More of the same never solved a problem

An excerpt from an email sent by our Republican congressman this morning:

During the hearing we heard about the challenges we have in accessing our mineral resources and the harm done to our local economy by project delays. The simple truth is that the Iron Range thrives when we’re mining to our full potential, and we desperately need to get shovels in the ground.

However, if we’re going to unlock the full potential of our resources and secure our domestic mineral supply chains, we need the political will to implement permitting reform. This hearing provided a platform for my constituents to further inform my colleagues about the challenges we face to getting shovels in the ground and securing our mineral supply chains.

And now that my colleagues have seen up close the important role northern Minnesota can play in securing our nation’s mineral supply chains, I know they will help me advocate for the Iron Range in Washington.

 

can mining and clean water coexist?

Photo by J. Harrington

Apparently the good congressman is not an avid student of either history or real progress. One long time resident of the Iron Range, Aaron Brown, recently wrote that

If Minnesota is to maintain the so-called “world’s best” environmental policies regarding mining, and also fair wages and collective bargaining for its workers, it has to embrace its most important assets: expertise and quality of life. Right now, some of the best minds in mining work in Minnesota. Our education and health care systems are some of the best in the nation. These factors, taken together, could make northern Minnesota a hub for development of green steel, iron-air batteries, and innovation in sulfide mitigation.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening in northern Sweden, to the tune of tens of thousands of new jobs tied to these very technologies.  (Hope for the Iron Range economy, but we must put the past behind us)

Decades before new options for green steel making or related innovations became possibilities, another Iron Ranger captured the very real problems of an economy based on extraction of natural resources. Eventually non-renewable resources will all be extracted. What then? In the meantime, life is like a roller coaster for families dependent on extraction. Shouldn’t we want better for our neighbors to the North? Shouldn’t they?

North Country Blues

Written by: Bob Dylan 

Come gather ’round friends
And I’ll tell you a tale
Of when the red iron pits ran plenty
But the cardboard filled windows
And old men on the benches
Tell you now that the whole town is empty

In the north end of town
My own children are grown
But I was raised on the other
In the wee hours of youth
My mother took sick
And I was brought up by my brother

The iron ore poured
As the years passed the door
The drag lines an’ the shovels they was a-humming 
’Til one day my brother
Failed to come home
The same as my father before him

Well a long winter’s wait
From the window I watched
My friends they couldn’t have been kinder And my schooling was cut
As I quit in the spring
To marry John Thomas, a miner

Oh the years passed again
And the givin’ was good
With the lunch bucket filled every season
What with three babies born
The work was cut down
To a half a day’s shift with no reason

Then the shaft was soon shut
And more work was cut
And the fire in the air, it felt frozen 
’Til a man come to speak
And he said in one week
That number eleven was closin’

They complained in the East
They are paying too high
They say that your ore ain’t worth digging 
That it’s much cheaper down
In the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing

So the mining gates locked
And the red iron rotted
And the room smelled heavy from drinking 
Where the sad, silent song
Made the hour twice as long
As I waited for the sun to go sinking

I lived by the window
As he talked to himself
This silence of tongues it was building 
Then one morning’s wake
The bed it was bare
And I’s left alone with three children

The summer is gone
The ground’s turning cold
The stores one by one they’re a-foldin’
My children will go
As soon as they grow
Well, there ain’t nothing here now to hold them

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