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Tag Archives: environmental ethics
The Boundary Waters Reversal Makes the Front Page of the New York Times
This is a big deal. https://t.co/707Q2Spb2U
— PK Read (@paula_read) June 26, 2019
The story about the Boundary Waters reversal in the New York Times appears to be causing a stir. Hours after its online debut on Tuesday, the article had attracted hundreds of comments and was all over social media; yesterday, it appeared above the fold on the front page of the print edition. What struck me first about public reaction was that Times readers — a civic-minded and educated lot, on the whole — seem to have been unfamiliar with the basic elements of this story until now.
Most of the commenters' heat appears to be focused on the Kalorama rental arrangement, which finds the daughter and son-in-law of the president renting a mansion from billionaire Chilean mining magnate Adronico Luksic Craig. It's the most lurid part the story, and hints at some darker deal, or explicit quid pro quo: a mansion for a mine. I still think caution on that point is warranted.
Luksic was easily able to dismiss earlier reporting in Newsweek, HuffPo, and elsewhere on the rental, because it was based on the laziest form of reporting: writing up a (typically colorful) tweet by law professor and Bush administration ethics official Richard Painter about Luksic using "the Boundary Waters as his toilet".
Lo aclaré hace 2 años: A través de empresas que controlo tenemos varios arrendatarios en EEUU. El matrimonio Kushner, a quienes no conozco y que pagan precio de mercado, es uno de ellos. Inaceptable que se involucre injustamente a terceros para fines políticos internos de EEUU . https://t.co/aS0Tuhqm8s
— Andrónico Luksic C. (@aluksicc) May 6, 2019
He stuck with this denial after the Times story appeared.
Hasta cuándo la misma historia!!! Lo dije en 2017 y repito: NO conozco a los Kushner-Trump. Una empresa que controlo tiene una casa, que ellos arriendan. NINGUNA RELACIÓN con proyecto Twin Metals. No sé con qué intención mezclan dos cosas NO relacionadas!! https://t.co/qViktavCWq
— Andrónico Luksic C. (@aluksicc) June 25, 2019
Luksic's denial almost always turns on the issue whether he has ever "met" or "knows" the Trumps and Kushners. In the Times story, however, Luksic's purchase of the Kalorama mansion is characterized in another way: as a soft opening bid, bringing Jared and Ivanka into an inappropriate, ethically compromised relationship from the moment they arrive in Washington. They are senior White House officials living under Luksic's roof:
…several ethics experts said they would have cautioned Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump against renting the home, given the Luksic family's business before the administration.
"There may be nothing wrong," said Arthur Andrew Lopez, a federal government ethics official for two decades who is now a professor at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. "But it doesn't look good."
It doesn't really make the arrangement look any better to say they "decided to lease the home before knowing the landlord's identity,"as Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Kushner lawyer Abbe Lowell tells the Times; and it's worth noting that Mirijanian "did not directly respond to questions about whether they learned of that identity before signing the lease," which would presumably have given Kushner and Trump an opportunity to review the matter with ethics officials. Besides, Rodrigo Terré, a Luksic agent, "said both sides were aware of each others' identities before the rental deal was finalized. 'We disclosed our name and the name of my boss,' he said in a telephone interview." That's pretty unambiguous.
After asking out loud — again — whether there had been any formal ethics review of the leasing arrangement, I received this reply from one of the Times reporters:
As far as we know, there was no formal ethics review.
— Hiroko Tabuchi (@HirokoTabuchi) June 25, 2019
There is additional new reporting here about the rental arrangement and other matters.
We learn, for example, that Charles and Seryl Kushner accompanied Jared and Ivanka on their tour of the Kalorama mansion. That family picture raises other questions, mainly about Charles Kushner's longtime business associate George Gellert — who along with his son Andrew Gellert has extensive business connections in Chile. This angle seems worth exploring, especially since the White House nominated Andrew Gellert to be ambassador to Chile. (The nomination was quietly withdrawn, without explanation, in August of 2018. For more, see this post.)
Times reporting also appears to confirm that Antofagasta did, indeed, meet with the White House in May of 2017. The emails I had obtained through FOIA only hinted at the possibility of a meeting: "this same group [from Antofagasta] may also have a meeting at the White House," wrote Interior's Karen Hawbecker on April 28th.
A key meeting occurred in early May, when Antofagasta's chief executive, along with other executives and lobbyists, discussed the issue with the White House's top adviser on domestic energy and the environment, Michael Catanzaro. The company said it wanted to reverse the Obama-era decisions, which it said were illegal and inflicted "undue damage."
That meeting now appears in an update to the Twin Metals at Interior timeline. As I've pointed out in another post, Catanzaro is especially close to the current Secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt. While at the White House, Catanzaro had a regular weekly call with Bernhardt. The two oil and gas lobbyists often had lunch together as well. This would be yet more evidence, if more were required, that the Chilean mining conglomerate owned by the Luksic family had unbridled access to the highest reaches of the administration, and these public officials were working on the mining company's behalf.
The message from an early meeting, according to an attendee who spoke on condition of anonymity, was that officials should prepare for a change in direction.
Parse that carefully. It's one of the most intriguing paragraphs of the entire story, and it calls into question the administration's claim — which it is currently defending in the US District Court for the District of Columbia — that the Boundary Waters reversal was made merely to correct an error in Solicitor Tompkins' 2016 M-Opinion.
Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here.
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Lake Superior, Louis V. Galdieri's Blog, Prosperity, The Boundary Waters Reversal and tagged Boundary Waters, Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Boundary Waters Reversal, Chile, corruption, David Bernhardt, Department of Interior, environmental ethics, ethics, Gellert Group, Hiroko Tabuchi, mining, Steve Eder, sulfide mining, Voyageur Outward Bound School et al. v. United States et al, Voyageur v. United States, Water on June 27, 2019 by lvgaldieri.
McCollum Questions Zinke on the Boundary Waters Reversal
This morning, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke appeared before the House Appropriations Committee at a hearing on the FY 2019 Budget. The video below marks the moment when Minnesota Representative Betty McCollum questioned Secretary Zinke on the Boundary Waters reversal.
It begins with an exchange on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase, in the course of which Zinke says reporting in the New York Times based on U.S. Department of Interior memos is not "credible." Fake news.
McCollum then moves the discussion to the Boundary Waters reversal. Her main question, which she asks in a few different ways, is whether Deputy Solicitor Jorjani met with any stakeholders other than lobbyists for Twin Metals Minnesota before issuing his reversal memo.
Zinke's response that this is all part of the public record is at best disingenuous, given that nearly all the information we have to date about the reversal is the result of FOIA requests; and it's also Trumpian in its post-truthiness, since Zinke just declared a few moments earlier that reporting based on Department of Interior records is not to be trusted.
At any rate, here is the full exchange:
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Governance, Lake Superior, Louis V. Galdieri's Blog, Prosperity and tagged Antofagasta Plc, Bears Ears, Betty McCollum, Boundary Waters, Boundary Waters Canoe Area, copper mining, Department of Interior, environmental ethics, environmental protection, ethics, mining, responsibility, Ryan Zinke, sulfide mining, truth, Twin Metals, Twin Metals Minnesota, Water, wilderness on April 11, 2018 by lvgaldieri.
A Note on Stone's "Should Trees Have Standing?"
A report in the New York Times the other day about the Federal District Court case naming the Colorado River as plaintiff led me to Christopher D. Stone's 1972 Southern California Law Review article, "Should Trees Have Standing?" Justice Douglas drew on Stone's arguments to formulate his dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton, and since that time the essay has been widely influential, a classic that helped define a field.
For Stone, a river or a lake, a mountain or a forest, a species or the biosphere can have roughly the same status as other "legal incompetents." A human guardian or, as we might say nowadays, a protector brings a complaint for a natural entity that has suffered some injury. The case is brought "at the behest of" the river or mountain, without having first to prove injury to the guardian or some third party (e.g., a fishing guide whose business has suffered as the result of stream pollution); and the natural entity itself would be the beneficiary of an award or remedy ordered by the court. So, for instance, a judgment against those who have polluted a stream might direct them to undo the damage done to its waters, mitigate erosion of its banks and depletion of its plant life, restock its fish, and so on. The stream would have a "right" to be made whole again.
Stone recognizes that his proposal "is bound to sound odd or frightening of laughable," but that, he notes, has been true of any movement to confer rights on rightless "things":
There will be resistance to giving the thing "rights" until it can be seen and valued for itself; yet it is hard to see it and value it for itself until we can bring ourselves to give it "rights" — which is almost inevitably going to sound inconceivable to a large group of people.
Stone's thinking can seem way ahead of its time — and ours (even if the writing here is sometimes redolent of Southern California in the early 1970s). This is especially true toward the end of the piece, where Stone moves from making strictly jural arguments for the standing of rivers, trees, and other natural entities to broader observations about the "shift from the view that nature exists for men":
…the time is already upon us when we may have to consider subordinating some human claims to those of the environment per se. Consider, for example, the disputes over protecting wilderness areas from development that would make them accessible to greater numbers of people. I myself feel disingenuous rationalizing the environmental protectionist's position in terms of a utilitarian calculus, even one that takes future generations into account, and plays fast and loose with its definition of "good." Those who favor development have the stronger argument — they at least hold the protectionist to a standstill — from the point of advancing the greatest good of the greatest number of people. And the same is true regarding arguments to preserve useless species of animals, as in [the case of sea urchins endangered by a nuclear power plant.] One can say that we never know what is going to prove useful at some future time. In order to protect ourselves, therefore, we ought to be conservative now in our treatment of nature. I agree. But when conservationists argue this way to the exclusion of other arguments, or find themselves speaking in terms of "recreational interests" so continuously as to play up to, and reinforce, homocentrist perspectives, there is something sad about the spectacle. One feels that the arguments lack even their proponent's convictions. I expect they want to say something less egotistic and more emphatic but the prevailing and sanctioned modes of explanation in our society are not quite ready for it. In this vein, there must have been abolitonists who put their case in terms of getting more work out of the Blacks. Holdsworth says of the early English Jew that while he was "regarded as a species of res nullius … [H]e was valuable for his acquisitive capacity; and for that reason the crown took him under its protection." (Even today, businessmen are put in the position of insisting that their decent but probably profitless acts will "help our company's reputation and be good for profits.")
For my part, I would prefer a frank avowal that even making adjustments for esthetic improvements, what I am proposing is going to cost "us," i.e., reduce our standard of living as measured in terms of our present values.
We may still not be "ready for it," as Stone puts it; and, he goes on to say, there might be a more "fundamental problem" with asking human beings to put their own immediate self-interest aside and act on ethical principle, or to limit our rights in order to respect the rights of others:
Insofar as the proposal is not just an elaborate legal fiction, but really comes down in the last analysis to a compromise of our interests for theirs, why should we adopt it? "What is in it for 'us'?"
This is a question I am prepared to answer, but only after permitting myself some observations about how odd the question is. It asks for me to justify my position in the very anthropocentric hedonist terms that I am proposing we modify. One is inclined to respond by a counter: "couldn't you (as a white) raise the same questions about compromising your preferred rights status with Blacks?"; or "couldn't you (as a man) raise the same question about compromising your preferred rights status with women?" Such counters, unfortunately, seem no more responsive than the question itself. (They have a nagging ring of "yours too" about them.) What the exchange actually points up is a fundamental problem regarding the nature of philosophical argument. Recall that Socrates, whom we remember as an opponent of hedonistic thought, confutes Thrasymachus by arguing that immorality makes one miserably unhappy! Kant, whose moral philosophy was based upon the categorical imperative ("Woe to him who creeps through the serpent windings of Utilitarianism") finds himself justifying, e.g., promise keeping and truth telling, on the most prudential-one might almost say, commercial-grounds. This "philosophic irony" (as Professor [S. Morris] Engel calls it) may owe to there being something unique about ethical argument. "Ethics cannot be put into words", Wittgenstein puts it; such matters "make themselves manifest." On the other hand, perhaps the truth is that in any argument which aims at persuading a human being to action (on ethical or any other bases), "logic" is only an instrument for illuminating positions, at best, and in the last analysis it is psycho-logical [sic] appeals to the listener's self-interest that hold sway, however "principled" the rhetoric may be.
That logic may have its limits and ethical argument its attendant ironies should not deter us. "The strongest case can be made from the perspective of human advantage," Stone writes; and after reviewing that case, he goes on to suggest that protecting the environment will actually raise our standard of living, if not in terms of our present values, then (this point deserves emphasis) in terms of new and more durable values.
Stone is even prepared to argue that "a radical new conception of man's relationship to the rest of nature would not only be a step towards solving the material planetary problems" (and the problems Stone identifies here, in 1972, are still very much with us and more urgent than ever before: melting polar ice caps, dying oceans, serious threats to water). "There are strong reasons for such a changed consciousness [Stone admits that he is uncomfortable with the term] from the point of making us far better humans." Recognizing the rights of those whose standing once seemed "unthinkable," to borrow Stone's phrase, surely has.
This entry was posted in Human Rights, Louis V. Galdieri's Blog, Readings and tagged altruism, animal rights, better humans, Christopher D. Stone, Climate Change, Colorado River, conservation, environmental ethics, environmental law, environmental rights, ethical argument, ethics, human, humanity, Justice Douglas, Legal Standing, limits, nature, oceans, philosophic irony, rights, rights claims, S. Morris Engel, self-interest, Should Trees Have Standing, us vs. them, Water, William Douglas, Wittgenstein on September 28, 2017 by lvgaldieri.
A Highland Map of Lake Superior Mining
It would be instructive to lay this map, published today by Highland Copper, over the map of Mines, Mineral Exploration, and Mineral Leasing around Lake Superior published in 2013 by the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.
Having acquired all of Rio Tinto's exploration properties in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Highland now dominates sulfide-mining exploration in the UP.
A multi-billion dollar mining behemoth like Rio Tinto could arguably have left these copper, zinc and gold sites idle for a rainy day. The same can't be said about a junior like Highland. With market capitalization of $62 million, the company paid $2 million at closing, leaving its subsidiary on the hook for an additional $16 million (in the form of a non-interest bearing promissory note), to be paid in regular installments.
According to company's own press release, "the payments…will be accelerated if Highland publicly releases a feasibility study covering any portion of the UPX properties." So once exploration begins with test drilling in 2018, we might see efforts to expedite permitting and development for these sites.
If UPX succeeds in taking even a fraction of these sulfide-mineral deposits from exploration to development, and if these new mines are developed under the pressure of an accelerated payment schedule, the risk to the Lake Superior watershed will be significantly heightened.
This entry was posted in Lake Superior, Prosperity and tagged $RIO, development, development ethics, environment, environmental ethics, environmental responsibility, exploration, financialization, heightened risk, Highland Copper, Lake Superior, Lake Superior watershed, mapping, maps, MDEQ, Michigan, mining, responsibility, Rio Tinto, risk, Upper Peninsula, Water, waterways on May 31, 2017 by lvgaldieri.
Some remarks on "another kind of power"
A new post about the merger of two Upper Peninsula environmental organizations on Keweenaw Now includes this short video excerpt of the talk I gave in Marquette, Michigan a while back about the power and responsibility we have to protect water and wild places from unsustainable development.
You can read the full text of my remarks here.
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Lake Superior, Prosperity, The Power of Asking and tagged cooperation, coordination, copper mining, development, environmental ethics, environmentalism, ethics, industrial development, intergenerational ethics, Keweenaw Now, Lake Superior, Michele Bourdieu, mining, non-coercive power, political authority, political power, pollution, post-industrial development, power, responsibility, Save the Wild UP, sulfide mining, sustainability, unsustainable development, Upper Peninsula, wild, wilderness on January 5, 2017 by lvgaldieri.
Three Questions for the Michigan DEQ on the Back Forty Project
Earlier this month, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality announced its intention to permit the Back Forty Project, an open-pit gold and zinc sulfide ore mine that Aquila Resources, a Canadian company, plans to develop near the headwaters of the Menominee River. In response to the MDEQ's request for public comment by November 3rd, I've submitted these three questions. I'm posting them here so that others might consider them in the run up to the public meeting with the MDEQ in Stephenson, Michigan on October 6th.
In determining that the Back Forty Project application meets the requirements for approval under Part 632, did MDEQ take into account the cumulative effects of sulfide mining throughout the Lake Superior watershed? We know that the Back Forty project poses a significant risk to the Menominee River all by itself. With the mine in close proximity to the river, a flood, berm collapse, subsidence or a slide could destroy the Menominee River; to answer these serious concerns by asking the company to add a "synthetic, manmade liner under their waste/tailing rock facility," as the DEQ has proposed, is to trivialize them. Other development that the mine will inevitably bring, including haul routes, power lines, lights, fueling stations, exhaust and machine noise, will leave a large industrial footprint and disturb the Menominee River and its environs in countless ways. At the same time, this mine will heighten the risk, in the long term, of large-scale environmental destruction posed by the resurgence of sulfide mining not just in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, but in Minnesota and Canada as well — all around the lake and throughout the Lake Superior watershed. Has the DEQ completed or participated with neighboring state agencies and tribal authorities in a scientific study of the cumulative impacts of sulfide mining around Lake Superior? Has the DEQ issued guidance on how cumulative environmental effects should factor into its decision-making process for permitting new mines in Michigan?
