In the Michigan Immense Public Park, photo by Andy McFarlane

Welcome to a “Soapbox Saturday” on Michigan in Pictures, where your host takes you a little ways past “ain’t it cool” towards “ain’t it a shame.” Don’t worry though – it’s still cool. If it doesn’t seem cool – please click the photo above. I figured that since I was going to be sharing some personal feelings, I probably should use one of my own photos. This photo of my daughter exploring something on the Lake Michigan beach was taken a few years ago at the base of Pyramid Point in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. I had posted it in gratitude to the Michigan Supreme Court for upholding our right to walk the Great Lakes shore.

Flash forward to the present day when Michigan’s regulators appear poised to permit the first metallic sulfide mine in Michigan. Several years ago, my friend Dick Huey and a few others started a group called Save the Wild UP when Kennecott Minerals, a subsidiary of mining giant Rio Tinto (one of the world’s largest polluters), began the process of securing a permit for a sulfide mine north of Marquette. The proposed mine is located directly under the Salmon-Trout River on the wild and beautiful Yellow Dog Plains. This is state land, our land, and the Salmon-Trout flows just a few miles through it and then empties into Lake Superior. Over that time I’ve been working for them to maintain their web site and have learned a thing or two about “acid mining”.

Iron and copper mining are things that helped forge the character of the Upper Peninsula. You can think of traditional mining as picking the chocolate chips out of a cookie. Sulfide mining is like getting the sugar out of a cookie – a chemical rather than mechanical process that yields a dust as a by-product. If this dust mixes with water and air, it forms sulfuric acid aka battery acid. There has never been a sulfide mine with the potential to pollute ground or surface water that failed to do so. Sulfide mining has polluted 40% of the watersheds in the West, and you can read more of the facts about metallic sulfide mining at Save the Wild UP (has a nice video if you prefer).

A process with 100% failure rate of protecting water located directly under a pristine river that flows into the largest body of freshwater in the world seems like a bad idea. When you realize that they also plan to blow the sulfide dust into the air and that there are hundreds of other prospected sites waiting in the wings, it becomes terrifying. Michigan and the UP have a lot of challenges right now, but something we do have going for us is our water and wild places and the tourism dollars and jobs they generate. The picture to the right is a result of sulfide mining from Sudbury, Ontario. Multiply that across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and consider how many thousands of tourism jobs and millions of tourism and tax dollars might be lost.

One of the people who has considered this is a wonderful musician named Daisy May. She has donated a song called A Letter from Downstream to Save the Wild UP and I hope you take the time to listen to it and see the photos that folks have shared about what Michigan’s water means to them.

If you’re a Flickr member, consider adding a photo to the Downstream group.