Висконсин: от истории добычи свинца до восстановления лососевых рек

First, we talk with author James Crawford about his latest book “The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction.” Then, historian Tracey Lee Roberts returns to tell the story of mining in the southwest corner of our state. Finally, we talk about trout stream restoration with Peter Jonas of the Wisconsin Clear Waters chapter of Trout Unlimited. Featured in this Episode - ‘The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction’While writing “The Vanishing Earth,” author James Crawford journeyed across the world to the places where rock, metals, sand, water and even human thought are being extracted. Crawford explores what might happen when these natural resources are stretched thin, and why we continue to extract when their end is imminent. - A history of lead and zinc mining in southwest WisconsinWisconsin is nicknamed the “Badger State.” It’s a nod to our history — lead miners used to live right inside their mines during the harsh winters. So, they were nicknamed “badgers.” We take a look at the history of lead-zinc mining in southwest Wisconsin. - Taking care of trout streams in northwest WisconsinWe visit with the president of the Wisconsin Clear Waters chapter of Trout Unlimited. He fills us in on the work happening in his corner of the state to conserve trout streams. We also touch on the need for funding and the pollutants that threaten stream ecosystems. Episode Credits - Lee Rayburn Host - James Crawford Guest - Tracey Lee Roberts Guest - Peter Jonas Guest - Jill Nadeau Executive Producer - Clara Neupert Producer - Jeff Robbins Technical Director Transcript Collapse Transcript Terms of Use Transcripts are provided for accessibility and convenience and may be created using a mix of automated tools and human review. While we strive for accuracy, transcripts may contain errors or omissions and are provided "as is" without warranties of any kind. The audio version is the official record of WPR programming. All transcripts are owned by WPR and protected by U.S. and international copyright law. They are provided for personal, non-commercial use only. You may not reproduce, modify, distribute, or use transcripts for public or commercial purposes without prior written permission from WPR. For permissions, contact [email protected]. Speaker 1 So the Trump administration has fast-tracked the permitting process to allow for mining in the Shawamagan-Nicolay National Forest. What should we be thinking about when we think about this story and the potential economic impact, environmental impact, and social impact? Everything. Well For that, this hour on the Lee Rayburn Show, we’re joined by the author of the new book, Just Out, The Vanishing Earth, Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction And if you’ve got a question about mining globally, um and mining in many different respects, not just oil and not just metals as the proposal is for the Shawamagan Nicolae for us, but also for sand and water and for that matter, our own mind. You can join the conversation at 1-800-6 You can send an email to talk at WPR. org James Crawford is an acclaimed historian, publisher, and broadcaster. His book, Fallen Glory, was selected as a Sunday Times must-read and a book of the year by the New Statesman and the Independent. The Edge of the Plane, How Borders Make and Break Our World earned rave reviews in the New York Review of Books and the Washington Post, and was also featured on CNN’s Amanpur. He lives in Edinburgh and joins us today with his new book out now, The Vanishing Earth Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. And James, welcome to the show. Speaker 2 Thank you, Lee. Thanks for having me. Speaker 1 Let’s start with a little bit of your family history and why mining is something that is deeply rooted in your story. Speaker 2 Yeah, so I I come from a long family of engineers. My great-great-grandfather was a fisherman. uh who left Scotland actually to emigrate to Canada and then into America and he he crossed the border from Canada into Detroit at the age of sixteen and as he crossed the border he’s asked as occupation and he put on the the the immigration forum he was an engineer. Now he wasn’t an engineer at that point, but he he he used it as a way as a way to get a job and the the job he got in Detroit was on the assembly line of the Model T Ford. So that started this kind of engineering dynasty, if you like. So my grandfather was an engineer, my father was an engineer, my brother was an engineer. engineer and my father went through lots of different stages of working in extraction. He started off as an apprentice for the British Co-Board working in coal mining, he then did an engineering degree and went to do copper extraction in Zambia. And then in the nineteen seventies when oil was found in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland, he moved to to take on the job. of oil extraction did that for the next 30 years and my brothers followed in his footsteps. I am the black sheep and that I’m a writer. I’ve taken a completely different approach. So so in many ways this this book is is is partly about a reckoning with that and and I guess with the legacy of my father’s work and and this long history of engineering in my family. Speaker 1 And James, uh the the vanishing earth takes us around the world, but you start right here in the United States with a phosphorus mine in Florida. And when you visit these places, you fly over them, you drive through them, you talk to the people impacted by them This phosphorus mine in Florida, could you paint the picture of us of uh of it for us from the sky and as you look around? Speaker 2 Well I I’ll paint it from the ground first of all, because the interesting thing is it’s very hard to see from the ground Which is one of the reasons that I had to get up on an airplane because Florida is so flat, you know, from from the this this sort of central area which is known as Bone Valley, where most of the phosphorus mining happens, to the to the coast by Tampa, there’s only about 180 feet in terms of elevation. from the sea to this central plain. So when you’re driving around you just see these