Has MDEQ made any determination about the human rights implications of its decision to allow the Back Forty project to go forward? Human rights are not outside the DEQ's bailiwick, no matter how hard it may try to exempt itself. Witness Flint. In the present case, the DEQ's oversight is inextricably bound up with the state's obligation to protect human rights abuses by third parties. Aquila's Back Forty project is sure to disturb, and likely to desecrate, lands traditionally belonging to the Menominee and still held sacred by them; and making provisions for archaeological recovery and preservation of mounds and other sacred sites does not adequately address the basic human rights issues involved here. The headwaters of the Menominee River are central to the tribe's creation story, marking the place where the Menominee people originated. Their very name derives from manoomin, or wild rice, which will not survive changes in sulfate levels or degradation of overall water quality. As tribal member Guy Reiter has said, "It's no different than if an open-pit sulfide mine was put in Bethlehem for the Christians." Seen from this perspective, the Back Forty is not only an affront to Menominee history; it also puts the cultural survival of the Menominee people at risk. How will the DEQ factor such human rights considerations into its decision-making process?
What has the DEQ done to restore trust in its authority, and reassure the Menominee and people living downstream from the Back Forty project in Michigan and Wisconsin that it will exercise appropriate care? The Flint water crisis cast a long shadow, and reinforced the perception that "politics and poverty are big factors" in DEQ decision making. "The same attitude of disregard for citizens and the environment has repeated itself in DEQ decisions across our state for well over a decade," said Marquette attorney Michelle Halley after news of the Flint water crisis broke; controversy over the renewed Groundwater Discharge Permit issued by MDEQ at Eagle Mine and legitimate concerns about lax oversight at Eagle East help make her case. Like all government agencies, the Michigan DEQ should operate in sunlight. Already, however, troubling questions have been raised about the transparency of the Back Forty permitting process. For example, Al Gedicks, Executive Secretary of the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council, asks why the DEQ appears to be in a "rush" to grant the Back Forty permit. So as things now stand, the DEQ enjoys de jure authority in Michigan under Part 632, but it is unclear whether the DEQ still enjoys de facto authority, which could only derive from demonstrations of regulatory competence. How does MDEQ intend to quell public concern that it is compromised or incompetent, and reassure the public that it is a responsible steward?
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Human Rights, Lake Superior, Louis V. Galdieri's Blog, Prosperity and tagged Al Gedicks, Aquila Resources, authority, Back Forty, cumulative effects, Eagle Mine, environment, environmental ethics, environmental governance, Flint, Flint Water Crisis, freshwater, governance, human rights, MDEQ, Menominee, Menominee River, Michelle Halley, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, mining, mining ethics, regulation, regulatory capture, risk, sulfide mining, transparency, trust, UN Guiding Principles, Water, Watershed, wild rice on September 27, 2016 by lvgaldieri.
Save the Wild UP December Gala Keynote Address
This is the text I prepared for my remarks at the Save The Wild UP December Gala. My talk deals with the ethics of Lake Superior mining, connecting it with climate change, the loss of the wild and the dawn of the Anthropocene. It's also a reflection on human ingenuity and human responsibility. The half-hour keynote makes for a long blog post, but I hope readers will find something here worth sharing and discussing.
When you invited me to speak tonight, I tried almost immediately to come up with names of people who might be better suited to the task. In this crowd, I ought to be listening and trying to catch up.
I'm an outsider, and a latecomer to boot. Some of you were here when Kennecott and Rio Tinto first staked their claim to the Yellow Dog Plains. I didn't fully appreciate the extent of the new mining activity in this area and all around Lake Superior until about 2012. That was right after Ken Ross and I had finished making 1913 Massacre, our documentary about the Italian Hall disaster.
I was so caught up in the story our film tells that I was under the impression that copper mining — sulfide mining — was a thing of the past in the Upper Peninsula.
Very near the end of 1913 Massacre, there's an interview with an Army veteran who's sitting at the counter of the Evergreen Diner, drinking a coffee and smoking a cigarette. He says that after the copper mines closed in 1968, attempts to re-open them failed because people were "bitching about the environment and all that shit and the water and the runoff." The camera, meanwhile, is exploring the industrial damage left behind by the mining operation.
This is the one moment in the film where we had to bleep out some bad language before Minnesota Public Television would air 1913 Massacre on Labor Day in 2013. The only time anyone in our film curses is when the subject turns to protecting the water and the environment.
That these two things — a destroyed, toxic landscape and a hostility toward people who care about the environment — exist side by side; that people can watch a mining company leave a place in ruins, poison its waters, damage it to the point that it's now a Superfund site, with high levels of stomach cancer and fish that can't be eaten, and direct their anger and curses at people trying to prevent it from happening again: our film presents all that as part of what we've come to call "mining's toxic legacy."
The Army veteran went on to say — this part didn't make it into the film — that people who bitch about the environment are "people from out of town." He wasn't complaining about environmental regulation or about big government; he was complaining instead about out-of-towners, strangers who make it tough for regular guys to make a living.
Strangers can be people from faraway, or just people from whom you feel estranged: people who don't share your ways or speak your language; and it would be possible to talk at some length about the way the mining operations in the Keweenaw estranged people from each other and from the place they live.
Everywhere it goes, it seems, mining divides and displaces people. It's never just about extracting ore from the ground. Mining is development and the power to direct it.
When strangers come to town or when people feel estranged, we need translators, guides and mediators. This is one reason why it's so important to have a local, grassroots organization dedicated to the shared interests people have in the nature and culture of the Upper Peninsula.
You might look like the underdog right now. But I think you'll agree that there's a pressing need for a more responsible, inclusive and respectful conversation about development in this place. Save the Wild UP is in a great position to lead it.
Back home in Brooklyn, I have a fig tree. I planted it last spring. I just finished wrapping it for the winter. I love the work the fig tree involves — the care it involves — because it connects me to the memory of my grandfather and the fig tree he kept. My tree connects me to my family tree (my roots), to history, and in my imagination the tree belongs as much to history as it does to nature. The life of my tree depends almost entirely on my care. I sometimes wonder if there is anything wild about it.
There is a wild fig. The ancient Greeks even had a special word for it: φήληξ. They seem to have derived its name from another word (φῆλος) meaning "deceitful," because the wild fig seemed ripe when it was not really so. The ancient world knew that wildness is tricky. It can deceive and elude us, or challenge our powers of discernment.
Nature, we claim, is our dominion, as if it (naturally, somehow) belonged to history, the world of human activity. Our economy organizes nature to produce natural resources. But the wild represents a living world apart from history and another order of value altogether.
We can't assimilate the wild into an engineered and technical environment: it will cease to be wild the instant we try. The wild begins where engineering and ingenuity stop, at the limits of human authority and command. So "wild" is sometimes used to mean beyond the reach of authority, out of control.
But what's wild is not alien. Sometimes the wild calls out to us, usually to ward us off. The wild is almost always in flight from us, leaving tracks and traces for us to read. It always responds to us, as wild rice and stoneflies respond to the slightest change in water quality, offering guidance if we are attentive and humble enough to take it.
The wild marks the limits of our powers, our ingenuity and ambition, and before it we ought to go gently.
We have not.
The headlines tell us that our carbon-intensive civilization, which brought us so many material advantages, is now hastening its own demise. We are entering an entirely new era of human life on earth. Some scientists and philosophers talk about the end of the Holocene and the beginning of the Anthropocene — the dawn of a new geological epoch of our making.
The story beneath the headlines is a record of loss. A map of the terrestrial biosphere shows that today only a quarter remains "wild" — that is, "without human settlements or substantial land use" — and even less is in a semi-natural state. Data from the Mauna Loa Observatory tell us that this year was the last time "anyone now alive on planet Earth will ever see" CO2 concentrations lower than 400 parts per million. Those levels started rising in the 1700s with the industrial revolution, spiked dramatically in the postwar period and have climbed steadily higher. Since 1970, the populations of vertebrate animals have dropped by 52 percent. The same report by the World Wildlife Fund tells us that freshwater animal species have declined by 76 percent since 1970.
That precipitous drop in freshwater species should set off alarm bells, especially here, on the shores of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world. Since the 1970s, Lake Superior surface-water temperatures have risen and ice cover has dramatically reduced. Walleye can now live in more areas of the lake than ever before. There's an earlier onset of summer stratification. By mid-century, according to the National Wildlife Federation, Lake Superior may be mostly ice-free in a typical winter.
Now I know it's the holiday season and these aren't exactly tidings of comfort and joy, but they are tidings all the same. And what they announce is this: we are responsible. We're responsible for all this destruction of the wild — of the whole web of life — and for the changes sweeping over us. Denial will not let us off the hook.
Responsibility is not just about being held accountable for the damage you've done; it's also about taking steps to limit damage, repair the broken world, reclaim it and make things better. We have that responsibility to ourselves and to future generations.
"Loss belongs to history," writes the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, "while politics and life are about what is still to be done." But, he's careful to remind us, loss still has a strong claim on the way we live now and on our future plans. The loss of the wild gives us a new responsibility that should inform our politics and our lives at every turn, direct the investments we make and the activities we sanction, and give rise to new conversations about what to do.
Saving the wild is now bound up, inextricably, with saving the human world — for ourselves and for future generations. We can appreciate in a new way Thoreau's famous statement: "in wildness is the preservation of the world."
Knowing all this, why don't we act? Why haven't we acted?
One answer to this question has to do with the word "we," and our underdeveloped capacity for coordinated, collective action.
Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, suggested another good answer in a speech he gave back in September to a group of insurance industry executives. Not exactly a bunch of tree huggers, but actuaries, people interested in accounting for risks and costs.
Carney talked about the future in terms of horizons, near versus long term. When we focus only on the near term, we don't account for the true cost of our activities. That's why for Carney, climate change is a "tragedy of the horizon," or the tragic consequence of our inability to see and plan and take steps beyond the near term. Since "the catastrophic effects of climate change will be felt beyond our immediate horizons" — beyond the business cycle and the quarterly earnings reports, beyond the political cycle and the current election — we have deferred the cost of fixing the problem to future generations.
We've organized things — markets, politics, institutions — so that near-term interests win out over longer-term well-being and more sustainable arrangements.
Nowadays, if you look out at the Lake Superior horizon, you might see all the way to China. An unsustainable scheme of Chinese urbanization and economic growth fueled much of the new mining activity around the lake, and especially the exploration and exploitation of copper-rich deposits. Over the last decade or so, copper was used not just to build and wire new Chinese cities, many of which today stand empty; it was used mainly for collateral on loans. As much as 80 percent of the copper China imported was used to back loans. Today, as China unravels and the price of copper plunges, commodities investors are expressing remorse. Nickel's down, too. The rush for Lake Superior minerals now seems to have been reckless — part of a larger market failure, with unforeseen risks and costs current and future generations are likely to incur.
Or look at the Polymet project in Minnesota. It's an exaggerated case of not accounting for the long-term costs of mining. Currently, the Polymet Environmental Impact Statement says that water treatment will go on "indefinitely" at a cost of 3-6 million dollars a year. There is no way, so far as I know, to multiply 3 or 6 million dollars by a factor of indefinitely; and even the company's most concrete prediction is 500 years of water treatment. Just to put that in perspective, the state of Minnesota has only been around since 1858: 157 years.
How is it possible that a proposal like this can be taken seriously? They promise jobs, a fix to a near-term problem; but there's something else at work here as well: technology or, rather, misplaced faith in technology and human ingenuity. We make technology a proxy for human responsibility.
But technological advances that create efficiencies or solve problems for mining companies can carry hidden social and environmental costs: for example, a study done after the Mount Polley spill last year concludes that "new technologies, deployed in the absence of robust regulation" have fostered a "disturbing trend of more severe tailings failures." Recent events in Brazil underline the point.
Great machinery, even full automation, will never amount to responsible stewardship. New technologies can have unintended consequences, distancing us from each other and from our responsibilities. Things corrode, repairs are made or not, entities dissolve, contracts are broken, obligations are forgotten, empires decline and fall, even within definite time horizons.
The industrial development that mining brings distorts horizons in another way. One theme of Tom Power's research on the economics of the Lake Superior region and on what he calls wilderness economics is that "protecting the quality of the living environment…lays the base for future, diversified economic development." Over-reliance on mining — and mining that damages or threatens the living environment — hinders economic diversification and makes the economy less resilient. It also requires us to discount the value of water and land it puts at risk, a value that is only going to increase over the long term, as freshwater becomes ever more scarce and as carbon capture afforded by peatlands and forests becomes more critical.
To allow that calculation for the nonce is not to concede that the market value of these wild places is their true value. The living world, creation and generation, is more than a bundle of ecosystem services, a tap and a sink for human activity. That way of thinking won't save the wild; it is bound to open the door to the very forces that have already destroyed so much of it.
Let's not lose sight of the larger point: if you take the long view, looking forward into the future and out across the horizon, protecting the land and water in this region actually looks like a more attractive investment than extracting all the ore from the ground.
That makes the capture of government by mining and extractive industry — from Marquette County to the state and federal levels — all the more troubling and deplorable. It directs investment and development down these risky and unsustainable paths, where short-term interests of multinational corporate actors are paramount and enjoy the full protection of law. The coercive power of the state, which ought to place constraints on corporate actors, is used mainly to benefit them. When things go south, society ends up bearing the cost.
This grassroots effort challenges that whole topsy-turvy arrangement. We have to continue to challenge it, at every opportunity, in every forum, recognizing that the results we're looking for probably aren't going to come on a quarterly basis or anytime soon. We have to lengthen our horizons.
At the same time, we have to re-open the conversation about how we are going to organize ourselves in this place, so that what remains of the wild UP can flourish and the people living here can thrive.
It's imperative, too, that Save the Wild UP stay connected with other groups around the lake facing similar challenges. To take just one example: Kathleen's recent Op Ed in the Star Tribune about Governor Dayton's visit to the Eagle Mine. That made a difference to people in Minnesota: it was widely shared and talked about. People connected with it.
I have to believe that there's power even in these little connections — and in conversation, cooperation and community. There is power where we come together, when we are no longer strangers and no longer estranged from each other. There would be power in an international congress where people from all around Lake Superior gathered to talk about responsible development. This isn't the power the mining companies and the state can wield; it's another kind of power, coordinated, collective, non-coercive, one we as a society have not done enough to realize.
We're going to need that power to meet this current set of challenges.
Now you may have noticed that I keep using the word "we," and I'm conscious that by including myself here I might be overstepping and intruding. But maybe that's why I keep coming back to the UP: deep down, I know this is not a faraway or a strange place but a familiar place, where I have a stake in things — where we all have a stake.
The "wild UP" that we are organized to save is not just wilderness, waterfalls, wolves and warblers. It is the stage of humanity's tragic predicament. It marks a boundary that we cross at our great peril. It can be a vital source of economic and social renewal.
Ultimately, saving the wild UP is about realizing the power and political authority we all have, everyone in this room, people across the UP and around the lake, to govern ourselves and make decisions about the future we want. What do we see on the horizon? What do we want for our children, grandchildren, our great-grandchildren and so on down the line? What do future generations require of us? What do we owe them?
That's a conversation we need to keep having. And that's why this organization deserves all the support we can give it, because Save the Wild UP connects us and shows us that we can be both powerful and responsible at the same time.
Thanks for listening so patiently, and thanks again for inviting me to the Gala.
delivered 5 December 2015
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Governance, Lake Superior, Language, Louis V. Galdieri's Blog, Prosperity and tagged 1913 Massacre, anthropocene, China, Climate Change, COP21, copper, corporate governance, corporate malfeasance, corporate social responsibility, cost, CSR, development, documentary, Eagle Mine, ecosystem services, environmental ethics, ESG, ethics, ethics of mining., historical awareness, history, human ingenuity, ingenuity, Lake Superior, Lake Superior mining, malfeasance, Mark Carney, Minas Gerais, mining, Mount Polley, natural capital, nature, political authority, Polymet, power, responsibility, Rio Tinto, risk, Salmon Trout River, Save the Wild UP, Sheldon Wolin, social conflict, sulfide mining, sustainability, Tom Power, tragedy of the horizon, Water, water pollution, wild, wilderness economics, wildness, Yellow Dog Plains, Yellow Dog River on December 6, 2015 by lvgaldieri.
The Political Project of MCRC v. EPA, 2
Second In A Series
Activists Afoot!
In this Greg Peterson photo from the Cedar Tree Institute site, Northern Great Lakes Synod Lutheran Bishop Thomas A. Skrenes blesses one of the trees faith congregations planted on Earth Day, 2009.
As I suggested in my first post in this series on MCRC v. EPA, the complaint filed by the Marquette County Road Commission would have us believe that "anti-mining" forces worked secretly with and even infiltrated the EPA, and the agency's objections to CR 595 followed a "predetermined plan." The EPA, it claims, had decided to oppose the haul road even before the MCRC application was reviewed.
This sounds like legitimate cause for concern: permit applications should be reviewed on their merits, not pre-judged and not according to some other anti- or pro- agenda. We certainly wouldn't want someone in the Environmental Protection Agency to be "pro-mining"; there are enough well-paid mining lobbyists already haunting the hallways in Lansing and Washington, DC. But in this case, the anti-mining label is being used as a term of opprobrium, and to distort and deliberately misrepresent what the Environmental Protection Agency is chartered and required by law to do: in short, to enforce the Clean Water Act and protect the environment.
When it comes to proving the insinuations it makes, the MCRC complaint offers slim evidence.
