Bad shit? Ya betcha. Wikipedia, here. But what has that to do with the BWCA and Voyageurs? That was then. That was there. We are here, and the Copperheads did sneak in the end of session special session mischief, and, don't they and Mr. Daudt know best?
Tailing basin not equal to toxic waste, they passed legislation saying so and Dayton willingly signed it, while touting buffer strips on ag lands. Jobbing for jobs, done and Bakk went fishing ["watching the bobber" presumably his cabin lake and lakefront is distant enough, so what's his worry?]
After Sen. Majority Leader Tom Bakk traded his suit for jeans, got in his car and headed north at 6 a.m. Saturday following adjournment of the special session, he said he became incredibly emotional.
“You’ve been so wrapped up in everything for five and half months you can’t help but reflect on what happened, what didn’t happen and the things you could have done differently to get maybe a little better outcome. Because it can always be better,” he said.
Three and a half hours later, when he arrives at his home in Cook, he’s emotionally exhausted.
The leader of the Minnesota Senate must be deep in the trenches of the session and he said he’s emotionally and physically exhausted.
He then heads for some time at the lake cabin.
“I can get away from the phones, the mail, and just watch a bobber for a couple days,” he said.
On Monday, Bakk described the recent session of the Legislature as really tough. There’ll be some disappointments, but some good things that happened, too, he said.
A crock? Ya betcha.
Would the esteemed gentleman have fished the Fraser, after Mount Polley? Unlikely? Well, this after all is Bakk, so we might speculate either way, with Bakk.
Moving on, connecting dots, Grand Rapids Herald Review:
http://www.grandrapidsmn.com/opinion/sportsmen-question-polymet-s-sulfide-mining-eis/article_142b34b0-1ff8-11e5-8acc-1beabada53e1.html
posted online yesterday, for sportsmen-anglers to ponder, stating:
Opinion: Sportsmen question PolyMet’s sulfide mining EIS
Posted: Wednesday, July 1, 2015 8:50 am
By David Lien Minnesota Backcountry Hunters & Anglers
During June PolyMet Mining’s preliminary final Environmental Impact Statement (PFEIS) was completed (for its proposed sulfide mine in northeastern Minnesota), and PolyMet’s CEO Jon Cherry said: “The PFEIS confirms that the state’s first copper-nickel mine can responsibly produce … metals in a manner that is protective of natural resources and remediates legacy environmental impacts from historic mining operations.”[1] What he, of course, failed to mention is that the company PolyMet is using to design its tailings disposal facility, Knight Piesold, is the same outfit that designed Mount Polley’s tailings dam.
In case you’re not familiar with the story, on August 5, 2014, some 6.6 billion gallons of toxic mine tailings sluiced into the headwaters of the Fraser River in British Columbia. Mt. Polley Mine, until that point, was held up as the industry standard—a shining example of how large-scale sulfide mining can coexist with the environment. Instead, it proved the opposite, that no large-scale sulfide mine in history has operated without laying waste to surrounding waterways and watersheds. Now history looks to repeat itself in northeastern Minnesota.[2]
Like PolyMet, Imperial Metals, the mining company responsible for the Mount Polley tailings disaster, claimed it was using modern technology. But the PolyMet tailings disposal design is similar to that for Mount Polley, and British Columbia’s Report on Mount Polley Tailings Storage Facility Breach concluded: “The dominant contribution to the failure resides in the design.”[3]
The way these sulfide mines operate, the desired metal makes up about 1 percent of materials mined. So for every ton of copper that they extract, 99 tons of toxic waste is produced, which must be stored in perpetuity.[4] What PolyMet’s CEO doesn’t want Minnesotans to grasp is that they’re essentially putting a large toxic time bomb in the headwaters of one of the wildest, most water-rich regions in North America.
Adding insult to injury, Cherry says the project will create 360 jobs.[5] Just to put that number in perspective, there are currently 160,000 jobs in the region.[6] Of those jobs, some 18,000 are dependent upon the wild public lands and sky-tinted waterways found in northeastern Minnesota’s greater Superior National Forest region.[7]
Remember, even if there isn’t an outright tailings basin failure, PolyMet’s initial draft Environmental Impact Statement predicted that their “West Pit” would fill with water and overflow into the Partridge River 45 years after the mine’s closure.[8] Hence, PolyMet is proposing that we trade a few hundred short-term, unsustainable sulfide mining jobs for potentially thousands of long-term jobs already employing hard-working Minnesotans.
[...] David Lien, of Colorado Springs, Colo., formerly of Grand Rapids, Minn., is a MDHA Life Member, co-chairman of the Minnesota Backcountry Hunters & Anglers (www.backcountryhunters.org) and author of Hunting for Experience: Tales of Hunting & Habitat Conservation. During 2014 he was recognized by Field & Stream as a “Hero of Conservation.”[10]
[highlighting added] The item is online, the footnotes are online, it is all there; and if there was Mount Polley, and common clown designing up North, go figure.
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Opening image sources, here, here and here, respectively.
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UPDATE: This google, with top online return links, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, this pdf and MinnPost, here. See also, here and here.