kind of high berms, some of which are grass covered, some of which aren’t, and you you and they’re all behind fencing, so it’s very hard to get a good look at them. Then you go up in an airplane and I I arrange with a pilot to take me up from a sort of agricultural farming airport where a lot of crop dusters would would take off from. and fly me over the mine sites. And once you do that, you get this sense of the incredible scale of earth that is being removed. to access the phosphate. And this is phosphate that is used for fertilizer production. You know, the the world’s biggest fertilizer producer, Mosaic, operates out of Bone Valley in central Florida. So you’re gouging up, you know, almost uh as I describe it, it’s almost like a series of giant rib cages in the landscape, a lot of which are filled with wastewater. huge drag line excavators, you know, on a scale that you see gigantic sort of you know ten-ton dump trucks beside them that look like toy cars when you’re flying over it. And so that’s one aspect. And the second aspect, the one that’s really staggering, are the mountains of waste which are left behind. because there’s nothing to do with the waste that that comes from from phosphate production and extraction. It creates this thing called phosphogypsum, which is radioactive. It’s highly toxic, it’s full of chemicals. So you have these gigantic mountains, and there’s about 25 of them in the central Florida plain, amounting for a billion tons of waste. And the Environmental Protection Agency, when it was originally set up in the United States in the in the 1970s. didn’t come up with a designation for what to do with this phosphogypsum waste and they still haven’t. So what happens is they just keep piling up the waste into these mountains and with Central Florida being so flat This is these have become major landscape features. And when you’re when you’re up in a plane, it’s like it’s like flying over the pyramids. You know, they’re bigger than the pyramids. You know, it’s they are they’re like pyramids, but they’re like sort of mesa-like structures A lot of them very kind of grey and raw. And some of them are in rural areas, but some of them are are close by to the city of Tampa. And, you know, there’s one that I flew over that entirely overlooks a high school, you know, a high school football pitch. So th th there’s you know, you get this sense of something that’s both immense in the landscape, but also kind of hidden. And there’s another hidden aspect that actually a lot a lot of these gigantic mountains of waste are starting to disintegrate. and sinkholes are appearing in them from the wastewater and that’s making its way into the the water table in Central Florida And it’s making its way into the rivers and it’s resulting in a lot of die-off within the rivers themselves. Speaker 1 Is that why one of the people that you spoke to, Cha James, referred to this area as and I I I just I this it’s it’s It sounds so interesting. Pollution’s magic porridge pot. Speaker 2 Yeah, that’s right. I mean I d I don’t know if people know the story. There’s a story I know in Scotland. It’s obviously porridge related. But it’s it’s it’s an old fairy story about uh a porridge someone sets cooking um and they don’t think about the consequences. So it it never stops cooking and ends up growing so large that it it sort of fit it it you know drowns the town um where the where the porridge pot was was was set cooking. And that’s the thing with these Even when you try and say empty the wastewater, what happens is it fills up with rainwater. And of course, you know, you can get, you know, significant amounts of rain in Florida. And the moment the rain lands in these um these phosphor gypsum stacks it obviously takes on some of the qualities of the radioactive material, the metals, so the water then becomes toxic again. Mm-hmm So it’s again but how do you deal with that? And the only way you can deal with it is, you know, well, one of the ways they’ve been dealing with it is pumping it, you know, a thousand feet down into the aqua. and hoping it doesn’t make its way into the water supply or taking it out and dumping it in the the Gulf of Mexico, again, which is resulting in in serious impacts on the on the water quality. in the Gulf of Mexico and significant dead zones that are developing where no life can exist. So you have this pollution problem. where you just keep creating it and you’ve nowhere to put it and the longer you do that, the more significant the impacts become. Speaker 1 Vern Kald couldn’t stay with us. He says the environmental impact of lithium mining is enormous and it’s destroying the lives of farmers and poor people in South America. Which is something you have learned firsthand, James, in your book, The Vanishing Earth. You fly over Chile’s Atacama Desert, you look at the lithium mines there, and you’re left with this question about not just the mining and the soil and the metals, but also the water, and what becomes of the water and whether or not is the question that is brine water or not? Speaker 2 Yeah, and I mean I I I think the brine that the lithium is in is not it is not exactly water, um, but it is part of an ecosystem. Uh and I think this you know this is the issue and things live within that that uh lithium brine. So The the I mean it’s it’s such an interesting and beautiful landscape, the this is the Salar d Atacama, the the the salt flats on the edge of the Atacama Desert, right below the the the spine of the the Andy Andean mountain range. Um and I guess if you imagine a giant bathtub and what happens is that whatever precipitation in this part of the world that there is and there’s a lot of snow cover on the top of the Andean rim. Which uh is a volcanic rain, but also a lot of active volcanoes. And as that snow melts, it runs down into this bathtub and then this relentless sun evaporates it and what you get is a huge, really huge accumulation of salt crystals. And within those salt crystals is this kind of all these tiny thread veins of brine. And lithium mining works by pumping that brine to the surface into a series of gigantic pools, you know, each about the size of fifty football pitches. Um and then over the course of sixteen