By Kathleen Heideman*
Reprinted in part with permission from UP Environment, the Fall-Early Winter 2022 Newsletter of the Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition (UPEC)
Saving the Wild UP
I’d like us to reflect on the grassroots opposition to Eagle Mine, Michigan’s first metallic sulfide mine. Although we could not stop the project, environmental vigilance continues. Eagle Mine, targeting a nickel-copper orebody underneath the Salmon Trout River, was initially owned by Rio Tinto’s Kennecott Minerals, and later sold to Lundin Mining. Eagle Mine was fought for two decades, even as Michigan’s Sulfide Mining regulations were being written.
A scrappy nonprofit called Save the Wild UP formed along the way, to educate the public about the dangers of sulfide mining; they later merged with the Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition to form the Mining Action Group.
Community resistance has included public education, media outreach, peaceful demonstration, occupation of a sacred site at the proposed mine, and litigation by a diverse coalition of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, Yellow Dog Watershed Preserve, National Wildlife Federation, and the Huron Mountain Club landowners.
Eagle Mine is being called a "successful nickel mine" by those who are promoting metallic sulfide mining, but in fact it is a cautionary tale:
- Eagle Mine morphed from an eagle into a spider, blasting miles of underground tunnels to connect to a different orebody that lies beyond the boundary of the permitted mine facility, and 2,000 feet deeper than the original orebody.
- Eagle Mine claimed their treated wastewater would be "cleaner than rainwater" and pose no threat to the aquifer -- but the mine’s septic system has leaked, and bottled drinking water is trucked to the mine site for their employees.
- According to the State of Michigan, Eagle Mine’s wastewater treatment plant has accumulated more than 70 permit violations since operations began; the wastewater treatment plant at their mill has racked up more than 50 permit violations.
- Eagle Mine is currently operating with a groundwater discharge permit that expired three years ago.
- There is no filter on the mine’s vent stack (MVAR), which exhausts tons of particulate matter (including sulfides and heavy metals) into the air over the Yellow Dog Plains. In 2020 public comments to EGLE, the Mining Action Group stated, "The MVAR emissions release sulfides and numerous toxic metals to the surrounding environment, including headwaters of the Salmon Trout and Yellow Dog Rivers. Only one stack test was completed, in the fall of 2014 -- prior to the mine's full operation. While Eagle Mine self-monitors the opacity of these emissions, the MVAR remains unfiltered, and the real emissions (Particulate Matter and constituents) are unquantified. The operation's potential to emit has changed significantly since the PTI (Permit To Install) was issued in 2014, due to the addition of the Eagle East orebody, and extensive new underground development. Modeling is insufficient. We urgently request that a stack test be performed on the Eagle's MVAR, during a period of full operation in both orebodies, in order to accurately capture particulate matter as well as geochemical analysis of emissions."
- Accidental "environmental releases" and worker injuries are increasing.
- The Humboldt Mill’s tailings disposal "facility" -- merely a deep pit lake -- is rapidly filling with toxic mine waste.
Environmentalists are not impressed by Eagle Mine, and insist that Michigan’s first sulfide mine should also be Michigan’s last sulfide mine.
Fighting to Protect the Menominee River
Looking back, let us also applaud the work of our friends and trail-blazers, Ron and Carol Henriksen, who banded together with neighbors and concerned citizens to form the "FRONT FORTY" environmental group in 2003. From the beginning, their mission was to protect the Menominee River from the hazards of sulfide mining -- specifically the Back Forty Mine proposed by Aquila Resources, now owned by Gold Resource Corporation.
Wherever you drive in this area, you’ll see signs, saying "Don’t Undermine the Menominee" and "Save Our Water -- Stop the Mine!"
The Back Forty Mine aims to extract gold, zinc, silver, and copper (as well as lead) from an enormous open pit mine on the bank of the Menominee river. Members of the Front Forty worked tirelessly to educate the public about the dangers of sulfide mining pollution, and risks to the Menominee River. As I understand it, information was spread one fish-fry at a time! At the same time, the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin was working to identify and protect culturally important sites along the Menominee River in an area previously occupied by the Menominee people, with ancient garden beds and burial mounds. Grassroots resistance to the Back Forty project spilled over into Wisconsin, spreading along the Menominee River, and culminating in the formation of the Coalition to SAVE the Menominee River. Both the Menominee Tribe and the Coalition have pursued litigation, with success.
Mining lobbyists claim "Our Western Civilization Depends on Mining." Aquila representatives, interviewed about the Back Forty Project, warned that we need mining in the UP or "we wouldn’t have cars -- we wouldn’t have anything."
They claim mining in the UP is essential, ethical, that it is clean and safe and modern -- they claim that metallic sulfide mines can produce wastewater cleaner than river water! But contrary to these assurances, there is no safe sulfide mine, and no metallic sulfide mine has operated without polluting water. When tailings and waste rock are left on-site, as in the Back Forty mine proposal, acid mine drainage threatens to contaminate freshwater resources in perpetuity.