For example, the complaint makes a big fuss over a November 28, 2012 letter from Laura Farwell, who lives in the Marquette area and is described here as "a prominent environmental activist." The letter is addressed to Lynn Abramson, then a Senior Legislative Assistant for Senator Barbara Boxer, and Thomas Fox, Senior Counsel of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, asking them to "weigh-in" with the EPA on CR 595. (Exhibit 1).
EPA must determine whether to uphold its original objections to proposed County Road 595 under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act ("CWA"), pursuant to its supervisory authority over Michigan's delegated wetlands permitting program. Tom may remember that during the August 30, 2011 meeting at EPA Denise Keehner of EPA's office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds definitively reiterated EPA's position and stated that the haul road would not happen.
Thus, this letter is to request, respectfully, that you weigh-in as soon as possible with the EPA on its decision.
The MCRC complains about Farwell's use of the word "definitively" here and casts the 2011 meeting in a sinister light:
on August 30, 2011, a very different type of meeting regarding CR 595 took place at USEPA Headquarters in Washington, DC. MCRC was neither invited to nor informed of the meeting. In attendance (as far as is known at the present time) were top USEPA officials, Congressional staff, KBIC representatives, and a prominent environmental activist opposed to the construction of CR 595. It further appears that USEPA made no formal record of the meeting.
Without a formal record, it's impossible to know what transpired at this meeting, and if the complaint is going to rely on Farwell's memory of the conversation, then it should also take into account her intentions in paraphrasing and recounting it, one year after it took place. The language here — "a very different type of meeting," "neither invited nor informed," "as far as is known at the present time," "no formal record" — doesn't help in that regard, and it's meant to suggest that conjurations were already afoot.
It's clear the MCRC was not included in some discussions at EPA. There's nothing extraordinary or illicit about that. All concerned parties had been meeting with and petitioning the EPA for several years at this point. The complaint is still a long way from proving that the EPA "surreptitiously met with a number of environmental activists vocally opposed to the road," and an even longer way from proving that there was anything like an anti-mining coalition assembled in secret at the offices of the EPA.
In an ironic twist, these allegations of secrecy and whispering behind closed doors may come back to haunt the MCRC: at a Marquette County Board of Commissioners meeting this month, the Marquette County Road Commission itself faced accusations that it had violated the Open Meetings Act in planning to bring its suit against the EPA. Public officials who intentionally violate that act are ordinarily fined and incur other liabilities; in this case, there would be some eating of words as well.
By November 28, 2012, the EPA had, in fact, "decided against the proposed haul road," as Farwell puts it in the email she sent along with the letter to Abramson and Fox. The EPA had entered objections to the Woodland Road Application (in March, 2010) and announced their objections to CR 595 (in March, 2012). Even so, a Fall 2012 public meeting held by the EPA "in Marquette…for more input" had Farwell worried. She was not at all confident the EPA would uphold its original objections to the haul road. The matter was still far from being "definitively" settled.
Whatever reassurances Farwell was given at that 2011 meeting — or thought she had been given, or recalled having been given, one year later — were clearly at risk of getting lost in the bureaucratic shuffle. The purpose of her letter is to prevent that.
There is nothing surprising in all this. Those watching new mining developments in the Upper Peninsula are constantly having to chase after the EPA and demand that the regulator step in and do its job.
Jeffery Loman, a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and a former federal regulator, has repeatedly put the EPA on notice and complained of the agency's failure to enforce the Clean Water Act.
In May of this year, the grassroots environmental group Save the Wild UP filed a petition with the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board, arguing that Eagle Mine was issued the wrong regulatory permit. The appeal requested that the EPA require Eagle Mine to obtain a Clean Water Act permit in order to protect the Salmon Trout River and other surface waters from the discharge of mining effluent. The Appeals Board did not contest the facts put forward in the petition, but dismissed it for lack of jurisdiction. They hardly proved themselves to be staunch allies.
So watchdogs and environmental groups, too, have reason to gripe about the EPA and often feel powerless in the face of bureaucratic inertia and ineptitude. Laura Farwell herself seems to have felt that way, and that's why we find her asking Abramson and Fox for help. The MCRC complaint exaggerates her influence at the EPA when it describes her as "a prominent environmental activist." The epithet is used here to create the misleading impression that within the offices of EPA Region 5 and the confines of Marquette County there are political opponents with resources to match the power of multi-billion dollar, multinational mining companies.
Laura Farwell and her husband Frank moved to the area in 2006 from Madison, Wisconsin. They are members of the St. Paul Episcopal Church and participate, along with their son Cody, in the church's Earth Day tree plantings. The couple donated some money to the UP Land Conservancy. Farwell has also organized events for the Cedar Tree Institute, which works to bridge "faith communities and environmental groups." (She is described on the Institute's site as "a concerned mother and local citizen.") She is thanked for "working quietly behind the scenes" in a 2011 Earth Keeper TV video on the environmental risks posed by the Eagle Mine; and she's copied along with many other local citizens in a Google Group post dated April 9, 2012, urging people to comment on CR 595 before the public comment period is closed.
Farwell's commitments to land conservation are pretty clear, and while the complaint asks us to recoil in horror at the phrase "prominent environmental activist," cooler heads are just as likely to be impressed by Farwell's dedication to the people around her and the place where she lives. Maybe that dedication is all it takes to be a prominent environmental activist in the view of the Marquette County Road Commission.
Some locals, on the other hand, are legitimately concerned that nationally and internationally prominent environmentalists — like Bill McKibben, George Monbiot, Naomi Klein and their ilk — ignore the current situation around Lake Superior, or fail to give it the serious attention it deserves. National media have barely taken notice. Farwell herself admits that to the great and powerful in Washington DC "the proposed haul road may seem like some little back trail in the middle of nowhere," but she urges that it will cut through "critical wetlands resources" and "enable the industrializing of this rural Great Lakes watershed by international mining interests."
Farwell's letter tries to create some urgency around the CR 595 issue by putting the road in context and specifying whose interests would be served by the industrializing of the region. A serious assessment of CR 595 would significantly widen the lens, taking into account the cumulative effects of all the new mining activities around Lake Superior: all leasing, exploration, development and active mining throughout northern Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ontario. Otherwise, we miss the big picture, and without that perspective, it's just too easy to parcel out the land, the water, and the future of the region to the highest bidders.
The MCRC complaint, too, places CR 595 in the context of "mining and economic development in the Great Lakes region" in a few places, but only to make the specious argument that those who oppose or question the road are opposed to mining and therefore opposed to the region's prosperity. These are the ideological leaps the complaint makes. Those who don't make these leaps are called activists or anti-mining obstructionists. That is a political, not a legal argument.
It's never too late to have a serious discussion of what sustainable economic development and true prosperity for the Great Lakes region might look like. How might we best organize our lives together in this place? is a fundamental political question. But at this juncture, it appears, the MCRC can't afford to let that conversation happen. This lawsuit is an attempt to shut it down and stifle dissent. Where business leads, society must obediently follow. To question this order of things, as Laura Farwell seems to have repeatedly done, quietly, behind the scenes, is to commit some kind of nefarious act.
This is where the attitude on display in this complaint gets worrisome. With this lawsuit, the MCRC pretends to have the political authority to direct economic development in the region (not just to build and repair roads). But that is only pretense, and things in Marquette County are not as they appear. The public still does not know who is funding the Road Commission lawsuit, what they stand for and what they expect in return for their support. The real powers lurk behind the scenes.
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Lake Superior, Louis V. Galdieri's Blog, Prosperity and tagged 501c4, anti-mining, Bill McKibben, Cedar Tree Institute, Clean Water Act, corporate political activity, corruption, County Road 595, CR 595, Eagle Mine, Earth Day, environmental ethics, environmental politics, environmentalism, EPA, George Monbiot, Jeffery Loman, Laura Farwell, Lundin Mining, Lynn Abramson, Marquette County, Marquette County Road Commission, Marquette County Road Commission v. EPA, MCRC v. EPA, mining, Naomi Klein, Open Meetings Act, political authority, politics, power, Save the Wild UP, secrecy, Stand U.P., Thomas Fox, Tom Casperson, Water on July 23, 2015 by lvgaldieri.
First in a Series
Ore trucks from Lundin Mining's Eagle Mine make their way down the Triple A road.
I've just gotten around to reading the complaint filed on July 8th in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, Northern Division, by the Marquette County Road Commission against the EPA. The complaint alleges that the EPA's repeated objections to County Road 595 — that the road will threaten and destroy wetlands, streams and protected wildlife in its way — are "arbitrary and capricious" and in violation of Section 404(J) of the Clean Water Act. The Road Commission asks the court to set aside the EPA's Final Decision against the building of County Road 595, restore Michigan Department of Environmental Quality's authority to permit the road, and bar the EPA from further interference in the matter.
While it may take the court some time to decide whether MCRC v. EPA has any legal merit, the complaint is written to serve other ends as well: political objectives. The complaint is aligned with efforts in Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere, to ease regulations, subvert the legal authority of the EPA and whip up anger against the federal government; and the plaintiffs appear to be connected, through their attorneys, to one of the most powerful Republican party fundraisers and a network of ultra-wealthy political donors.
The MCRC complaint directs ire against a familiar cadre of enemies — environmental "activists," overreaching federal bureaucrats and the area's indigenous community; and it pretends to discover a dark conspiracy, in which these groups meet "surreptitiously," write "sarcastically" about mining interests, and collude to block economic development. In fact, it's often hard to decide whether the arguments and evidence assembled in this complaint are meant to serve as legal fodder or support political posturing. So I thought I would try to sort through them in a short series of posts on the CR 595 lawsuit.
There is the tiresome pretense throughout the complaint that CR 595 would serve as something other than a haul route from the Eagle Mine to the Humboldt Mill, and that the road will benefit the public as much as the mining company. While the mining company says it is committed to making do with current infrastructure, the public clearly deserves some relief: trucks hauling ore on a makeshift route from Eagle have already been involved in a few scary accidents, and it remains a question whether cars can safely share the same road, especially an icy winter road, with ore trucks trying to beat the clock. People are understandably concerned, too, about big trucks loaded with sulfide ore barreling through the city of Marquette.
The public has another cause for grievance, and it makes for some angry foot stomping in the complaint: the MCRC spent millions to prepare for EPA reviews of the CR 595 application and failed repeatedly to win approval. Both time and money were wasted, the complaint says, not due to incompetence, stubbornness or denial, but because the EPA was never going to give the Road Commission a fair hearing. It's in this connection that the complaint tries to lay out an "anti-mining" conspiracy between the EPA and environmental activists and the indigenous community in the Great Lakes Basin, and where the arguments become specious and contorted.
In subsequent posts I'll address some of the ways MCRC v. EPA constructs this anti-mining strawman in order to mount a political offensive; and throughout this series, I'm going to be asking whether the "anti-mining" label correctly characterizes the evidence brought by the MCRC. I think it's fair to say from the outset that it does not accurately represent the priorities and commitments of people and groups concerned about the construction of CR 595. It's reductive, and turns road skeptics into industry opponents. To be against this particular haul road — or hold its planners to the letter of the law — is not necessarily to pit yourself against the entire mining industry.
The anti-mining label deliberately confuses haul-road opposition with opposition to the mining industry in order to coerce people into going along with the haul road or risk losing their livelihood, or at least the jobs and economic prosperity promised when mining projects are pitched. The MCRC complaint goes even further: it conflates mining with economic development — or reduces all economic development in the region to mining — and so runs roughshod over the thoughtful arguments of people like Thomas M. Power, who has studied the ways mining can restrict and quash sustainable economic development.
The anti-mining label fences ordinary people in, distorts and exaggerates their legitimate concerns, and does not recognize that people might come to the CR 595 discussion from all different places. Most don't arrive as members of some anti-industry coalition; they are fishermen, residents, property owners, teachers, hunters, parents, hikers, snowmobilers, birdwatchers, loggers, parishioners, kayakers, merchants, and so on. Some are many of these things all at once.
The label is fundamentally disrespectful: it refuses to meet people on their own terms and fails to ask what any of the people who oppose CR 595 actually stand for. What do they want for the area? What do they value and love? What do they envision for the future? Where do they have shared interests? Where do they have real differences? How can we work together? The anti-mining label forecloses all those questions. Instead, people are divided. The label demands that everybody take one side or the other (and, as I learned in the course of my work on 1913 Massacre, in the Upper Peninsula that demand has deep historical roots in the labor conflicts of the early twentieth century; but, no worries, in this series of posts I'll try to stay focused on the present).
I have always had trouble with the idea that "anti-" and "pro-" mining positions should govern the way we talk about the environmental regulation of mining. I myself can easily slip into this way of talking. But as I tried to explain in an exchange on this blog with Dan Blondeau of Eagle Mine, that way of thinking impedes and short-circuits important conversations about the ethics of mining. Playing the anti-mining card reduces the questions of whether and how mining can be done responsibly — in this place, by that company, at this time — to mere pro and contra. It's a dangerous ruse: instead of identifying risks and addressing responsibilities, it generates social conflict.
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Lake Superior, Prosperity and tagged 1913 Massacre, anti-mining, business, Clean Water Act, Clean Water Rule, Club for Growth, coercion, copper mining, corporate social responsibility, corruption, County Road 595, CR 595, Dan Blondeau, Eagle Mine, environmental ethics, environmental politics, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, ethics of mining., freshwater, Great Lakes, Lake Superior, Lundin Mining, Marquette, Marquette County Road Commission, Marquette County Road Commission v. EPA, MCRC v. EPA, MDEQ, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, mining, mining ethics, nickel mining, ore trucks, politics, pro-mining, right wing politics, Section 404, social conflict, social responsibility, Upper Peninsula, Water, Watershed on July 22, 2015 by lvgaldieri.
Laudato Si' on Mining
The views of mining we find in the new papal encyclical Laudato Si' clearly reflect the Latin American experience — centuries of plunder and absconded wealth, industrial development and economic underdevelopment, violence and ruin, degradation of the land and destruction of communities where mining is done. But in its careful attention to issues of water, water access, and the condition of the world's poor, the encyclical raises serious questions about mining and the ethics of mining everywhere in the world.
Laudato Si' explicitly addresses mining in three places, raising the very same issues that I've been writing about here, in connection with the new mining around Lake Superior. So I thought I would set out these passages for consideration now, with the intention of returning to them after I have had a chance to read the encyclical more carefully.
The first explicit mention of mining in Laudato Si' comes at 29, which deals with the "serious problem" of "the quality of water available to the poor."
Underground water sources in many places are threatened by the pollution produced in certain mining, farming and industrial activities, especially in countries lacking adequate regulation or controls. It is not only a question of industrial waste. Detergents and chemical products, commonly used in many places of the world, continue to pour into our rivers, lakes and seas.
At 51, one of the most powerful passages in the entire encyclical looks at the role of mining in creating an "ecological debt" of the global north to the global south, where raw materials are taken from the land for markets that serve the wealthy, industrialized north:
Inequity affects not only individuals but entire countries; it compels us to consider an ethics of international relations. A true "ecological debt" exists, particularly between the global north and south, connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment, and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time. The export of raw materials to satisfy markets in the industrialized north has caused harm locally, as for example in mercury pollution in gold mining or sulphur dioxide pollution in copper mining.
Quoting a 2009 Christmas Message from the Bishops of Patagonia-Comahue Region of Argentina, Laudato Si' goes on to explain that the industrialized world has incurred this debt because mining and other companies
operate in less developed countries in ways they could never do at home, in the countries in which they raise their capital: "We note that often the businesses which operate this way are multinationals. They do here what they would never do in developed countries or the so-called first world. Generally, after ceasing their activity and withdrawing, they leave behind great human and environmental liabilities such as unemployment, abandoned towns, the depletion of natural reserves, deforestation, the impoverishment of agriculture and local stock breeding, open pits, riven hills, polluted rivers and a handful of social works which are no longer sustainable."
Finally, at 146, the encyclical addresses the way mining projects degrade and destroy land that indigenous communities regard as "sacred space," often displacing them and threatening their very survival:
it is essential to show special care for indigenous communities and their cultural traditions. They are not merely one minority among others, but should be the principal dialogue partners, especially when large projects affecting their land are proposed. For them, land is not a commodity but rather a gift from God and from their ancestors who rest there, a sacred space with which they need to interact if they are to maintain their identity and values. When they remain on their land, they themselves care for it best. Nevertheless, in various parts of the world, pressure is being put on them to abandon their homelands to make room for agricultural or mining projects which are undertaken without regard for the degradation of nature and culture.
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Human Rights, Lake Superior, Prosperity, Readings and tagged Climate Change, dignity, ecological debt, encyclical, environmental ethics, ethics, ethics of mining., global south, indigenous, industrialization, Lake Superior, land, Laudato Si, mining, pollution, Pope Francis, sacred, sacred space, sulfide mining, water pollution on June 18, 2015 by lvgaldieri.
@tom_peters @_johnbarnes And right around 1970 a new figure appeared on the scene, sporting the moniker "CEO." 4 minutes ago
@willwilkinson The poor Roto-Rooter guy. 9 minutes ago