months the brine in the pools evaporates and it changes its chemical composition. At the end you get in this it starts off bright blue and at the end the final pool will be this almost olive green and that’s the lithium that gets taken away for processing that makes its way into the batteries of electric vehicles, the battery of your your your laptop, your your mobile phone. And the brine itself The you know the lithium miners that I talked to, they’re saying they’re having very limited impact on this ecosystem, but they are using fresh water to flush the pipes that pump out the brine. And you’re using fresh water in a place that’s 40 years into a mega drought where there’s a very, very fragile ecosystem, there’s a number of villages and indigenous people who live on the rim of the Salar de Atacama and you know they are experiencing significant changes to that ecosystem. There’s a lot of argument whether that’s being caused by the lithium mining, while whether it’s already being caused by copper mining, because this is one of the world’s largest sites of copper mining as well. but they’re seeing die-off in their fragile ecosystems. And to go there and to see each village in the Salar Data Kama that’s on the rim below these series of volcanoes. is like a thread of green in a landscape that otherwise looks like the surface of Mars. So you get a sense of how fragile this all is. But then there’s this incredible interconnection between the people And the lithium itself, you know, as one of the as one of the villagers who who works with with and for one of the lithium extraction companies put it to me Lithium is the state for us. They don’t trust the government, but the lithium has given them things. The lithi lithium has given them solar plants rather than diesel generators. They’ve entered into profit sharing deals with the the lithium miners. Which in some respects might help sustain their villages in the short term, but will it in the long term if all of the water is taken away by the process of mining. And that I think that’s the concern. There might be short-term gain for significant long-term loss. Speaker 1 James Crawford, our guest, his new book, The Vanishing Earth, Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. And if you’d like to join our conversation with your questions or your stories about mining, you’re welcome. at 1-800-642-1234. That’s 800-642-1234. Or give us uh send us an email to talk at WPR. org. And James, I think of lithium as part of the green energy solution. Lithium batteries replacing our gas-powered uh cars, lithium and our cell phones that keep us all connected. that this is a necessity, right? But at the same time, when you describe the mines, it also becomes, as one person in Chile put it, pollution is part of our fork folklore, our tradition. Speaker 2 Yeah, I th I think that’s it’s it’s a perfect example of uh something I talk about a lot in the book, which is uh you know uh a sacrifice zone or a sacrifice landscape. And you you know, this is I mean it’s a a really interesting term. This sacrifice zone was actually invented by the American government in the 1970s during the energy crisis. when they were looking at strip mining in the Midwest and the fact that they were gonna essentially take over uh large parts of sort of ranch land or farming land and strip mine it for coal, for energy because of this energy crisis, the oil crisis. And that might be very difficult to ever return those landscapes to their former agricultural uses unless you designated them national sacrifice zones, in which case after you’d used up destroyed the landscape, um, you know, got out the coal, you could say it’s a national sacrifice zone and then it would be rehabilitated as a sacrifice zone. It’s a very strange, you know, bureaucratic Um nicely basically means you’ve destroyed a landscape, but you’ve destroyed it in the service of something bigger. And I guess the pressure that’s put on the people in Chile is that this is one of the the largest sites of of lithium extraction in the world. If you take in the you know the neighboring territories of Bolivia and Argentina as something like a third of all the the the earth’s currently accessible lithium is in these is in these places and they are being told that this landscape is absolutely necessary for the green transition And that the removal of this lithium is necessary for the green transition. And in many ways that is true. But what’s the cost of that And and I suppose the book is you know, the book doesn’t give any easy answers about this, but it does lay bare the nature and extent of the problem because You know, one of the things, one of the people I talked to in in Chile who has relatives in America and she was she was over the time of the Super Bowl and the half-time adverts, there was an advert for, you know large s electric SUVs and the gist of the advert was like it’s electric now it can be as big as you want but obviously You know, that still that that comes from this landscape in Chile. You know, that the more lithium you use, the more you’re extracting, the more damage to that landscape. So the idea that we should live within our means with this transition to electric or this other idea, it’s electric now, it can be gigantic. That’s the wrong direction because it’s that kind of sense of everything can always be bigger. And the the worry that we have moving forward is that actually that sense of infinite growth may not be possible in a finite planet and we may have to reckon with that. Speaker 1 Let’s go to Jack and Madison next. Jack, hi Speaker 3 Haley, uh a couple of thoughts. And first of all, you know, noticing that your guest is from Scotland. I appreciated the Scottish uh cultural callback with the um overflowing flowing porridge analogy. And I yeah, so Yeah, other than that, as a kid I remember visiting uh Pendarvis Historical Site outside of Mineral Point, Wisconsin, with a lot of Cornish people went to become miners and get in on the lead mining trade at the time. And It was just interesting learning about how I think I was eight when I went there that kids who were about my age would first go down the mines and learn how to dig for lead and then you know go up