I grew up there - Ironwood, Michigan. When we moved into town, the
neighbor kids all came around on their bikes and wondered why we were
moving in when everyone else was moving out. We didn’t understand the
question; we were just little boys.
My Dad was a pastor – he had two churches that merged into one as the population of the town dwindled. In the beginning, the churches were filled and there were lots of dads in the pews. And then there were less dads and then even less, finally it was mostly grandpas left and just a few dads; a few months after the dads disappeared their families left to join them. We didn’t understand that either.
My paper route dropped from 43 customers to 32 in less than a year. The kid with the adjacent route lost his in consolidation, and I picked up two of his blocks just to keep a critical mass of volume in my business. The kids who kept our routes were the ones willing to pedal farther for less. I have three graduate degrees in business that didn’t teach me anything half as valuable.
The houses across the street were first vacated and then torn town. I asked my Dad why all my friends were leaving. He said, “it’s complicated.” So I asked one of the other dads, and he said, “the unions did it.” I suppose if I had asked some different dad I would be President of the Steelworkers Union today instead of a libertarian Right To Work guy. It didn’t seem complicated to me then, and it still doesn’t – unions kill jobs.
A lot of the dads with skills hit the road when the mines shut down; a lot of those without skills hit the bottle or hit their kids, or hit the missus. Each successive graduation emptied the town of some more of its young – off to Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, college, or Viet Nam. Some came back to raise their families, or later to retire. The tough birds stuck it out - hard times conquered by even harder men. And women. I admire their perseverance and courage.
Some of the guys found jobs at the new ski hills, making a few bucks holding chairlifts all day for rich people from the cities and kicking back brandy in the warm-up shack on break. We locals used to hit them up for a snort and a Camel; we skied better with a package on than the snotty kids did with their new equipment and matching outfits who laughed at our accent. I couldn’t stand those city kids’ attitude back then, still don’t.
I think my class of ‘72 had about 240 kids in it; today there are only 218 in the whole high school. Ironwood kids still go to schools that the mines built almost 100 years ago. Many live in houses the mines originally built for their employees. I went to see Dr. Gallo at the mine clinic in Newport Location. I’ll bet that 99% of the opponents of mining don’t even know what a location is.
Ashland, Anvil. Aurora, Bonnie, Cary, Jessieville, Newport, Norrie, Pabst, Puritan, Yale, Castile, Wico, and the Resettlement – when you asked where something was, people told you the mine location, not the town or address. “Scoop’s Bar is in Jessieville” means you head for that headshaft and start to look around – Yooper GPS. There are men in their 90’s in Ironwood that are still “Norrie boys”.
The neighboring town of Hurley had 102 licensed taverns and a couple dozen off-book joints in its prime and its main street is only 3 blocks long – prosperity is fun. Today’s wild-oat-sowers have only a couple dozen to choose from, and they think they found Sin City. In Iron County, Wisconsin, the population has declined by 80% since the mines closed. I’d like to see Dane county manage through something actually difficult like that; that would knock some of that smug off ‘em.
At its peak, nearly 19,000 people lived across the river in the tamer city of Ironwood; today less than 16,000 live in all of Gogebic County. 17.6% of them live below the poverty line. The boom and bust cycle of mining has been smoothed out at bust for almost 50 years. 18 building permits were issued in 2010 - eighteen.
Mining did not devastate the Gogebic Range; it was the cessation of mining that devastated the Gogebic Range. If you were there, you know. Griff was, and Ken, and Lynn, John(s), Paula, Marianne, Frank, JD, Brad, and all my MOC fans from our little mining town who love it as much as I do. You know.
Half a century later, a proposed new mine in Iron County has met with vitriolic opposition, mostly from white-collar city liberals and largely over the irrational fears of environmental devastation. It is indeed beautiful in Iron County; anyone who would not be concerned about protecting nature’s magnificence there would be a fool. But it is precisely that pristine beauty that defeats the extremists’ argument.
Because that pristine wilderness, the one that we are told will be ruined forever if mining ever returns, is located over the same deposit where 1/3 of the nation’s iron was produced for over seven decades. 255 million tons have been taken from that ground and I would drink from any stream on the range today, just like I did when I was a kid and the mines were running full bore. We didn’t have bottled water; we had cupped hands. We didn’t wear helmets, either; and we ate our mom's sandwiches for lunch, and said the pledge of allegiance every single day. Still standing.