Enough Is As Good As a Feast
So how do we protect our water from mining? There is an external effort to educate ourselves, to participate and resist, but there is also a private, internal fight -- we must work to curb our own consumption.
Everyone is familiar with the phrase "Less is More," which can be traced back to the 1850s. It echoes a far more ancient phrase, "Enough is as Good as a Feast." Not all-you-can eat, but enough. Enough to sustain life -- enough clean water, enough clean air, enough healthy food, enough wild, undeveloped land to support healthy ecosystems. "Less is more" has become popular as we seek to clear space in our cluttered minds and garages. "Less is more" becomes poignant if we try to picture our ancestors, or those who were living in the Upper Peninsula in the 1800s, making do with a kettle, a frying pan, a knife, an axe, a canoe, fishhooks, needles and thread. What would they think of us and our heaps of gadgets, our degraded lands and polluted rivers, our overflowing closets and basements and garages stuffed full of the surplus "stuff" we don’t really need but can’t seem to get rid of?
It won’t be easy to change. We’ll need to think long and hard before buying more digital gadgets -- doorbell cameras, Alexas, garden lights, dusk-til-dawn lights, trail cams, web cams, go-pro cameras, video drones, gaming consoles, cell phones, laptops, flat-screen TVs, even hybrid and electric vehicles. Each high-tech device is full of promises, and metal; few of the metal components can be easily separated or fully recycled. Our magical, must-have modern conveniences contain copper, nickel, manganese, cobalt, platinum, palladium, zinc, lead, graphite, lithium, and rare earth elements. And since most of these metals can be found in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, mining companies will continue to target our wild lands in search of new metallic deposits. Unless we change ourselves, and work to change the culture, environmental threats will radically increase in the coming years.
No Green Nickel and No Simple Solutions
In 2018, the Federal government published a long list of the "Critical and Strategic Minerals" deemed essential to our economy and national security. The list was expanded in 2022, and now includes both nickel and zinc. Michigan’s State Geologist is working with academic researchers, scouring historic mining documents and drill cores from the 1800s, looking for mine sites where these "critical metals" may have been overlooked by miners in past centuries. Changes urged by the mining industry, at the same time, include:
• STREAMLINING the mine permitting process;
• NATIONAL STOCKPILING of critical minerals;
• IMPROVING the mining industry’s "environmental image"; and
• HIGHLIGHTING "how mining contributes to a CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE."
Hoarding stockpiles of critical metals, fast-tracking environmental permits and greenwashing the reputation of the mining industry? -- these are serious threats. And Michigan’s auto companies are already looking to create supply chain partnerships with individual mining companies, competing to secure a steady feed of "critical metals" as they ramp up production of electric vehicles. According to researcher Brian Roemmele, a typical electric vehicle (EV) battery contains:
• 25 pounds of lithium
• 60 pounds of nickel
• 44 pounds of manganese
• 30 pounds cobalt
• 200 pounds of copper
• 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic.
The fabrication of a single EV battery requires extracting:
• 25,000 pounds of brine to obtain lithium
• 30,000 pounds of ore to obtain cobalt
• 5,000 pounds of ore to obtain nickel
• 25,000 pounds of ore to obtain copper.
In sum, that means disturbing 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust, including waste rock -- to produce a single EV battery!
Obviously, there are no simple solutions, no single technology that can fix our old problems without creating new problems. We must scrutinize our own choices, and consciously resist the propaganda of the mining industry, which invents meaningless phrases like "Green Nickel" and "Sustainable Mining." Metallic mining is not sustainable. Metallic mining degrades our environment and contaminates water. There is no such thing as "green nickel" and all metals are non-renewable resources -- even when they are used to build "renewable energy" devices like electric vehicle batteries or wind turbines.
Going forward, each of us must become a trail blazer, carrying on in the tradition of [those] who’ve guided us this far. For the sake of future generations -- of all species -- we must become stewards of Upper Michigan’s clean water and wild places, making difficult, cautious, well-informed decisions about non-renewable resources. This is the only way we can guarantee a future with more clean water, more Milky Way, more northern lights, more silence, more fish, more owls, more frogs, more wolves. Less mining -- and NO METALLIC SULFIDE MINING -- is the only way we can safeguard Lake Superior or the Menominee River, now and in the century to come.
Editor's Notes:
* Guest author Kathleen Heideman is a member of UPEC's Board of Directors and does research on mining impacts for the Mining Action Group (formerly Save the Wild UP and now part of UPEC).
** Click here to read this entire article, beginning on p. 5 in UP Environment, the Fall-Early Winter 2022 UPEC newsletter.
See also our Sept. 8, 2022, article, "Coalition to SAVE the Menominee River holds Water Celebration featuring Native, non-Native speakers on Back 40 mining project," by Mark Doremus of Back 40 Film and Michele Bourdieu.
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