that skill set over time. But one of the things that I just got thinking about was how aware people were of the innate dangers of mining, especially you know, with a child workforce in that day and age, and to kind of bring it up to the present, like is there a more sustainable way of conducting mining in general, uh one that obviously won’t have as you know catastrophic ecological repercussions and that is better for human health in the long run Speaker 1 Jack, it’s a great question, and I don’t think there’s anybody better to ask who has been around the world and looked for answers to this. Um Uh and you really don’t talk about how directly dangerous mining is to the actual miners who do it that much. You’re looking at the aftermath and its impact around the communities that it largely are created because of this mining, James Crawford. But did you find a way where mining can be done in an environmental environmentally stable way? Speaker 2 I mean one of the things I’d say is that one of the reasons my my father didn’t become a miner was partly because of the dangers of of mining and that’s and and you know really interestingly if you look into the history of mining in Scotland there was something called coal bonding which was the workers were bonded to the seams of coal they worked. And if they wanted to try and go, you know, if they were in Scotland and they wanted to go and and mine in in, you know, in Cornwall, they would be brought back. You know, it was it was a form of slavery. Um and so one of the things that I think for my father, who came from a working class background moving into oil, was oil actually allowed social mobility in a way that coal mining never never did. Nonetheless, and I’m gonna come on to answer the question about sustainability in a second, but this is an important point. You know, uh one of the things I want to emphasize is I’ve you know, I’m I’m immensely proud of what my father did and and the you know, he worked on oil infrastructure, rig construction, rig design in the North Sea and this was incredibly pioneering stuff. You know, it was Some have have said it was equivalent to putting men on the moon, you know, that the hostile nature of the environment that that um you know oil men were working in. So there’s something really quite remarkable about that, and I you know, I don’t agree with the demonization of anyone who works in these extractive industries, because I’ve talked to a lot of them. I come from a family of them. And a lot of them are just trying to do it to get by, you know, to put food on their their family’s table. On the question of sustainable extraction, this is like the Holy Grail. And a lot, particularly with lithium actually, it was, you know, there was a sort of um senior executive in the lithium mining company that I was talking to who was trying to paint this picture for me that what they’re doing in the Atacama Desert is more like farming than extraction. You know, it’s using solar power, it’s low impact. They’re trying to develop a technology called direct lithium extraction, which basically removes the lithium as you pump the water. It’s still not proven at any scale. But even then it it’s a it is this it’s this thing that’s a little bit like alchemy. It’s like trying to turn base metal into gold. There are a number of other people that I talked to who basically said there is no such thing as stain sustainable extraction. You cannot do it you have to find the least damaging way of doing it. And I think one of the key things is you have to bake in the cost. And what has often happened with extraction is the companies that are pioneering it, that are doing it, that are making profits from it, are not paying the knock-on cost. And the knock-on cost is happening increasingly across the entire world now. And of course one of the major knock-on costs from the burning of fossil fuels is the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And again we’re all feeling that But the companies that have benefited from it are not paying the cost of it at all. And you know, I know you’ve had uh wildfire smoke in Wisconsin very recently in Madison. You know, so so that is starting to bite more and more. That sense of this is happening somewhere else. We are benefiting, it’s happening somewhere else. Somewhere else, somewhere I can’t see. It’s happening in the desert in Chile, you know, it’s happening in rural central Florida. I can’t really see the effects. Increasingly we are all seeing the effects. You can’t turn away. And I think that’s one of the the the critical things that I want to look at in the book. And and I I think we can try and move towards ideas of how do we do this more sustainably because We can’t switch off extraction. We can’t stop it. You know, the world would stop. The soci the civilization we’ve built would stop if we did that. But the way we’re doing it is just not sustainable. I mean that’s the key message of the book. None of this is sustainable and we are seeing all the cracks right now on a global level. Speaker 1 James, I’m sorry, I got a couple of minutes before the break, but just to the the idea of environmentally sustainable way to mine, it’s you did go look for this and probably the closest you got was looking at uh uh tim the timber industry in Oslo, Norway. Speaker 2 Yeah, that I mean that’s right. If you I mean I I I went to stay in the the tallest all timber building in the world. Um which is 18 stories high. Um I mean it’s not entirely all timber but it’s about sort of eight seventy percent. It has some concrete and some steel in it, largely just to weigh it down because if you just build with wood the top floors a little bit like a crow’s nest and a ship might start to move in the wind. Not there would be any the structural problem, but people staying on the upper floors might get seasick apparently. Um but if you if you build with timber you sequester the carbon and then you replant the trees and there is vast potential for scale up. in certain parts of the world and particularly in Scandinavia to build more with timber and one of the things they rigorously do is test its fire safety um to the extent that one of Norway’s uh main insurance company takes offices