If mining really will ruin the environment forever, it would already be ruined many times over. The 80-mile Penokee-Gogebic range was home to 337 mines that operated during the 75 years that they mined iron like it would spoil if we left it in the ground. Three hundred and thirty seven.
And now a mining company wants to invest $1.5 billion of its own money to develop one mine – one - on its own land at the southwest end of the Range, creating thousands of jobs in a community which has been economically blighted for decades. Mine-site construction alone will employ skilled laborers and machinery operators from across the state and the region; we will all learn what a real stimulus feels like.
I know a little about the mining business, although our company does not stand to gain with this particular project. I have indeed seen landscapes around the world that have been ruined forever, and I can tell you that the safest and cleanest mine on the planet is the next one.
Blocking development of the Gogebic Taconite project will not save our planet; it will merely insure that the tons of ore left in the ground in Wisconsin will be replaced by increased production somewhere much less safe and much less clean. Little brown people in faraway places will die – that is the victory that mine blockers can celebrate if they succeed in stopping the Iron County mine.
Eventually, a new iron mine will open, but in some other town. And the people in that town will prosper, probably people with Chinese names you will find hard to pronounce. They will get the new schools, new roads, new water treatment plants, new businesses, new churches, and new hospitals that could have come to Iron County, just like they did a century ago. Someone else’s children will get braces, fashion, corrective surgery, or the chance to go to college. It will not be our children; it will be their children. We will be jealous of them.
So I say let’s mine it - let those kids be our kids. But my opinion about mining iron in Iron County is irrelevant, as is likely yours. There are only two groups of people who should have any say in the matter: the owners of the property and its mineral rights, and the owners of adjacent properties.
It is a local issue for a community to decide without interference from lawyers, Madison politicians, and professional obstacles. The only thing that government can do to bring prosperity to Iron County is to get out of the way and then stay there.
Everything is made out of something that was either grown or mined. It all has to come out of the ground somewhere. It would be a good thing for some of it to come out of the ground in Iron County, Wisconsin.
“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D. Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”
My Dad was a pastor – he had two churches that merged into one as the population of the town dwindled. In the beginning, the churches were filled and there were lots of dads in the pews. And then there were less dads and then even less, finally it was mostly grandpas left and just a few dads; a few months after the dads disappeared their families left to join them. We didn’t understand that either.
My paper route dropped from 43 customers to 32 in less than a year. The kid with the adjacent route lost his in consolidation, and I picked up two of his blocks just to keep a critical mass of volume in my business. The kids who kept our routes were the ones willing to pedal farther for less. I have three graduate degrees in business that didn’t teach me anything half as valuable.
The houses across the street were first vacated and then torn town. I asked my Dad why all my friends were leaving. He said, “it’s complicated.” So I asked one of the other dads, and he said, “the unions did it.” I suppose if I had asked some different dad I would be President of the Steelworkers Union today instead of a libertarian Right To Work guy. It didn’t seem complicated to me then, and it still doesn’t – unions kill jobs.
A lot of the dads with skills hit the road when the mines shut down; a lot of those without skills hit the bottle or hit their kids, or hit the missus. Each successive graduation emptied the town of some more of its young – off to Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, college, or Viet Nam. Some came back to raise their families, or later to retire. The tough birds stuck it out - hard times conquered by even harder men. And women. I admire their perseverance and courage.
Some of the guys found jobs at the new ski hills, making a few bucks holding chairlifts all day for rich people from the cities and kicking back brandy in the warm-up shack on break. We locals used to hit them up for a snort and a Camel; we skied better with a package on than the snotty kids did with their new equipment and matching outfits who laughed at our accent. I couldn’t stand those city kids’ attitude back then, still don’t.
I think my class of ‘72 had about 240 kids in it; today there are only 218 in the whole high school. Ironwood kids still go to schools that the mines built almost 100 years ago. Many live in houses the mines originally built for their employees. I went to see Dr. Gallo at the mine clinic in Newport Location. I’ll bet that 99% of the opponents of mining don’t even know what a location is.
