Pierce Arrow,

a choir of silenced Chevrolets.

And, showing their lapsed trademarks

and proud grilles to a new westward

expansion, two Hudsons, a LaSalle

and a DeSoto.

       I was hoping to describe

the colors of this industrial autumn—

rust, a faded purple like the dusty

skin of a Concord grape, flaking moss-

green paint with primer peeking

blandly through, the garish macho reds

insurance companies punish, the greys

(opaque) and silvers (bright), the snob colors

(e.g. British Racing Green), the two-tone

combinations time will spurn like roadkill

(1957: pink and grey), cornflower

blue, naval blue, royal blue, stark blue, true

blue, the blacker blue the diver sees

beneath him when he plumbs thirty feet—

but now they are all covered,

rolling and churning in the last

accident, like bubbles in lava.

And now my Cincinnati—the hills

above the river, the lawn that drained

toward Ricwood Ave. like a small valley of uncles,

the sultry river musk that slid

like a compromising note through my bedroom window—

and indeed all Cincinnati seethes. The vats

at Proctor & Gamble cease their slick

congealing, and my beloved birthplace

is but another whorl of dirt.

Up north near Lebanon and Troy and Rosewood,

the corn I skulked in as a boy

lays back its ears like a shamed dog.

Hair along the sow’s spine rises.

The Holstein pivots his massive head

toward where the barn stood; the spreading stain

he sees is his new owner.

What we imagined was the fire-storm,

or, failing that, the glacier.

Or we hoped we’d get off easy,

losing only California.

With the seismologists and mystics

we say the last California ridge

crumble into the ocean.

And we were read with elegies:

O California, sportswear

and defense contracts, gasses that induce

deference, high school girls

with their own cars, we wanted

to love you without pain.

O California, when you were moored to us

like a vast splinter of melon,

like a huge and garish gondola,

then we were happier, although

we showed it by easy contempt.

But now you are lost at sea,

your cargo of mudslides and Chardonnays

lost, the prints of the old movies

lost, the thick unlighted candles of the redwoods

snuffed in advance. On the ocean floor

they lie like hands of a broken clock.

O California, here we come,

quoting Ecclesiastes,

ruinous with self-knowledge.

Meanwhile, because the muck won’t stop

for lamentation, Kansas succumbs.

Drawn down by anklets of DDT,

the jayhawk circles lower and lower

while the sludge moils and crests.

Now we are about to lose our voices

we remember that tomorrow is our echo.

O the old songs, the good days:

bad faith and civil disobedience,

sloppy scholarship and tooth decay.

Now the age of footnotes is ours.

Ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid.

While the rivers thickened and fish

rose like vomit, the students of water

stamped each fish with its death date.

Don’t let a chance like this go by,

they thought, though it went by

as everything went by—towers

of water flecked by a confetti

of topsoil, clucked tongues, smug

prayers. What we paid too much for

and too little attention to,

our very lives, all jumbled

now and far too big in aggregate

to understand or mourn, goes by,

and all our eloquence places its

weight on the spare word goodbye.

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