on the fifth or sixth floor of this all-timber building. So that’s you know, once you’ve got the endorsement from insurance, you know you’re okay. Um because they’re the hardest people to please. Um so that is a that’s a kind that’s a sustainable way of extracting timber, harvesting it, replanting it rather than the process of constructing the the built environment that we know which is predominantly concrete and steel, which is an incredibly large emitter. I mean in fact the built environment is the largest emitter of of greenhouse gases uh on the planet. Speaker 1 And you also went to the w uh western shores of Greenland to look at the sand mines as the glaciers recede, there seems to be more sand than ever, but we’ve used more sand than ever in everything that we’ve built. Uh and I mean from the uh cement to the aggregates, the bricks, the asphalt, you name it. Sand uh is being used everywhere, but at the same time, as you point out in the book Sand is running out. James Crawford, our guest, author of the brand new book, The Vanishing Earth, dispatches from the frontiers of extraction, and we’re traveling the world with him. and covering some of his experiences and what he saw, w w who he talked to, and what he learned. You can join our conversation at 1-800-642-1234. That’s eight hundred-six four two one two three four. What can we learn from him? You can also send us an email to talk at WPR. org. I’m Lee Rayburn and you were listening to WPR News. So there is copper to be found. Under the Shawamagan-Nicolate National Forest. Should we mine for it? There has been a fast track in the permitting process to allow it Our guest this hour is James Crawford. He has traveled the world for his new book, The Vanishing Earth, Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. And you’re welcome to our conversation this hour about mining at 1-800-642-1234. That’s 800-642-1234 or email talk at WPR. org. Let’s go to Luis in Dodgeville next. Speaker 4 Um hi, I have a question for your guest. Um just wondering uh I guess What you’ve learned, um, can you speculate about the future in in when like if we tap out everything, tap out our resources, what’s left? Um have we just not discovered it yet? And I’m a little fuzzy on my my British history, but I think during the Industrial Revolution At first it was sourced by timber and then all the timber got tapped out and then that’s when it switched to coal. And so it seems like humanity has kind of always gone to the brink and then found something new. So just wondering your thoughts on that. Speaker 1 Thank you, Louise. So we yeah, we what happens if we run out of natural resources and what about this progression of moving through resources as we run through them, James? Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean one one of the things that we often find, you know, as your caller said, is that you know when you’re pushed to the brink we discover something new And that is testament to the ingenuity of humanity. Um, it may also be luck and there may be a point where we don’t find something new and and who wants to be around when that happens And that’s obviously one of one of the risks. I mean I think one of the interesting things that that that your caller sort of mentioned there and to pick up on, and it was something that I discovered in the course of writing this book that kind of astonished me, actually towards the end of writing it, something I came across is that last year we burnt more timber, more coal, and more oil than ever before in human history. Now we think of a transition. We think of well we used to we used to burn wood and then coal came along and then we burnt that and then we moved on to oil and now we’re trying to develop solar and we’re trying to develop wind But actually we’re just using more and more of everything. And I think that’s that’s one of the the really big concerns here is that this talk of transition isn’t transition, it’s actually just accumulation And you know, there’s there’s uh uh uh uh something called Jevons paradox, which goes back actually to the British Industrial Revolution and a concern that the coal might run out. And you this um sort of uh researcher uh Stanley Jevons looking into it and he’s saying, well at what point are we going to run out of coal? And what would happen if we made the steam turbines more efficient so you could get the same energy out of less steam? And the turbines become more efficient, so then what happens? Um, you know, do you use less coal in these turbines? Actually, no, you use more coal to do more with the more efficient turbines. And this is Jevons’ paradox, that the more energy you have access to, the more you use. And this is the problem. that I mean it’s one of the things I you know that doesn’t even feature really in the book is that I wanted to to have a whole chapter about nuclear fusion. Oh this idea of fusion fusion technology. Um and in the end I I sort of I I I made a trip to uh uh sort of prototype fusion plant in Oxford in in England um where for a brief time they managed to get the fusion working and it was the It was so hot, it was about ten times hotter than our sun. It was the hottest point in the universe for half a millisecond um before the the the plasma kind of broke apart. Um but the c the problem is If you have access to that clean energy, does that solve the problem that we have, or does it create a new problem? because there’s still issues around, you know, population, um, land, resources capital, how big we build, where we build, all these sorts of things. So so universal clean energy may not be the solution that we actually think it is, and maybe we have to think differently about how we live on the planet, which comes back to that question about sustainability. and how do you live sustainably on earth? You know, it’s one of one of the the things that I begin the book with, and it’s a statistic that just blew me away. Is that a threshold was crossed in 2020 where the weight of everything that humanity has built came to exceed the weight of all living things on Earth? Speaker 1 What? Could you say that again please, James? I uh let me wrap my head around w in that’s a few years. Speaker 2 So that’s