Ashland, Anvil. Aurora, Bonnie, Cary, Jessieville, Newport, Norrie, Pabst, Puritan, Yale, Castile, Wico, and the Resettlement – when you asked where something was, people told you the mine location, not the town or address. “Scoop’s Bar is in Jessieville” means you head for that headshaft and start to look around – Yooper GPS. There are men in their 90’s in Ironwood that are still “Norrie boys”.
The neighboring town of Hurley had 102 licensed taverns and a couple dozen off-book joints in its prime and its main street is only 3 blocks long – prosperity is fun. Today’s wild-oat-sowers have only a couple dozen to choose from, and they think they found Sin City. In Iron County, Wisconsin, the population has declined by 80% since the mines closed. I’d like to see Dane county manage through something actually difficult like that; that would knock some of that smug off ‘em.
At its peak, nearly 19,000 people lived across the river in the tamer city of Ironwood; today less than 16,000 live in all of Gogebic County. 17.6% of them live below the poverty line. The boom and bust cycle of mining has been smoothed out at bust for almost 50 years. 18 building permits were issued in 2010 - eighteen.
Mining did not devastate the Gogebic Range; it was the cessation of mining that devastated the Gogebic Range. If you were there, you know. Griff was, and Ken, and Lynn, John(s), Paula, Marianne, Frank, JD, Brad, and all my MOC fans from our little mining town who love it as much as I do. You know.
Half a century later, a proposed new mine in Iron County has met with vitriolic opposition, mostly from white-collar city liberals and largely over the irrational fears of environmental devastation. It is indeed beautiful in Iron County; anyone who would not be concerned about protecting nature’s magnificence there would be a fool. But it is precisely that pristine beauty that defeats the extremists’ argument.
Because that pristine wilderness, the one that we are told will be ruined forever if mining ever returns, is located over the same deposit where 1/3 of the nation’s iron was produced for over seven decades. 255 million tons have been taken from that ground and I would drink from any stream on the range today, just like I did when I was a kid and the mines were running full bore. We didn’t have bottled water; we had cupped hands. We didn’t wear helmets, either; and we ate our mom's sandwiches for lunch, and said the pledge of allegiance every single day. Still standing.
If mining really will ruin the environment forever, it would already be ruined many times over. The 80-mile Penokee-Gogebic range was home to 337 mines that operated during the 75 years that they mined iron like it would spoil if we left it in the ground. Three hundred and thirty seven.
And now a mining company wants to invest $1.5 billion of its own money to develop one mine – one - on its own land at the southwest end of the Range, creating thousands of jobs in a community which has been economically blighted for decades. Mine-site construction alone will employ skilled laborers and machinery operators from across the state and the region; we will all learn what a real stimulus feels like.
I know a little about the mining business, although our company does not stand to gain with this particular project. I have indeed seen landscapes around the world that have been ruined forever, and I can tell you that the safest and cleanest mine on the planet is the next one.
Blocking development of the Gogebic Taconite project will not save our planet; it will merely insure that the tons of ore left in the ground in Wisconsin will be replaced by increased production somewhere much less safe and much less clean. Little brown people in faraway places will die – that is the victory that mine blockers can celebrate if they succeed in stopping the Iron County mine.
Eventually, a new iron mine will open, but in some other town. And the people in that town will prosper, probably people with Chinese names you will find hard to pronounce. They will get the new schools, new roads, new water treatment plants, new businesses, new churches, and new hospitals that could have come to Iron County, just like they did a century ago. Someone else’s children will get braces, fashion, corrective surgery, or the chance to go to college. It will not be our children; it will be their children. We will be jealous of them.
So I say let’s mine it - let those kids be our kids. But my opinion about mining iron in Iron County is irrelevant, as is likely yours. There are only two groups of people who should have any say in the matter: the owners of the property and its mineral rights, and the owners of adjacent properties.
It is a local issue for a community to decide without interference from lawyers, Madison politicians, and professional obstacles. The only thing that government can do to bring prosperity to Iron County is to get out of the way and then stay there.
Everything is made out of something that was either grown or mined. It all has to come out of the ground somewhere. It would be a good thing for some of it to come out of the ground in Iron County, Wisconsin.
“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D. Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”