Currently there is not a time limit to how many times or how often you can access your purchases with Beirresistible.com.
However, if a charge back is filed by you with your bank on the order we do remove access.
Remember, you have up to 60 days from the date of purchase to request a refund. If you need a refund, you can easily open a support ticket here or call us at 1-800-755-4364.


Can you help clean up at Tentsmuir?
Fifers are being urged to lend a hand and help clean up one of the area's most popular beaches.
Dundee couple Fraser and Kath Clark have organised the Big Spring Beach Clean at Tentsmuir beach on April 14, as part of the wider project set up by Surfers Against Sewage.
Fifers are being encouraged to come along, pick up a recyclable bag, gloves, and litter picker and help clean the north east Fife beach.
Fraser described the beach at Tentsmuir as "close to our hearts", describing it as a "home from home".
"We've always gone there," he added. "We have an annual family gathering at the beach. And we go across for walks or take our bikes. You can switch off there.
"We've always wanted to give back. We always try to pick up some litter when we're there. And Tentsmuir suffers because of where it is situated – it gets a lot of sea-based rubbish.
Already, with weeks still to go, dozens of people have signed up to take part in the event, which Fraser hopes can become an annual beach clean.
The beach clean will be held on April 14 between 11am-3pm. Those helping are asked to meet at the car park.
The event is part of the larger project set up by Surfers Against Sewage, with beach cleans being organised across the UK between April 6-14. Since 2010, more than 74,500 people have taken part in over 1775 events, with around 152,741kg of marine litter being removed.


