Activist: Don’t repeat history. Mines won’t save Upper Peninsula or climate

• An artist turned activist is leading the fight against renewed mining in the Upper Peninsula
• She lives in a cabin near a mine, prompting her opposition to more extraction
• Society is delaying a reckoning on climate change, overconsumption, she says 

An artist, author and anti-mining activist who splits her time between Marquette and an off-grid cabin in the Yellow Dog Plains, Kathleen Heideman doesn’t believe the solution to climate change is more extraction.

Companies seeking to expand mining in the Upper Peninsula, she said, may tout themselves as part of the solution to save the world by providing materials for electric batteries.  But that’s “greenwashing” to protect profits while avoiding a reckoning about overconsumption, Heideman says.

“We can’t use the same thinking that got us these problems, to fix these problems,” Heideman says. 

“Maybe less is an option.”

Heideman became involved in anti-mining activism in the early 2000s, when plans first emerged for what would later become the Eagle nickel mine, located 2 miles from her cabin. 

"This is a symbol of the wild heart of the UP,” she says of the woodland property flecked with ponds and frequented by wolves and moose. Her schoolteacher father-in-law built the cabin by hand on 1,000 acres of barren land he purchased bit-by-bit from logging companies, re-planting the forests and willing the property to become a wildlife refuge when he died. 

“When we talk about what we might lose, it’s good to have a base reference point.”

Related:

• Mining rush brings hope, dread to Upper Peninsula, amid historic energy shift
• Mining is back in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Here’s how it works
• Retiree: Mining brought good life. Revival would help young Michigan families

Anti-mining activists lost their fight to prevent Eagle’s opening. But the effort led to a sustained mining opposition movement, now called the Mining Action Group. Heideman leads the group.

She fears in the government’s eagerness to expand domestic mining, regulators won’t conduct thorough permitting reviews. While the uncontrolled waste dumping of past mining eras is not allowed today, improperly stored sulfide-bearing waste rock can chemically react with air and water to produce acid mine drainage.

And while underground mines have smaller land footprints than open-pit mines, they still require lots of land and water for ore processing and waste disposal, and they emit air and noise pollution when they blast rock underground and haul it away in large trucks.

From her cabin in the Yellow Dog Plains, she recently heard rumbling and tapping noises at night, and flood lights illuminating the nearby forest “like a small town football game.”

While Heideman says she understands the consequences of continuing to rely on fossil fuels for energy, she wants more recognition that undisturbed wilderness areas help mitigate climate change. The federal government recognized as much when it created a plan to conserve 30% of the country’s land by 2030.

“That is the true natural resource of the UP, and that is the thing that’s bringing in far more money right now to the state economy,” she said, noting that outdoor recreation is a $12.6 billion industry in Michigan. 

“We’re still operating with a weird old script that says jobs, jobs, jobs have to do with mining. And you know, that’s just not true anymore.”