"Cha, Cha, Cha, Changes!"

 Reflections in the Woods

 I sit not far from the Canadian border, among white and red pines, cedars and birch, spruce, balsam and jack-pine; eagles, turkey vultures, loons, ducks, turtles, crayfish and frogs; jack-rabbits, deer, bear and the occasional wolf.  The water is still clear, the sky blue, clouds scattered.  It is as close to paradise as anyone is likely to get.   It certainly won’t come after you die. Yet some things are haunting the woods here in northern Minnesota.  Fire, heat, water pollution and gentrification.  But I can't call these 'snakes in paradise' because that would be an insult to snakes.

A couple of years ago a large fire south of Ely almost got into town.  Our County gave out money for cabins and rural homes to install metal roofs, so they wouldn’t go up in flames.   We were told to clear trees around structures.  Now the County is actually paying for removal of balsam, spruce and other easily-burnt trees and under-story.  Instead of thick woods, this clearing will make things more like a ‘park.’  The woods themselves are dry and 'crunchy' underfoot.  Predictions by the State of Minnesota are that with global climate change, our woods will slowly turn into an oak savannah.  I don’t see that yet. But it teaches one thing, even if your not a Marxist.  Things do not remain the same, even in an ‘eternal’ place that rarely changes.  Even the rocks move sometimes.

Few up here have air-conditioning.  Yet the increasing heat and hotter sun – and high-wind events – are causing shades to be drawn, canopies installed, fans to be purchased, even room air-conditioners installed.  ’90-degree days have increased. The wind is having more ‘blow-downs’ of groups of trees than remembered.  One massive one in 1999 (a derecho) leveled thousands of trees in the nearby Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

But healthy frogs, minnows, fish, turtles and crayfish tells me the water is not toxic or too warm as yet.  Yet, yet.  Not too far downstream (the water flows north here ... into Hudson’s Bay I imagine) a foreign mining company is trying to build a toxic sulfide mine called Twin Metals, one of two planned on this Iron Range, to get trace (.5%) elements of copper and others.  Their acid-poisoned water will eventually flow into our lake, into other lakes north of us, into the Boundary Waters and into Canada.  All for the ‘race for what’s left.’ 

Then there is capitalism, rentier capitalism.  The shores of many lakes are being gentrified, as the upper-middle class – executives and businessmen - buy up lakeshore homes or build giant white-pine 3-story lake homes where they can work via internet.  So every bit of property is up for grabs and previously quiet lake sides suddenly need boundary surveys – even for the tiniest slices of lake land.  Pink boundary flags flutter in the woods and ‘pins’ are inserted into the corner grounds.

This doesn’t just scare the animals, this scares the people that have lived here for many years – descendants of Finland, central Europe and where-ever.  The rich are coming!  The Republican Party is a proponent of all this – that is no secret.  But it doesn’t help that we have many prominent Minnesota Democratic Party politicians who wobble on climate change or support tar-sand pipelines, shady mining plans, wolf killing and back the right of the rich to control land and prices.  Governor Walz, senators like Klobuchar, local Congressmen – no allies of labor, indigenous people, youth or anyone but the monied – no matter what they claim.

The ground, as they say, is shifting under our feet.  But the ‘old red mole’ is also working away.

P.S. - The Greenwood fire south of Ely is 0% contained at present.  It is growing fast and unpredictable. Fear is in the air, not just billowing smoke.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews:  “Northland,” “Klobuchar is a Hot Dish Neo-Liberal,” “Tar Sands Oil,” “A Less Modest Proposal,” “Crying Wolf,” “Lockout Over,” “Grocery Activism,” “James-Younger Gang,” “A Night at the Caucuses,” “Sulfuric Acid,” “Factory Days,” “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers Again,” "The Race For What's Left."

Red Frog

June 29, 2021