Response to the Lakeland Times
We must be on to something!
Local editorial unleashes smear campaign against environmental activists fighting to save the Willow Flowage
June 25, 2018–State Senator Tom Tiffany just can’t stand to have me question the wisdom of imposing unwanted mining projects that threaten the clean water of Wisconsin. So after my recent testimony against opening up formerly protected lands from mining in Oneida County, he passed along the information on my 1970 antiwar protest conviction to the River News, which ran the story in the June 23, 2018, edition.
This is not the first time Tiffany has tried to divert attention from his efforts to promote destructive sulfide mining in Wisconsin. During the public hearing in Ladysmith in September 2017 on his legislation to repeal Wisconsin’s Prove it First Mining Moratorium Law, he interrupted my public testimony against the repeal and asked me about my arrest and conviction during antiwar protests at the University of Wisconsin in 1970. I told Tiffany: “If you are so desperate to defend a bill that has no scientific or factual credibility, you have to go to the depths of deviousness to bring up something that happened 47 years ago, under highly questionable circumstances, this is eloquent testimony to the bankruptcy of this entire proceeding.”
The report by Richard Moore, who had supported the repeal of Wisconsin’s Prove it First Mining Moratorium Law, did not mention a word about most of my testimony on June 6 in Rhinelander, which warned about the danger of methylmercury from sulfate discharges into the water, the sulfur compounds into the air and mercury into both air and water, plus the flooding and destruction of wetlands which increases the amount of methylmercury in fish. The bioaccumulation of methylmercury in fish will have a disproportionate impact upon the health of the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe, who depend upon fish for a larger portion of their diet than the non-Indian population. The promotion of policies and practices that have a disproportionate negative impact upon minority populations is the definition of environmental racism.
Moore notes that I turned my back on the committee and directly addressed the 200 people in the Rhinelander High School auditorium, “holding high an inflammatory placard.” He doesn’t say what the content of the placard was. Why not? Maybe because it was a large photo of an armed private security guard in camouflage and ski mask with an automatic weapon in the public forestland around the proposed Penokee Hills iron mine. The armed guards were employed by Gogebic Taconite Company to protect the controversial mine site from a steady stream of visitors to the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe’s harvest and educational camp on public forest land in the Penokee Hills of Iron County.
In his editorial against my testimony in the same edition of the River News, Moore accuses me of supporting violence as an acceptable form of democratic dissent because I did not mention that prior to the hiring of armed guards in July 2013 to protect a controversial mine site in the Penokee Hills, 15 mining opponents had raided a drill site, vandalized mining equipment and took a camera from a geologist working on site. There was no physical violence but one protestor was charged with robbery by force.
While Gogebic Taconite (GTAC) justified its hiring of armed guards in response to so-called “eco-terrorists,” former State Senator Bob Jauch (D-Poplar), who represented the proposed mining area, said the show of force was unnecessary, because there had not been any trouble in the Penokee Hills since the June 11, 2013, protest. Jauch said the June 11 incident was terrible, but it was isolated. “There was no threat, there was no danger and, all of a sudden, GI Joe shows up in the north woods.”
GTAC at first refused to remove the guards. Then they learned that Bulletproof Security, an Arizona-based private security firm, was not licensed to operate in Wisconsin and withdrew the guards on July 10, 2013. “These actions demonstrate that GTAC has no respect for the public and no regard for the law,” said Jauch. “Had GTAC not been in such a hurry to hire a militia that’s armed more for war than defense of property, they could have hired a legally licensed Wisconsin firm.” Under Wisconsin state law, GTAC committed a felony by hiring unlicensed out of state guards for its drilling site. However, the state dismissed complaints against the security firm for operating without a license.
The real targets of GTAC’s armed guards were not the 15 protestors, but the growing resistance to the project among all 11 Wisconsin tribes, environmental organizations and local officials in Bayfield, Washburn and Ashland. Mining pollution from the proposed open pit iron mine posed a threat to the largest remaining wild rice wetland in the entire Great Lakes Basin downstream on the Bad River Ojibwe Reservation.
Tiffany authored the bill (SB 278) that allowed Gogebic Taconite to prohibit public access to 3,500 acres of land in managed forest law. During the public hearing on this bill, I testified before Tiffany’s Mining Committee that the bill was “nothing more than GTAC’s psychological warfare against anyone who cares about protecting the water. If this ill-conceived piece of legislation is passed, Wisconsin will join the countries where highly polluting mining activity can only proceed through the use and threatened use of armed violence: the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Philippines, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and West Papua. Is this the legacy you want for the people of Wisconsin?”
The vitriolic attack on me can only be understood as the product of a well-orchestrated industry-financed smear campaign led by Tiffany with the support of the most powerful corporate interests in and out of state. This includes Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business group; the Natural Resources Development Association, led by Nathan Conrad, a former spokesperson for the Republican Party of Wisconsin; Aquila Resources, a Canadian mining company; and Americans for Prosperity, a dark money electioneering group created by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch (https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2017/11/10/campaign-cash-new-gop-pro-mining-group-ran-attack ads/)
Tiffany is clearly out of touch with the vast majority of the Wisconsin public. Public opinion polling prior to Tiffany’s repeal of Prove it First found 72 percent of Wisconsin residents wanted to keep Prove it First protections from mining pollution. Ojibwe water protector Winona La Duke has said: “Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.”
By Al Gedicks
Executive Secretary of the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council and emeritus professor of environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
This article was originally published on the website of Oneida County Clean Waters Action (occwa.org)