My dentist recently mentioned that his daughter was accepted into dental school, but he was uncertain if there was a viable future for her on the Iron Range, even in his long-established business. "She wants to live up here," he said, "but … you know."
The thorny Range economy is again news, reporters citing the "boom-and-bust" nature of taconite as if fulfilling a stylistic mandate. But that rusty cliché masks a more pertinent truth: For more than 70 years, mining employment on the Range has been in decline. In his book "Taconite Dreams," historian Jeffrey T. Manuel writes, "In 1944, more than eleven thousand workers labored at ninety-five iron-ore mines in Minnesota. By 2011, only seven mines were left in the state and they employed fewer than four thousand workers." Despite occasional upticks, the long-haul trend is inexorably downslope.
There is no single cause. Automation, globalization, corporate greed and the inherently unsustainable nature of mineral extraction all contribute. I live 12 miles from the Hibbing Taconite mine and processing plant that's been operational for more than four decades, and I know many who work there. I've asked what they're hearing. How long before HibTac plays out? I've been told four years, six years, 10 years. Probably none of those is correct, but the ultimate answer is clear: It's going to shut down — all mines do — and likely sooner rather than later.
And yet, just recently I drove along a stretch of St. Louis County Road 5 that I've traveled all my life. Within a year it will be devoured by the expansion of the HibTac mine. Across a narrow swath of scarified earth that was lately forest, I saw the boom of a shovel looming over the rim of the new pit. Students of history know that roads are sacred to civilization, but there's a limit to that regard in mining country. Even towns have vanished, casualties of the "creative destruction" of capitalism.
As early as 1909, the exhaustion of iron mines seemed imminent to engineers, and before the passage of the Taconite Amendment in 1964 spawned a resurgence of production due to the capture of lower-grade ore, state government officials figured the solution to the Iron Range's chronic economic problems was a massive out-migration of its citizens. How American is that? Our prosperity and pluralism have often been rescued by the relief valve of immense geography. Not enough jobs where you are? Head out, usually westward. Your beliefs are out of sync with your neighbors? Pull up stakes and leave, usually westward. Note that we've long since reached the Pacific.
I was born and raised on the Iron Range. My father was a driller/blaster for U.S. Steel, more specifically the Oliver Iron Mining Co., or "John Oliver" in local jargon. In Chisholm in the late 1950s, I went to bed lulled by a shift whistle in the Sherman Mine, a kind of industrial loon song. A kid I grew up with, playing together with our brothers in a sandbox next to my house, is now in the state Legislature. Last year, I wrote him a letter complaining that the U.S. Steel MinnTac plant has been in violation of its water discharge permit for more than two decades. I opined that we either needed to enforce the law or change it, and that if we're unable to control the wastewater of relatively benign taconite, then how could we possibly trust that the proposed sulfide mining, with a worldwide record of spectacular water contamination, will not also be allowed to pollute regardless of regulations? In an acerbic, irritated way, I expressed skepticism that U.S. Steel would abandon northeastern Minnesota simply because it was forced to obey the law. The threat of such abandonment has been the political subtext of more than one Iron Range legislator's criticism of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
My old playmate detonated. Matching my provoked tone, he opened his letter with: "We aren't playing in the sandbox anymore." I took that to mean he considered my comments naive, and it's possible I am that. He complained that environmental regulations had become "extreme." He chided me for using the term "sulfide mining," as opposed to "copper/nickel mining," even though the industry itself employs the former. He mentioned "questionable science" regarding the sulfate standard for wild rice, a bone of contention for taconite tailings pond discharges. He wrote: "If it were up to the environmental groups they would shut down mining and logging completely and then we would turn into nothing but a wasteland for the city slickers to enjoy on their days off. … I'm sick and tired of listening to people who don't live where we live trying to tell us what we can and can't do."
That encapsulates the perceived conflict in any number of regions across the nation and the world. People whose main livelihood is resource extraction feel persecuted and misunderstood by citizens who lobby for the protection of water, air and soil quality. Although data show that antipollution measures created as many jobs as they eliminated in the 1970s and '80s, the advantages and disadvantages were not evenly distributed. "Nationwide," as Jeffrey Manuel writes, "enforcing pollution regulations often hardened a rural/urban divide over the environment."
