by Steve Dent
April 17, 2017
Menominee, MI – The first of three planned protests against the back forty mine this week near Menominee happened tonight during the Menominee City Council Meeting.
by Genevieve Adamski
April 18, 2017
Aqulia Resources is in the process of creating an open-pit sulfide mine along the banks of the Menominee River near Marinette.
Apr
14
2017
Listen to Wisconsin Public Radio’s segment on the proposed Back Forty project, on the Menominee River: https://www.wpr.org/shows/whats-ahead-proposed-back-forty-mine
Al Gedicks and Dave Blouin
Lacrosse Tribune, January 15, 2017
State Sen. Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst, has announced his intention to repeal Wisconsin’s landmark mining moratorium law to make it easier for mining companies to operate metallic sulfide mining operations (gold, copper, zinc) without having to first demonstrate that sulfide mining can be done without polluting the environment (Wisconsin Public Radio, Jan. 10).
The law, known as Wisconsin’s “Prove it First” law, was developed to address the problem of acid mine drainage from metallic sulfide mining.
Prof. Al Gedicks, an activist expert and emeritus prof at UW-Lacrosse, tells us about the environmental and social dangers attending the new open-pit mining proposal just over the Wisconsin-Michigan border, 150 feet from the scenic river and overlapping sacred Native American burial grounds.
Listen to Al Gedicks’ radio interview, The Grass is Greener.
by Brian Bienkowski, Environmental Health News
September 19, 2016
Modern boundaries complicate —and stymie—the Menominee Tribe’s effort to protect burial grounds.
Guy Reiter was an archaeologist before he was an activist. But the two merged after a dream six years ago.
“I was in a van and when we drove by the White Rapids I looked over and saw an elder sitting on a dam, in full Indian regalia,” Reiter says. “He flagged me down, I climbed the dam, and he started talking to me in Menominee.”
Menominee is the language of Reiter’s tribe, the Menominee Indians of Wisconsin. The dam is on the Menominee River, where the history of the tribe begins.
Sep
20
2016
Lee Bergquist, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
September 19, 2016
As an open pit mine planned along the Menominee River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula nears final regulatory approval, opponents are raising worries about potential environmental harm and the threat of the project on cultural artifacts of Wisconsin’s Menominee tribe.
Sep
16
2016
by Al Gedicks
Imagine an open pit mine deeper than the height of Wisconsin’s tallest building, Milwaukee’s U.S. Bank tower.
The depth of that pit, a mere 150 feet from the Menominee River (a major Lake Michigan tributary that forms the Wisconsin-Michigan border and flows into Green Bay) would exceed 700 feet.
The pit would be 2,000 feet wide and 2,500 feet long.
That would be the enormous size of the controversial open pit gold and zinc sulfide mine recently given preliminary approval by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ).
July 22, 2016 / TomBoswellBlog
THIS IS THE LAST IN A SERIES OF EIGHT POSTS WHICH TOGETHER COMPRISE AN IN-DEPTH ARTICLE CONCERNING A PROPOSED IRON ORE MINE IN THE PENOKEE HILLS OF NORTHERN WISCONSIN AND THE WIDESPREAD RESISTANCE TO THE PROJECT.
One irony about the new mining regulations the Wisconsin State Legislature passed and Governor Walker signed is that, rather than expediting and simplifying the permitting process for a mining company, as intended, they actually slow down the process and may have ultimately eliminated a meaningful regulatory role for the State.
AL GEDICKS | executive secretary, Wisconsin Resources Protection Council Jul 23, 2016
July 22 marks the 20th anniversary of the successful train protest on the Bad River Chippewa reservation in northern Wisconsin, a forerunner of the current wave of protests against the dangers of crude oil rail and pipeline traffic and struggles over local control and tribal sovereignty.
For Wisconsinites opposing the proposed expansion of Enbridge Energy’s Line 61, a tar sands crude oil pipeline running from Superior to Delavan, the successful resistance is a powerful reminder that tribal and citizen action matters.
