8/13/2013 Lughnasa Honey Moon
To the EPA meeting in Chicago to discuss sulfide mining in the BWCA:
You may not have been to the Boundary Waters, a magical part of America the Beautiful, filled with lakes and rocks and fish and silence. If not, I hope you get the chance to go sometime in the future. There you will find rest as well as a place to celebrate the wonder that is our planet.
Would you locate a landfill so that it drains its waters into the baptismal fount of a Catholic cathedral? Would you site a noisy factory with its emissions of smoke and toxins next to a spot dedicated to meditation? Of course not.
The argument from Polymet and other would be miners of copper and nickel and magnesium locked in sulfides near the Boundary Waters is that their technology will not pollute the three watersheds that send water from its site to Hudson’s Bay, the Pacific and the Atlantic. The trouble is that there has never, NEVER, been a technology that prevented sulfuric acid runoff from these kinds of mines. Never.
Can we trust them when the EPA says this claim is suspect?
