Bob CollinsOne doesn’t have to go to Appalachia to see the poverty and ghost towns from failed and abandoned mining. One need only take a relatively short drive from Minnesota to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where copper mining isn’t what it once was. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Tag: Mining
The Mesabi Daily News has had it with the big-city folk trying to destroy the Iron Range’s way of life. Read more →
There’s really not a lot of new information in the Washington Post’s documentation today of the economic tsunami that’s wiping out the Iron Range. But the domestic economic collapse hasn’t gotten anywhere near the attention it deserves, at least from a human scale. Read more →
The Iron Range has always been the land of boom times and bust, but the country is full of decaying cities where people once waited for a bust to end and the status quo to return. Read more →
The state’s grand champion jack pine tree is no more.
It was a good run for the tree in a Mountain Iron neighborhood — two days, according to the Duluth News Tribune.
But after receiving its crown, it was cut down.
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A mining company employing 1,850 employees at three plants in Minnesota is warning politicians not to help out another company that plans to have 300 employees at a taconite plant. Read more →
Explorers Dave and Amy Freeman have made it to Washington in their effort to canoe to the nation’s capital by canoe to lobby against copper mining around the Boundary Waters.
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For more than a year, Dave and Amy Freeman, of Grand Marais, have been planning a canoe trip to Washington as a way to call attention to — and protest — plans for copper mining in northeast Minnesota which they say threatens the wilderness.
Yesterday, they left.
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Opponents of frac sand mining in Winona County have lost a legal challenge at the Minnesota Court of Appeals.
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The Minnesota Court of Appeals today rejected an attempt to stop the state’s sale of mining leases without any environmental review. Read more →
The tension is certainly rising in northern Wisconsin where the presence this week of paramilitary guards has ratcheted up the controversy over a proposed open-pit iron mine. Gogebic Taconite isn’t backing down from its decision to bring in the security force from an Arizona firm, citing a June confrontation between opponents of the mine and Read more →