text:
Little Talks - Of Monsters and Men piano sheet music
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Little Talks description
"Little Talks" is the debut single by the Icelandic indie folk/indie pop rock band Of Monsters and Men. The song was released as the lead single from their debut studio album, My Head Is an Animal (2012). According to Hilmarsdóttir, the song describes two loving people talking past each other and implies one is recently deceased, saying "maybe one person isn't really hearing the other one." The song was inspired by an old house she moved into. Show Little Talks piano sheet
Of Monsters and Men description
Of Monsters and Men is a six-piece indie folk/indie pop band from Iceland, formed in 2010. The members are lead singer/guitarist Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir, co-singer/guitarist Ragnar "Raggi" Þórhallsson, guitarist Brynjar Leifsson, drummer Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson, keyboard player Árni Guðjónsson and bassist Kristján Páll Kristjánsson. The band won the Músíktilraunir in 2010, an annual battle of the bands competition in Iceland. In 2011, Of Monsters and Men released an EP entitled Into the Woods. The band's debut album My Head Is an Animal (2011), peaked at No. 6 on the US Billboard 200 album chart, No. 3 in the UK and also reached other European charts. Its lead single "Little Talks" was an international success, reaching the Top 20 in over five countries and No. 1 on US Alternative Songs. More piano sheets by Of Monsters and Men
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Atomic Kitten - The Last Goodbye
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Anouk - The Other Side of Me
Orange Blue - Can Somebody Tell Me Who I Am?
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Arturo Correa is a Venezuelan-American contemporary visual artist and is featured in Miami's Wynwood Arts District. Correa's style offers an "intense and painstaking labor dedicated to explore the chaos of human nature through painting, in a constant quest to fathom the mysteries of life". In Correa's paintings, whether on canvas or wood, a particular aesthetic language can be perceived, resulting from a colorful mixture of figuration and abstraction, in their form as well as their concept, related to the combination of his Latin American roots and the Anglo American side of his personality. Correa's long and established artistic career consists of numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Venezuela.


