Angels and Assholes #11…2016 - Mixed Nuts

Short Version

If you feel you have a social conscience, please take a moment to read and share if you feel like it.

Mixed Nuts

Seven weeks in paradise coming to an end. The entire family (all 21 made it) for ten heavenly days and two visits by friends. A couple days to get excited about seeing family, again, and savor the beauty and serenity of this small, friendly Bahamian cay before we leave.

What I don’t look forward to is returning to the dirty world of mining and politics. In my mind there is no way allowing a foreign conglomerate, that does not have a single mine (I could cite enumerable sources) NOT polluting, to mine in or near the Boundary Waters Canoe area is okay. It is ridiculous to even consider. As Cook County (the county the proposed mine is in) Commissioner Frank Moe stated simply: “It’s [the BWCA] the most popular wilderness in the United States. It’s ludicrous to put those things at risk for 10-20 years for a few hundred jobs.”

The mining will create polluted sludge that will need to be somehow contained…maybe forever. The mining company’s modeling only goes out 500 years! Absurd to think that it won’t be our money cleaning up after this company plunders our land and disappears with the money. There is zero chance this mine won’t pollute. The mining company admits that! When it does, not only will it threaten some of the most pristine waters in the world, but the St. Louis River which runs into Lake Superior on its way to the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mississippi on its way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Already political blackmail is starting: if Cook County opposes the mine, previous funds may (?) be withdrawn, etcetc.

Mining has always been a dirty asshole business including the greed-driven politics surrounding it. I understand laid-off mine workers not having perspective when they’re out of work. But we need perspective to stop this ‘culture of greed at any cost.’ I could go on and on about how this mine is un- equivocally wrong on so many levels. The potential cost is WAY too great to ignore. It does not only affect the livelihood of the thousands of people living in and supporting the BWCA and surrounding recreational area, it will affect drinking water and all of us eventually. There is no doubt in my mind this mine is ALL WRONG. If you feel we are subjugating our values to the monetary gain of wealthy corporations destroying the earth (us actually) do what you can to oppose this example of cancerous greed.