Posted on Louis V. Galdieri's blog on July 22, 2015
Reprinted here with permission
[Editor's Note: Guest author Louis Galdieri is a filmmaker based in New York City. He and fellow filmmaker Ken Ross visited Houghton, Mich., in October 2013 and screened their documentary 1913 Massacre, about the Italian Hall tragedy. Since then he has posted several articles on his blog about present-day mining issues in the Upper Peninsula. This is the first in a series of articles Galdieri is writing on the Marquette County Road Commission (MCRC) lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concerning County Road 595.]
I’ve just gotten around to reading the complaint filed on July 8th in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, Northern Division, by the Marquette County Road Commission (MCRC) against the EPA.* The complaint alleges that the EPA’s repeated objections to County Road 595 -- that the road will threaten and destroy wetlands, streams and protected wildlife in its way -- are "arbitrary and capricious" and in violation of Section 404(J) of the Clean Water Act.** The Road Commission asks the court to set aside the EPA’s Final Decision against the building of County Road 595, restore Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s authority to permit the road, and bar the EPA from further interference in the matter.
While it may take the court some time to decide whether MCRC v. EPA has any legal merit, the complaint is written to serve other ends as well: political objectives. The complaint is aligned with efforts in Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere, to ease regulations, subvert the legal authority of the EPA and whip up anger against the federal government; and the plaintiffs appear to be connected, through their attorneys, to one of the most powerful Republican party fundraisers and a network of ultra-wealthy political donors.
The MCRC complaint directs ire against a familiar cadre of enemies -- environmental "activists," overreaching federal bureaucrats and the area’s indigenous community; and it pretends to discover a dark conspiracy, in which these groups meet "surreptitiously," write "sarcastically" about mining interests, and collude to block economic development. In fact, it’s often hard to decide whether the arguments and evidence assembled in this complaint are meant to serve as legal fodder or support political posturing. So I thought I would try to sort through them in a short series of posts on the CR 595 lawsuit.
There is the tiresome pretense throughout the complaint that CR 595 would serve as something other than a haul route from the Eagle Mine to the Humboldt Mill, and that the road will benefit the public as much as the mining company. While the mining company says it is committed to making do with current infrastructure, the public clearly deserves some relief: trucks hauling ore on a makeshift route from Eagle have already been involved in a few scary accidents, and it remains a question whether cars can safely share the same road, especially an icy winter road, with ore trucks trying to beat the clock.*** People are understandably concerned, too, about big trucks loaded with sulfide ore barreling through the city of Marquette.
During the May 19, 2015, community meeting held by Eagle Mine in Big Bay, Mich., local residents ask questions about road visibility and safety, especially in winter, with large mining trucks using local public roads. (Video by Keweenaw Now. This video clip is included here with permission of our guest author.)
The public has another cause for grievance, and it makes for some angry foot stomping in the complaint: the MCRC spent millions to prepare for EPA reviews of the CR 595 application and failed repeatedly to win approval. Both time and money were wasted, the complaint says, not due to incompetence, stubbornness or denial, but because the EPA was never going to give the Road Commission a fair hearing. It’s in this connection that the complaint tries to lay out an "anti-mining" conspiracy between the EPA and environmental activists and the indigenous community in the Great Lakes Basin, and where the arguments become specious and contorted.
In subsequent posts I’ll address some of the ways MCRC v. EPA constructs this anti-mining strawman in order to mount a political offensive; and throughout this series, I’m going to be asking whether the "anti-mining" label correctly characterizes the evidence brought by the MCRC. I think it’s fair to say from the outset that it does not accurately represent the priorities and commitments of people and groups concerned about the construction of CR 595. It’s reductive, and turns road skeptics into industry opponents. To be against this particular haul road -- or hold its planners to the letter of the law -- is not necessarily to pit yourself against the entire mining industry.
The anti-mining label deliberately confuses haul-road opposition with opposition to the mining industry in order to coerce people into going along with the haul road or risk losing their livelihood, or at least the jobs and economic prosperity promised when mining projects are pitched. The MCRC complaint goes even further: it conflates mining with economic development -- or reduces all economic development in the region to mining -- and so runs roughshod over the thoughtful arguments of people like Thomas M. Power, who has studied the ways mining can restrict and quash sustainable economic development.****
The anti-mining label fences ordinary people in, distorts and exaggerates their legitimate concerns, and does not recognize that people might come to the CR 595 discussion from all different places. Most don’t arrive as members of some anti-industry coalition; they are fishermen, residents, property owners, teachers, hunters, parents, hikers, snowmobilers, birdwatchers, loggers, parishioners, kayakers, merchants, and so on. Some are many of these things all at once.
The label is fundamentally disrespectful: it refuses to meet people on their own terms and fails to ask what any of the people who oppose CR 595 actually stand for. What do they want for the area? What do they value and love? What do they envision for the future? Where do they have shared interests? Where do they have real differences? How can we work together? The anti-mining label forecloses all those questions. Instead, people are divided. The label demands that everybody take one side or the other (and, as I learned in the course of my work on 1913 Massacre, in the Upper Peninsula that demand has deep historical roots in the labor conflicts of the early twentieth century; but, no worries, in this series of posts I’ll try to stay focused on the present).*****
I have always had trouble with the idea that "anti-" and "pro-" mining positions should govern the way we talk about the environmental regulation of mining. I myself can easily slip into this way of talking. But as I tried to explain in an exchange on this blog with Dan Blondeau of Eagle Mine, that way of thinking impedes and short-circuits important conversations about the ethics of mining.****** Playing the anti-mining card reduces the questions of whether and how mining can be done responsibly -- in this place, by that company, at this time -- to mere pro and contra. It’s a dangerous ruse: instead of identifying risks and addressing responsibilities, it generates social conflict.
Author's Links:
* Click here for the Marquette County Road Commission July 8, 2015, complaint against the EPA.
** Click here for Section 404 of the Clean Water Act.
*** Click here for the UPMatters.com article "Stand U.P." for Co. Rd. 595. Click here for Louis Galdieri's post "A Boom Starts with a Rush," concerning an overturned Eagle ore truck.
**** See the Nov. 6, 2013, Daily Mining Gazette article "Economist presents results of copper mining study." See a report by Thomas Power here. [Editor's Note: See Keweenaw Now's article on Thomas Power's visits in Houghton here.]
***** See http://1913massacre.com/
****** Click here for these comments on Louis Galdieri's post "A Mining Renaissance?"
UPDATE: Part 2 of this series, "The Political Project of MCRC v. EPA, 2," is now posted on Louis Galdieri's blog.
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