European leaders lost no time on Friday in offering David Cameron talks on EU reform, bidding to ease uncertainty about Britain's future in the bloc ahead of the in-or-out referendum the prime minister will call now he has been re-elected.
France's Socialist president Francois Hollande invited the triumphant Conservative to Paris once he has formed a government in which, confounding opinion polls, he will no longer have to rely on coalition partners like the arch-europhile Liberal Democrats.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU's new chief executive whose team is already working to cut the kind of red tape and interference that angers many Britons, sees scope for reform short of major treaty changes and told Cameron: "I stand ready to work with you to strike a fair deal for the United Kingdom in the EU."
Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and leaders of the EU institutions in Brussels should offer a variety of fixes for gripes the generally pro-Europe leader of an often eurosceptical party says must be sorted out before he puts British membership to an unpredictable popular vote within a couple of years.
But the EU executive again stressed that there could be no renegotiation of basic treaties that irk Britons opposed to immigration from poorer EU states. In any case, as Hollande will surely tell Cameron, governments like Paris, which need referendums to ratify treaties, are in no position to get such measures past their own increasingly europhobic electorates.
European Commission President Juncker is also ready for talks and said he looked forward to hearing concrete proposals from Cameron, who has listed a number of general demands since promising the plebiscite in early 2013 to appease Conservative eurosceptics and outflank the rising UK Independence Party.
After two years of saying little and quietly hoping the issue might go away if Cameron lost power, EU leaders woke up on Friday realising they now must confront the problem head on.
For all the exasperation with Britain's love-hate relationship with the continent, most think the Union would be weakened by the loss of its second biggest economy, a global commercial power with significant military and diplomatic clout.
Paris and Berlin are ready to study British demands for EU reform "if that allowed them to argue for staying in the EU", a French government source told Reuters.
Stefani Weiss at German think-tank the Bertelsmann Stiftung in Brussels said other leaders had been unwilling to engage with Cameron while he was still only campaigning for re-election.
"This changes now. The Germans will be very forthcoming," she said, but warned that migration control was off-limits for nearly all other EU leaders. "There is a clear camp which wants to keep the UK, but also not at any price."
Those hoping for least disruption in the EU hope Cameron can use the surprising scale of his personal victory to sell a modest package of measures, some already in hand, to voters who recent polls suggest are more minded to stay in the EU.
While some Conservatives may demand more than the bloc is willing to concede in the way of sovereignty, Cameron may be able to curb any appetite for Brexit by using the threat of nationalist Scots breaking with London should it quit the EU.
Donald Tusk, the former Polish premier who chairs EU summits, praised Britain's "common sense" contribution to the Union and made a personal appeal to Cameron not to give in to compatriots who feel stifled by EU regulation.
"The United Kingdom plays a key role in ensuring that Europe has a common sense agenda, keeping the emphasis on a competitive economy through an effective single market, non-intrusive regulation, openness to trade with other nations, and a confident foreign policy," he said. "Objectives which I share."
Tusk, as president of the European Council which groups the 28 national leaders, will have a crucial role in forging any consensus on changing rules. An EU official said he would be keen to avoid a 27-against-1 row that could destabilise the EU.
Rather Tusk will try to generate a "positive debate" around making the bloc more efficient and more business-friendly.
Though some federalist voices, including former French premier Michel Rocard, have said so-called "Brexit" would remove a barrier to the "ever closer union" to which London is firmly opposed, many in France see Britain as a valuable counterweight to Germany, now Europe's clear economic and political leader.
Like Tusk, Juncker will play a key role along with Merkel and Hollande, both of whom have ruled out treaty change.
Despite Cameron's failed single-handed bid to stop Juncker's appointment last year -- alleging the Luxembourger wanted an EU super-state -- EU officials say the Commission chief is determined to forge a compromise.
Cameron's business allies want Britain to stay in the EU but the prime minister also needs something to show voters he has secured concessions, notably on being able to curb welfare benefits for migrants from poorer EU states, restoring powers to national parliaments and protecting London's financial market interests from being locked out of a more integrated euro zone.
With a first major debate likely at an EU summit in Brussels on June 25, Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, told Reuters said both sides would have to work fast to get any deal in place before Cameron must go to the country by 2017.
"Brussels will have to be open minded and listen to Cameron. Some substantive accord is needed and Tusk is the key person here. Berlin will also be very important," he said.
"Cameron now needs to reengage with Europe. He needs to come across with reform proposals that are achievable."
Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform in London, said Cameron could highlight the programme of cutting bureaucracy and interference as well as plans to improve free trade inside the bloc that is already under way under Juncker.
"They'll have to dress that up to claim it's a British achievement," he said. "But it's happening already."
Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations in London said Cameron had spoken of a need to change treaties but would have to accept the best he might get could be pledges to make amendments later when broader changes may be taking place.
"A lot of what he wants can be done with protocols and secondary legislation," Leonard said, noting Juncker's offers to stop short only of "major treaty change".
Michael Emerson, a long-time EU official and diplomat now at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, said the EU could, for example, offer some minor new regulations to make clear people cannot migrate across the bloc simply to claim benefits -- a view already supported last year by EU courts.
"Whereas the English Tories may be baying for blood," he said, "The Scottish factor will restrain him rather as the LibDems did in the last parliament."


