June 12, 2009
Dear WRPC Member,
Critics of Kennecott‟s financially-troubled Eagle nickel-copper project on the Upper Peninsula‟s Yellow Dog Plains were present at Rio Tinto‟s annual meeting in London in April to remind the company of the substantial local opposition to the project. Jon Magnuson, a Lutheran pastor from Marquette, Michigan, presented a document signed by one hundred religious leaders in Marquette, Baraga and Keweenaw counties. “Around the world, there‟s a new unprecedented consciousness rising up about human rights, ethics, and the environment. Rio Tinto and its Kennecott mining operations in Michigan, in its cavalier dismissal of the claims of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, represents a dying world of one dimensional reality, bad science, old colonialism, and unfettered capitalism: a culture of death. We‟ve travelled here with a message from 10,000 citizens and 100 community leaders from 10 faith traditions to say, „No thank you. There‟s a better way.”
