Madison–The Sierra Club, Wisconsin Resources Protection Council and over 75 other organizations, including Trout Unlimited, the Wisconsin Association of Lakes, the Izaak Walton League of Wisconsin, the River Alliance of Wisconsin, the Penokee Hills Education Project, the Mining Impact Coalition of Wisconsin, Clean Wisconsin, the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters and many more statewide, regional and national groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council released an open letter urging Wisconsin legislators to reject changes to Wisconsin’s mining safeguards.
January 9, 2013
Dear WRPC Member,
Wisconsin is now under a well-funded mining industry attack on the grassroots environmental, sportfishing, and tribal movement which mobilized tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens to successfully oppose Exxon’s destructive Crandon mine at the headwaters of the Wolf River and enact Wisconsin’s landmark Mining Moratorium Law.
Assembly Republican leaders say the first bill they’ll introduce in early January is the Bad River Watershed Destruction Act, also known as Gogebic Taconite’s Strip Mine Legislation
Dear Environmental and Conservation Colleagues,
We’re writing to ask you to consider signing your organization on to the sign-on letter (below) that will be sent to Wisconsin legislators in both houses by mid-January. The letter asks the legislators to reject special interest legislation gutting Wisconsin mining law to enable a single destructive iron ore mine. Similar legislation was defeated by a single vote in 2012.
Click on the link below to access briefing papers on Wisconsin’s mining “moratorium” law, strip mining legislation, and iron mining:
Briefing on Wisconsin Mining Moratorium Law
Briefing on Strip Mine Legislation
Iron Mining Environmental Track Record Briefing Paper Jan 2013
By Al Gedicks and Dave Blouin
January 4, 2013
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the mining industry have begun a major lobbying effort to overturn Wisconsin’s landmark Mining Moratorium Law. The law, also known as Wisconsin’s “Prove it First” law, was developed to address the problem of acid mine drainage from metallic sulfide mining.
Dec
14
2012
by Joe Tarr
When the idea for a moratorium on mining projects in Wisconsin was floated in the early 1990s, few people gave it much chance of succeeding.
The speaker of the state Assembly, Scott Jensen, vowed the bill would never pass. Gov. Tommy Thompson pledged to veto it.
But what happened next is something that Spencer Black, who was then a Democratic assemblyman, lectures about in his natural resources class at the UW-Madison. Environmentalists, Native Americans, sports enthusiasts, college students and others all came together to support the bill, pressuring legislators in every district.
“It was the strongest grassroots effort I’d seen in Wisconsin,” Black remembers. “Exxon spent more money lobbying against the moratorium than had ever been spent lobbying against a bill. Exxon spent millions of millions to lobby against it. But there was this tremendous support for it.”
December 8, 2012
Dear WRPC Member,
Governor Scott Walker recently told his supporters in the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) that his top legislative priority in the upcoming (January) session of the legislature is passage of the controversial Iron Mining Bill that was defeated by one vote in the Senate last spring. He claimed that if the bill were passed early in 2013, Gogebic Taconite (GTac) would “move forward with a mine which would put people to work right off the bat.”
Listen to Al Gedicks and Jan Morrill talk about mining issues in El Salvador and Wisconsin on The Progressive Radio Show: http://www.progressive.org/al-gedicks-jan-morrill-interview-audio
In an address to the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce’s“State of Wisconsin Business” gathering last Wednesday, Scott Walker said his top priority for the next legislative session that begins in January is to pass acontroversial iron mining billdrafted by WMC and lawyers for the Gogebic Taconite mining company that passed the assembly but failed in the senate earlier this year when Republican Senator Dale Schultz voted against it.
Mining industry lobbyists are urging the Legislature to repeal Wisconsin’s landmark mining moratorium, or “prove it first” law, by pointing to the “success” of the partially-reclaimed Flambeau metallic sulfide mine in Ladysmith.
There is no scientific evidence to support such claims.