Plants, animals, biomass, trees, everything. And then you think, okay, that must have been a steady accumulation. across all of human civilization since the last ice age. It’s been building, it’s been building, it’s been building suddenly across that threshold. That’s not the case. At the start of the twentieth century, the weight of everything we had made only accounted for three percent of the weight of all living things. The acceleration has happened after the Second World War. It’s happened in the last seventy years. So we have put our foot to the pedal in a way like we never have before. And we have taken more out of the earth in the last 50 years than in all the rest of human history combined. Speaker 1 And when you talk about putting Yeah, when you talk about putting the foot on the pedal, I can’t help but think of the debate over data centers and their demand for water and electricity and some of speculation in uh from our Uh I think it’s a public service commission here w that does our utilities in Wisconsin that our demand for electricity could rise by as much as forty percent in the next six years in Wisconsin. Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean I think data centers is such an interesting thing to talk about. And you know, I I I touched on it briefly in the book, but I’m very aware of what’s going on in America and how bipartisan the resistance to the data centers is it’s like nobody wants it in their backyard and America has more than any other country in the world. And I think when I was writing the book, and it’ll be higher than this, I think it was something in the region of 5 to 7% of all of the electricity used in the US was for data centers. But that was statistics dating to about 2023, 24. So, you know, two years later, it’s going to be more significant. You’re talking about building some of the biggest data centers on Earth. all of which is both fueling the cloud and fueling AI development. And it’s a it’s a perfect example actually of what I was talking about earlier of this kind of sacrifice zone. Because those towns that are going to have to be near the data centers in some way are being sacrificed for this greater glory, particularly of of you know frontier AI companies. um and you know the the major major tech companies based out of Silicon Valley and people don’t want them. They don’t want them near them. They don’t want to be a part of it. Um and of course they are drawing on real-world resources. They’re drawing on critical minerals and they’re drawing on significant amounts of water at a time when you know there’s drought across various parts of the world and various parts of the US. So, you know, this is where we start to collide against the limits and and it’s a really interesting, very current example of of why that’s a problem. Speaker 1 Luis, thank you so much for the call. Let’s go to Perry and Ocanto next. Hi, Perry. Speaker 5 Yes. As a public landowner, I’m seeing similarities between the Squaminakan National Forest and permitting the use of copper mines there and also how it uh affected the copper mine in the boundary waters which is sold off to a Chilean company. And we can’t even process the copper here. We gotta ship it to China for processing. And how has the guest seen Other than voting, make sure we get out and vote for the people that serve us, but how has he seen other countries push back against this destruction of the environment? Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean there’s there’s a really interesting case study in in Ecuador. Um w you know, Ecuador which its main uh product throughout most of its history was was banana export um until Texaco arrived and started drilling the Amazon. Um and Texaco drilled the Amazon in a way that it wouldn’t have been allowed to drill the Amazon, uh wouldn’t have been allowed to have drilled in America. Um there’s something called oil field brine which when it’s brought to the surface when you drill oil you have to put back underground. But because there was no environmental regulation in Ecuador, they didn’t do that. and they created what was described as a lawyer in a case that put it in a case against Texaco as a rainforest Chernobyl. And that’s throughout the nineteen eighties, you have extensive amounts of drilling in in And very recently in 2023 there was a referendum in Ecuador. The whole country voted on whether or not to drill for oil in a protected part of uh the Amazon National Park in that country. And I think it was 60% of the country voted no not to drill there And the Constitution of Ecuador has established what are known as rights of nature, so that that rivers and forests, um, mountains, landscapes. have their own rights. And I know this is something that is developing in other countries in the world and there are examples of it in the US itself and in Canada. So that that’s one recourse is that the law is in many ways ahead of the politics. And there’s a really fascinating uh an interesting concept and I you know I I have a background in in in legal history because I studied law at university before I became a writer And there’s something called the public trust. And the public trust dates back to the Roman Emperor Justinian. And it’s a very simple thing, is that the government shouldn’t be allowed to destroy the water, the air, and the soil. And it’s b it’s baked into the US Constitution. You know, the the the the people who wrote your Constitution were farmers. They understood that very well. And We haven’t really been enforcing those rights until now. And climate change and the impacts of extensive mining bring them into sharp focus. So I think that’s one recourse that legal cases are happening all over America right now, which are dealing with his concept of public trust. Speaker 1 Perry, thank you for the call. We’ll go to Ernest and Hayward next. Hi, Ernest. Speaker 6 Why? You know, I’ve always thought that our tax system is backwards. We prefer taxing income rather than resource depletion and pollution. El Gore once suggested replacing the payroll tax With a carbon tax, Henry George in his book Progress in Poverty went even further when he suggested a single tax on land and natural resources Now right now a