February has always made me grumpy. Being the pedant I am, I’m irritated by that sorry month’s loss of the first R in its name. The sky is gray and unfriendly most of the month and ice out seems a distant hope.
So it was with fading testiness that I read a letter to the editor of the Echo by Colin Yahnke of Ely. Yahnke encouraged the two sides in the weary mining v anti-mining debate to find a compromise. Now I’ve never met Mr. Yahnke but I agree with his points.
- Communities like Ely are dying. Our schools are making drastic cuts. Nursing homes are struggling to stay open. The hospital’s future is at risk.
- All-year jobs in the area are rare. Seasonal jobs do not pay enough annually to support families.
- The BWCA has hurt not only the families that owned the businesses that were forced out but also those people not hale enough to enjoy a wilderness.
Supporting one of those points, note that I graduated from Memorial High in 1967 in a class of over 130. Today the school population is 491 for 13 grades an average of under 40 per class and dwindling. This school year’s graduating class is projected to be 38 and the incoming kindergarten class is likely to be in the upper teens.
You’ll hear the argument that many small communities in America have shrunk and will continue to shrink. True. But how many of them have one of the world’s largest deposits of desired minerals just over the next hill? A deposit that, when developed, would provide scores of high paying jobs to support families, businesses, institutions, clubs in short, the community.
Yahnke recognizes the situation perfectly and asks those who have resisted this development and those jobs for decades to consider a compromise. He concludes his letter by asking that discussion on this controversy avoid vulgarity.
Avoid vulgarity I will. But knowing the anti-mining mindset, I expect any reasonable compromise one could suggest would be dismissed pre-discussion.
Given my pessimism about that side’s obduracy I’ll propose two compromises that would be my starting points in the negotiations. Two that are as inane as the folded-arm nyets coming from those who fear mining so much that they would willingly sacrifice a lovely community.
Since opposition to the resumption of mining near Ely is due to the location of the proposed mining, separating the two seems like a good compromise to discuss.
1. Move the mining to Hennepin County. I’ve heard opponents ask with exaggerated huffiness, “why would you want to open a mine near the BWCA?” The only answers I can offer is that that’s where the minerals are and the minerals were there first. Why would you create a wilderness there? Moving the mining to Hennepin would solve that proximity problem but might be hard on the economic sustainability (one of my favorite characteristics) of such a mine . Nevertheless, locating a mine there wouldn’t be too hard. Simply condemn and remove everything in a couple of hundred square blocks and start digging. Admittedly, it might be hard to find investors for such an enterprise since the minerals aren’t there.
2. Move the BWCA to Hennepin County. This would be much easier, of course. Minneapolis has long been self-identified as “The City of Lakes.” Show us. Hennepin county has lakes, rivers, trees, and people who could easily access the preserve without worrying about charging their Teslas in Hinckley on the way upNorth. That same removal of buildings, streets, sewers, and the electric grid to create this proposed wilderness wouldn’t be much harder than removing resorts from Basswood Lake was to create the BWCA where it now is. Oh, and changing signs and maps would be fairly easy -- just change the B to an M. Metropolitan Waters Canoe Area.
Any compromise we might offer has about as good a chance as a white shirt at a Columbus Day spaghetti feed, but what the heck, let’s start with these two compromises.
What’s your counter proposal, Antis?
Doug Luthanen grew up in Ely and graduated from Memorial High School in 1967. He wrote a weekly viewpoint column for the Northwest Arkansas Times for four years and is an occasional contributor to The Ely Echo.
