Below the Surface on the Yellow Dog Plains

View from Eagle Rock. By Kari Lydersen ~Enlarge

By Kari Lydersen

On a blustery gray day in late February, I stood in deep snow on Eagle Rock in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with Chauncey Moran, otherwise known as River Walker, gazing at an expense of conifers, wetlands and streams leading to Lake Superior about 10 miles away.

Eagle Rock is where Kennecott, a subsidiary of the international mining giant Rio Tinto, wants to tunnel into the earth to a nickel ore body half a mile away, directly under the headwaters of the Salmon Trout River. Reporting a forthcoming story for Earth Island Journal, I already knew many of the facts about the ongoing battle over the mine. But I wanted to immerse myself in the place, to get a deeper sense of the magic that UP residents seem to feel when talking about their home.

For almost a decade, Moran and other locals have been fighting Kennecott’s plans, fearing that the proposed mine will tear up one of the last forested areas in the region and contaminate springs, tributaries and Lake Superior itself with acid mine drainage caused by the disturbance of the sulfide-containing ore which holds the nickel, copper and other metals Kennecott wants to harvest.  

Kennecott officials have described the mine as an almost surgical operation, promising the extraction  would be finished, the area reclaimed and the waste rock cleanly disposed of – sans acid mine drainage – within a matter of two decades. A surgical procedure also came to mind as Moran described how Kennecott clear-cut the trees around Eagle Rock to do exploratory drilling some years ago. Trees have since been replanted…but as Moran talked an unpleasant image popped into my mind of a dog’s fur shaved in preparation for an operation. Perhaps those visuals were subconsciously linked to the fact that this area north of Marquette is known as the Yellow Dog Plains.

The Yellow Dog Plains are not spectacularly breath-taking like the craggy mountains and raging rivers of the western United States. However like other gems of the Great Lakes region, the area has a quiet and intimate beauty that might take a bit longer to appreciate, but in some ways seems more special once you have spent enough quiet time to appreciate the cold clear springs under deep powdery snow and delicate crystalline ice formations hovering above small waterfalls…or in summer, the lush green of soft moss permeated with the insistent hum of insects.

Kennecott has put forth the somewhat contradictory ideas that mining will be completed and cleaned up before residents know it…but at the same time, will provide crucial jobs and economic stimulus. The Eagle Project is only supposed to produce about 100 jobs – a significant number in a sparsely populated, economically struggling area like this, but hardly transformative. Residents both supportive of and opposed to the mine think that in reality the Eagle Project is just the first wedge in a potentially massive resurgence of mining in the Upper Peninsula. Everyone knows plenty of copper, gold, nickel and other metals still sit in the ground. The only questions are whether it is financially worthwhile for companies to exploit these metals, and whether they will be allowed to do so.

Hearing people talk of the possible mining rush to come, I’m reminded of the oil sands of Alberta, Canada. The scale of the oil sands is of course exponentially larger, and the extraction process much more destructive and energy intensive. But the idea of transforming a landscape and culture in the name of resource extraction is parallel in many ways. As in Alberta, a mining boom in the UP would mean forests torn up by new roads for an endless parade of trucks lugging fuel and waste rock; an influx of transient workers; a serious disruption of activities and economies based on the great outdoors; a new power paradigm where huge multinational companies call the shots.

 Moran and many other opponents of the Eagle Project say they are not against the harnessing of natural resources or even mining per se. Much of the forest they are trying to protect is actually commercial forestry area – periodically logged – and they have no problem with that. They also have few complaints about ongoing iron mining not far away – a different geology which does not create acid mine drainage. But they fear the Eagle Project in particular and other new metallic mining under current regulatory realities  would change the character of the UP completely, would rip the heart out of the land as they know it. It’s not something to do rashly, Moran says. With snow blanketing the ground and clouds hanging heavy in the sky, it seems like time is standing still. Moran laments that company officials have never come to this rock and appreciated it in the way he does right now. If they did, he thinks, they might act differently. “Just wait,” Moran tells the company. “The ore will still be there. You don’t know enough. Just wait.”