text:
Iran pushes app with 'Death to America' emoji
By News from Elsewhere...
...as found by BBC Monitoring
duration 25 April 2018
image copyrightSoroush
image caption"Death to America", "Death to Freemasons" and "Let's go pray" are among the stickers available for users
Iran is promoting a domestically-produced mobile messaging app, complete with a "Death to America" emoji, in an attempt to get millions of Iranians to abandon the popular Telegram service, which it blames for promoting unrest in the country.
Among the features on new app Soroush are a series of emojis featuring a chador-clad woman clutching a picture of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and placards wishing death to Israel, America and Freemasons.
The Soroush app is even the subject of a competition in the country's elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, where five lucky people will be given gold coins for signing up. The competition was announced on the Force's Telegram channel.
Ayatollah Khamenei has emerged as a champion of the new app, closing down his account on Telegram and telling users to do the same and sign up to the Iranian-produced service.
"The activities of the presidency's Telegram channel have stopped in support of domestic messaging apps," state broadcaster IRIB also reported last week.
image captionMillions of Iranians rely on their mobile devices for news and business
Some 50 million Iranians, attracted by Telegram's strong security and privacy features, use the app. But the authorities blame its use for the spread of anti-establishment protests in the country in December.
Soroush, which currently claims five million users, closely resembles Telegram in that it allows users to join channels, follow news, and conduct business online. But users don't seem to be buying assurances by officials - including the Supreme Leader himself - that user privacy will be fully protected on the domestic app.
One joke doing the rounds on social media says that Soroush's three-tick message receipt notification (as opposed to Telegram's two ticks) confirms that an intelligence officer has read the message in addition to the sender and receiver.
image captionSoroush comes with tools to help users migrate their data from Telegram
Telegram vs Tehran and Moscow
Iran's Supreme Cyberspace Council has issued a ban on the use of foreign apps by public institutions, amid reports that Telegram, as the most popular messaging app in Iran, may be blocked by the Iranian government any time.
The Islamic Republic wants Telegram to abide by its laws, a demand which has been repeatedly turned down by the company's Russian founder Pavel Durov, who says Telegram will always "stand for freedom and privacy".
Telegram was banned recently in Russia after Mr Durov refused to hand over encryption keys to the authorities.
Meanwhile, Iran's Supreme Leader, president and other officials are still posting on their accounts on Twitter, which is still officially banned in Iran, and Ayatollah Khamenei's office is still active on Facebook. The Supreme Leader has seven pages on Twitter in different languages.
image copyrightTwitter
image captionSupreme Leader Ali Khamenei has nearly half a million followers on his English-language Twitter account
Reporting by Alistair Coleman
Next story: Chinese university hosts grenade-throwing contest
Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter.
BBC Monitoring
Ali Khamenei


