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Man has gone and done it once again. Just when you think you can develop a modern, safe, environmentally pleasing copper-nickel/precious metals mine, the whole thing falls apart and sends a flood of toxic waste downstream.
We sure can convince ourselves that we’re smart enough to mine copper-nickel disaster free.
We so smart.
In the watershed of the Fraser River in British Columbia, which happens to be the largest sockeye salmon fishery in Canada, a batch of lead and cadmium and other heavy metals was let loose after an unexpected August rain event swelled the waste basin to the brim. The earthen dam was simply overwhelmed, and that fishery will now have to deal with the stigma that the fish may be contaminated now and into the future.
Just last week the supporters of copper-nickel mining in Minnesota finally acknowledged the disaster and said they wouldn’t allow that to happen here in this state.
Not here.
We’re smarter than that here.
Our regulations are tough. Real tough.
We won’t let that happen in Minnesota, they say.
Project supporters said the same thing in Canada, according to scientists assessing the damage for Environment Canada, that nation’s EPA. The waste basin was engineered to withstand the harsh northern British Columbia weather, but a rain event like those rain events we’re seeing more and more often these days doomed their predictions of a safe, clean mine in a place where people value the environment more than, say, the Chinese.
Mining supporters are always picking on the Chinese or some other less-developed nation with the red herring argument that we should mine in Minnesota where the environment will be protected, not devastated, when everybody knows that those global mining giants will mine wherever there’s money to be made and a willing ore body is available.
In other words, they aren’t going to suspend mining operations across the developing world just because they’ve decided to zero in on the Duluth Complex in northeastern Minnesota.
We just think we so smart. We so smart we might even believe we can mine copper-nickel without harming the environment even a little bit. We so smart.
This smart thinking has happened forever, of course, especially since the Industrial Revolution kicked in. We so smart, we can handle the byproducts of a very smart society. First, we dump it into a hole in the ground or into the rivers, lakes, and oceans. When that hole fills up or the river catches fire or the fish die and people start getting sick, we move to Plan B.
Smart societies always have Plan B.
In the meantime, Superfund sites are all over the countryside. There may be a Superfund site near you. Of course there is. A majority of Americans now live within 20 miles of a nationally recognized Superfund site.
We so smart.
We so smart, nuclear energy was developed based on the fact that we so smart, of course we’ll figure out a way to deal with plutonium and its million-year half life. In the meantime, entomb those spent fuel rods in concrete, and whatever you do, don’t take one of those fuel rods out of the water even for a minute. Be smart. Don’t do that.
We so smart, here we are 60 to 70 years later and still without a clue of what to do about radioactive waste.
We so smart.
We so smart we’ve now succumbed to a farming model that poisons the very soil we grow our food in. Man, that smart! Put poison in the ground along with seeds, grow that food or food product, and then eat it, keeping fingers crossed that bad food doesn’t harm the population.
We so smart.
We so smart we can pump chemicals into deep wells to force crude oil out of shale and be energy independent and not see any potential side effect at all! Pump chemicals into the ground and nothing bad will happen now and in the future. Amazing.
We so smart.
We just so darn smart, we can fool ourselves into thinking that we can do anything as long as there’s money involved.
Money, money, money.
Money just money. Can’t take it with you. Money not smart.
We dumb.

Forrest Johnson has been writing for over 20 years and was editor of the Lake County Chronicle in Two Harbors.