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How to Destroy a River and Create an Environmental Catastrophe in One Fell Swoop
How to Destroy a River and Create an Environmental Catastrophe in One Fell Swoop
The St Louis River of Northern Minnesota will be as Vulnerable to Annihilation as were Brazil’s Rio Doce and Paraobeba Rivers(pictured below) – if the PolyMet Project is Allowed to Proceed
(Trying to understand why every Brazilian mining catastrophe has been blacked-out by the Duluth News-Tribune)
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The photos and videos in this supplemental Duty to Warn column need to be viewed by everybody living downstream from the proposed PolyMet mine tailings lagoon – scheduled to be built near Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota, a St Louis River river-town in northeast Minnesota. Hoyt Lakes is the northernmost of the 12 river towns on the St Louis River estuary which empties into Lake Superior, the least polluted of the Great Lakes. Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world (by surface area) and it contains 10% of the entire world’s remaining fresh water.
Tens of thousands of people live and fish and harvest wild rice and depend on the fresh water that is provided by the St Louis River estuary. If what happened to the permanently polluted river in Brazil a week ago happens to the proposed PolyMet tailings lagoon, those 12 towns and their people will be severely – and permanently – impacted. Some of the towns may be destroyed and unknown numbers of people will be drowned, injured or displaced.
As has been described many times in Duluth’s alternative news-weekly paper (the Duluth Reader but, significantly, NEVER by the Duluth News-Tribune earthen-walled tailings lagoon dams always leak but many of them totally collapse with devastating results. (Please study the photos below and be certain to click on the links to the 5 important videos below to fully understand why the PolyMet dam is so dangerous and cannot be allowed to be built.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
On Pretending That What’s Happening Isn’t Actually Happening
On Pretending That What’s Happening Isn’t Actually Happening
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| “Unbelievable Winter Color” by Albert H. Krehbiel Des Plaines River, 1928 |
Deep Winter Ruminations
In December I found myself sliding into a state of extreme unwillingness to take on new projects, to continue work on those in hand, to write, or do much of anything else, really, at work or at home. I found myself prodded awake in the night by worries about global warming, the tides of war and migration, the ramifications of random, dismal environmental facts come upon during the course of a day’s work, or of social justice problems encountered in the news and on the streets of Chicago; about any of which I can do very little to help. There were too many meetings with environmental groups, and no time for walks. I could not look at a tree without wondering how its species would fare in coming, climate disrupted years. I had reached a state of incipient burnout.
Thus, for a few weeks–a month and more, actually–after the solstice, I went into a state of semi-retreat. I did this by allowing myself to hope that COP21 would help bend the climate curve, and by pretending that our ongoing environmental catastrophe, of which climate change, is, after all, only a pernicious, deadly symptom, isn’t happening. I also attempted to pay less attention to the ever increasing spate of bad news, from war, to race relations, to migration, to the grim presidential race—and on and on and on, much of which is at least partly related to said catastrophe, with some industrial civilizational collapse, resource depletion and overpopulation thrown in.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
