In the contentious battle unfolding around a proposed sulfide mine in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the particular focus of intense opinion depends, of course, on whom you’re listening to. Most of the pro and con arguments are based in science and economics. Lost in most public debate is any reference to the moral implications of this heated public controversy.
According to an 1842 treaty between the US government and local Native American tribes, native peoples’ ongoing access to hunt, fish and gather are protected forever on land Rio Tinto is trying to mine. As Native American leaders continue fighting to protect theses provisions recorded in hundreds of treaties established between the US government and sovereign indigenous nations, there’s emerging a growing consciousness of potential conflicts between human rights issues and unfettered economic expansion.
As a clergyman, my involvement in the collective protest against Rio Tinto is grounded in a personal history of advocacy for indigenous people’s legal rights and an increasingly troubled awareness that all of us, to some degree or another, remain entrapped in the iron cage of Western culture; as Hermann Hesse aptly observed, “asleep” from deeper dimensions of spiritual living.
Last April I traveled with a farmer and writer to London, England to attend the Annual General Meeting of Rio Tinto. We joined members of the London Mining Network to publicly express, during the company’s stockholder meeting, our dismay about what many of us believe are manipulative and unethical actions by Rio Tinto in the Upper Peninsula. I carried with my documents of protest from the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and a petition signed by 100 leaders from faith communities bordering the area where the proposed mine would be located.
Shortly before we left London to return to the United States my colleague and I met with the Ethical Investment Advisory Group for the Church of England. The Church, we learned, holds over $100 million (62 million) in investments with the world’s three largest mining companies: Rio Tinto, BHP-Billiton and Anglo American. Seven months earlier the country of Norway, one of Rio Tinto’s largest investors, announced a decision to divest from the company because of “severe environmental damage” at its mine in West Papua.
In the discussion that ensued, the Church representative, a former British diplomat to Scandinavia, tossed out one of his working principles: “It’s always good to talk with the enemy.” I thought about my own daughter, now living in Colorado, and her musings to me one evening on the telephone about a recent visit to Aspen, where high-end bars were filled with beautiful young women in their early twenties, dressed in black, on the arms of older, wealthy men.
I asked the former British diplomat, “Sir, do you have any children?” He nodded his affirmation. “If an old, overweight, well-dressed rich man with bad breath approached your 19-year-old daughter in Aspen,” I continued, “and with all good courtesy asked her for a date, suggesting he had a great financial deal for her while, at the same time, she knew he was a felon with a criminal record, would you encourage her to sit down and see what he had to offer? And, if in fact she initially refused his advances but he wanted to show her his expensive car and flashed a roll of $100 bills while whispering in her ear that this could be good for her family, would his argument be any more persuasive?”
That’s what’s facing us here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We’re unabashedly being courted by a wealthy, irresponsible multinational mining company. We not only have the right to refuse their advances, we have, from a moral pint of view, from a stance of integrity and alliance with the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, an imperative to stand up and say, “No thank you, leave us alone.”
Jon Magnuson is Lutheran (ELCA) Campus Pastor at Northern Michigan University and also Director of the Cedar Tree Institute, a nonprofit organization that initiates projects and provides services in the areas of mental health, religion, and the environment.
Photo courtesy Gabriel Caplett
