by Dave Blouin and Al Gedicks
In their May 7 opinion piece “Unlock minerals in Wisconsin,” representatives of the Wisconsin and National Mining Associations grossly misrepresent the facts to sway the public in favor of mining law reforms for gold and base metals. Their rhetoric is designed to hide the fact that their No. 1 goal is to repeal Wisconsin’s landmark “prove it first” Mining Moratorium Law.
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.
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.”