. are the greatest piano composers, ranked from best to worst by Classical music fans. 81 50. Scott Joplin is listed (or ranked) 14 on the list The Best Piano.
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text:
Amani-nataki-lebte fue rey de Kush (Nubia) entre los años 538 a. C. - 519 a. C., del llamado período Napata. Otras grafías de su nombre son: Amaninatakilebte, Amaninatakelebte, Netaklatathamen.

Biografía

Fue hijo del rey Analmaye, quien reinó entre el 542 y el 538 a. C. y a su muerte le sucedió en el trono. Tomó el nombre real de AachepeRe ("Re es aquel cuyas manifestaciones son grandes"). No se conoce el nombre de Horus, lo que es común en el período.

Durante su reinado se produjo la invasión de Egipto por el rey persa Cambises II.
Conquistado rápida y brutalmente Egipto, Cambises envió espías a Meroe. Según Heródoto, Cambises envió para la supuesta embajada a "Ictiófagos", habitantes de la costa del mar Rojo (en la latitud de Elefantina) que hablaban la lengua kushita. Llevaban como presentes un vestido de púrpura, un collar de oro, brazaletes, un bote de alabastro con ungüentos, y vino fenicio.

Amani-nataki-lebte no se engañó al respecto. Trató con desprecio los regalos y dio la siguiente respuesta:

«Ni ese rey de los Persas los envía con esos presentes para honrarse de ser mi amigo y huésped, ni vosotros decís la verdad pues, lo entiendo claramente, venís como espías. El no tiene nada de príncipe justo y hombre recto, pues de serlo, no desearía más imperio que el suyo, ni intentaría sojuzgar a los pueblos que en nada le han ofendido. Para abreviar, entregadle de mi parte este arco que tenso, y dadle esta respuesta formal: Le aconsejo al rey de los Persas en nombre de la paz, que no nos haga la guerra fiado en el número de vasallos en que es tan superior sino sólo cuando vea que sus Persas encorvan arcos de este tamaño con tanta facilidad como yo ahora doblo éste; y que mientras no los vea capaces de hacerlo, dé muchas gracias a los dioses por no inspirar a nuestro pueblo el deseo de hacer nuevas conquistas.»

Cambises, al recibir el mensaje, furioso por la respuesta, sin dilación ni provisión de bastimentos, destacó sus mejores hombres (unos 50 000 según el historiador griego) contra los amonios del Oasis de Siwa, y con el grueso de sus tropas marchó contra Kush.

El primer ejército fue «tragado» por el desierto, y se lo recuerda como el «Ejército perdido de Cambises». La segunda operación no fue tan desastrosa pero tampoco alcanzó sus objetivos.
A una quinta parte del trayecto se le acabaron los víveres, con lo que tuvieron que sobrevivir en el terreno. Continuando el avance llegaron a los arenales, y ante el hambre, según Heródoto, las tropas llegaron a «diezmar» (sortear uno de cada diez hombres para alimentarse). Cambises dio fin a la campaña y retrocedió a Tebas con numerosas bajas.

Si bien Heródoto plantea que la invasión fracasó por completo, los registros persas indican que al menos la parte norte del país fue efectivamente ocupada.

Amani-nataki-lebte murió en 519 a. C. y le sucedió su hijo Karkamani. Fue enterrado en la necrópolis de Nuri. Su pirámide es la clasificada como Nº 10. En su tumba se encontró un cilindro de oro, un espejo de plata con incrustaciones de oro, de 14 × 17,8 cm, con la imagen de un papiro y un pectoral de oro con la imagen de una Isis alada (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Referencias

Bibliografía
 Federico Lara Peinado, Estudio Histórico del entorno geográfico de Debod. Universidad Complutense de Madrid
 Adams, W.Y., Nubia, Corridor to Africa, Princeton Univ Pr (September 1984), ISBN 0-691-09370-9
 Desroches Noblecourt, Ch., Las ruinas de Nubia. La gran epopeya de la Egiptología, Barcelona, 1997. ISBN 84-233-2591-1
 Edwards, David N., The Nubian Past, An Archaeology of the Sudan, 2004, ISBN 0-415-36988-6
 László Török, The Kingdom of Kush: handbook of the Napatan-Meroitic civilization, BRIL, 1997, ISBN 90-04-10448-8
 Desmond J. Clark, Roland Anthony Oliver, J. D. Fage, G. N. Sanderson, A. D. Roberts, Richard Gray, John Flint, Michael Crowder, The Cambridge History of Africa, Cambridge University Press, 1975, ISBN 0-521-21592-7
 Heródoto, Historia, Libro tercero XVII-XXV

Enlaces externos

 Sitios Arqueológicos, Región Napata
 Archaeology in Sudan
 The International Society for Nubian studies
 The nubian net
 Halsell
 The Oriental Institute of Chicago
 Society of Africanist Archaeologists
 Seminario Arqueología y Cultura Norafricana, Univ.Humboldt, Berlín

Imágenes

 Figura funeraria de la tumba de Amani Nataki Lebte
 Espejo de plata, tumba de Amani Nataki Lebte

Reyes de Kush
Reyes del siglo VI a. C.
África en el siglo VI a. C.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


This course will teach you how to work with and lead your team through a project.
Start-up Meeting - Project success depends on everyone having a shared vision of the project and knowing what they have to do. The start-up meeting clarifies these matters before you begin.
Team Leadership - Project management is about people management. You need to be able to motivate your team and lead them toward completion.
Project Communication - Who, what, when, how: not everyone needs to know all the details. Good project communication is about giving people the information that they need to know when they need to know it.


This musical biography tells the story of the making of Deep Purple's classic album "Machine Head. Exclusive interviews with Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, John Lord and Ian Paice take us through a track by track making of the album. The performers demonstrate riffs & licks from the songs and explain the genesis of the songwriting. Also included are featured songs, archive footage of Deep Purple in concert, including American footage of "Smoke on the Water" and "Space Truckin'", TV performances and promotional videos, more.


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