natural limitation on data centers is the cost of energy and water, and that is without a carbon tax and without a tax on water withdrawals from high capacity wells and from the Great Lakes. Speaker 1 Ernest, thank you for the comment and if we were to tax these companies would that be passed along to us? Is that an avenue to explore to help protect and sustain our uh mining and extraction, James Speaker 2 I I think building in the real costs is what is is one initial way of doing it. That if you are going to If you’re going to embark on a new copper mine, what is the environmental cost of that? What is the true environmental cost of that? And is the mining company prepared to pay it? And I think that’s a fundamental question that has to be asked of all extraction and the reality has never really been asked before. The extractors haven’t had to pay They go in, they get the high profit materials and then they get out. Maybe they sell it on to someone else who’s prepared to eke out some profit from the lower grade material. and then they move on again. And I think the absolute perfect example of that is Butte, Montana. I don’t know if you want to talk about that now, Lee, but I think there’s that’s such a fascinating story to to get into about how this could work going forward. Speaker 1 Well the Butte Montana would be where the Copper Kings were, right? And and this is uh and and where a super fun site can be found today. Speaker 2 Yeah, that’s it. I mean it’s the largest environmental cleanup site in America. For those who don’t know Butte, it was known as the richest hill on earth, something like a third of all the copper in America came from there at the start of the twentieth century, you know, particularly to to electrify the whole nation. Miners from all across the world came. They dug something in the region of 10,000 kilometers of tunnels into this one hill and the city grew up right on top of the mine And then you get to the nineteen fifties and copper’s not profitable anymore and the way to eke out what’s left of the mine, the choice you have is to make it open cast. So then you demolish the mountain. You you make this giant pit in the center of the city. You move entire neighborhoods from the hill down to what’s known as the flats, the sort of lower bit of the plain below this this copper mountain Then it becomes so unprofitable that it gets closed and you’ve dug so deep below the water table that it fills up with water. And because of the nature of the rocks you’ve opened up, the water becomes contaminated with with heavy metals. And what you have in Butte is a lake that’s almost a mile wide, half a mile deep, full of fifty billion gallons of essentially sulfuric acid. What do you do with that? Is the question. And it’s the question that has been asked of Butte for the past 30 years, and they reached a settlement, so I think it was in 2023. And the settlement is incredibly interesting because The copper mine was sold by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which was owned variously by both the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers. It was sold onto an oil company that had hit it big in the 1980s, who didn’t know how to mine, you know, price of copper went through the floor. That oil company was actually bought over by one of the largest oil companies in the world, BP So all of the liability for this in this super fund site, this environmental cleanup site, has fallen on BP. And they’ve essentially, as part of the settlement, got a blank check to monitor and maintain the water and soil of Butte in perpetuity forever because you have to pump and treat the water in the pit which is known as the Berkeley pit forever because there’s no way of stopping it filling up. And you have to monitor the surrounding soil because there’s so much copper smelted in butte on site. that people’s attics are full of asbestos dust. You know, as one person in Butte said to me, they didn’t realise that soil wasn’t yellow until until they left Butte, you know. Um and they they you know they would ride their BMXs in this kind of yellow moonscape where bones would turn if like a you know a bird died, its bones would turn blue because of the chemical reaction to the the the calcium and the copper in the soil. So th you could you could abandon this city, but the people aren’t abandoning it. They’re turning to repair and they accept that the repair that has to happen in beauty has to happen forever. There is no alternative. It has to happen forever. The company that is liable for it, not exactly responsible for it, but bought the liability, has to pay for it forever. Now What does forever look like? That’s the question I can’t answer. It’s a question I pose towards the end of the book. But it’s also a way of looking at the whole world that what we need is that repair mindset for the entire planet. And to look at that in all our different ways. bipartisan, as engineers, people who are activists, people who are writers, people who are miners. We have to look at it in that collective way. And I think Butte’s such an interesting model for how that’s happening because the people are not abandoning that city They’re staying and they’re trying to change it and make it better and and trying to understand what repair means for them. As a way of telling a story they have to tell forever, because they have to hand it on to generation after generation after generation if they’re going to stay there And so there’s there’s hope in that, even though the damage is so great. Speaker 1 The quote that I have highlighted here from your book, James Crawford, is with butte and this is what somebody told you, with butte it’s a remedy, it’s not a fix, there is no exit. And that just sorta hung there for me and and I can’t I can’t stop thinking about it in those terms and especially when you mentioned some of the wealthiest corporations and some of the wealthiest people. having their hands in what became this Superfund site, being able to extract what they could from this Superfund site, make as much money as they could from it, and then well the people of Butte, what they’re left with is No exit. Um Linda in Iowa emailed us. She wants to know how much copper and other metals can be found in our landfills per ton. She would think our landfills m would be more productive than rock. Uh and and same with taking from old mines and extraction of other metals, uh, the potential that we could be mining our landfills, James. Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean I I I there’s there’s lots of examples of this of w you know what are known as urban mines, you know, giant recycling plants that are taking in metals separating them out and that that circularity I think is definitely one of the ways forward. At the moment is there money in that? And I think that’s the concern. Who’s developing those businesses? You know, it’s a little bit like the the example I went I traveled to Iceland to look at this concept of carbon capture which is you remove carbon dioxide from the air and you pump it underground in this kind of pressurized water like a soda stream and it hardens into rock. And that decreases the parts per million of carbon dioxide in there, which is causing the global warming that we’re experiencing. Unfortunately, that that at the time I visited was the largest carbon capture plant on Earth. It’s powered by geothermal energy, so it’s a renewable power source. But it only removes the equivalent of seven hundred cars worth of um of emissions a year. So I mean it’s it’s the tiniest drop in the in the largest ocean. They’ve actually since opened a bigger than that which is now the big Carbon capture plant in the world, just next to the first one, which is ten times larger, but that’s 7,000 cars. And it needs to work with um with renewable energy, otherwise it’s part of the problem. But the the chief technical officer for the the company that developed at a company called Climbworks put it to me, cleaning up isn’t sexy. Yeah. You know, it isn’t sexy, it isn’t profitable as as it stands. And I think that’s one of the problems. But we need to clean up. You know, we have to clean up the messes that we that we are making. And I think that’s that’s one example of how we’re trying to, but it it’s it’s at such small scale that whether it it’s part of a solution or you know, uh uh something tangential, I’m not sure. Speaker 1 We can’t make the entire planet a sacrifice zone. That just doesn’t make any sense. Uh and I yeah, the point is well taken. But how does that carbon capture plant compare to just plain trees, James? Speaker 2 Uh planting trees is simpler. And you know, and there’s and and to be fair to the company, Climeworks that developed this uh Swiss company They they’re very much we need to do all these different things, all these different methods of carbon capture. I mean one other example that that came from my time in Greenland was something called glacial rock flower. So as as the glaciers move through Greenland and they erode the rock and they they leave this kind of sediment almost like a kind of clay you can spread that over crops. It’s like a natural fertilizer. So it gives nutrients that crops need to grow at the same time as binding and removing carbon from the atmosphere So that’s a that’s an example of something if you did that at scale, that would be another part of a solution. But it’s it there’s no one silver bullet. I think that’s the main thing. There is no one silver bullet. Apart from perhaps thinking differently, changing the nature of how we think about our place on the planet, how we think about how our corporations operate. how we think about profit and what we include and don’t include, particularly for those who are causing the most damage. I think that that factoring that in is has got to be a key part of how we move forward. Speaker 1 Karen in Madison called and couldn’t stay with us, but she echoes this. She says we need to think of ourselves not as consumers, but as people first, and that we need to think of what will pass along to the next generation as a priority. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it’s it’s that it’s the notion of stewardship, you know, and I think that that’s why that that story in butte, which comes at the end of the book, which I didn’t necessarily expect. I would find what I found. And and in a way there’s I I found so much hope in it, so much hope in something that that is a sacrifice zone. Americ you know, in some respects America’s largest sacrifice zone where the damage is both visible and invisible. You know, it’s it’s it’s made its way, it’s filtered all the way down the the sort of tributary river that runs out of of um out of butte Silverbro Creek as it’s known, which turns into the Clark Fork River, which is a tributary of the Columbia River. You know There’s a danger there that pollutants from historical copper smelting make their way into that river, but they’re fighting against that and they understand this idea of stewardship. and what you have to look after. And if we all collectively understand the concept of stewardship, that’s a way of moving forward. But at the moment, corporations don’t care. And that’s that’s the problem, is that that that doesn’t help shareholder you know growth. Um but corporations aren’t people, they wouldn’t care. Speaker 1 They have priorities and if we were to have make corporations care, we would have to enforce priorities upon them in a way that you wouldn’t have to do with a human being that has things like empathy and and a long-term understanding of the next generation. Speaker 2 That’s right. And that I mean in in in many ways that’s where the the rights of nature movement comes from. Because you know uh you have examples of of things that are not people that have rights. Corporations have rights, companies have rights. The argument comes well Why shouldn’t a river have rights? You know, why shouldn’t a river have rights not to be destroyed? Why shouldn’t the salt flattened chili have a say? in whether or not it has to sacrifice itself for the good of humanity. I think all of these are really interesting questions. Speaker 1 And Yeah, we’ll have to leave it there with more questions, but Your book was fascinating. Uh this hour has been wonderful. I want to thank you for sharing it with us and I want to encourage folks who are interested in more to go get the Vanishing Earth dispatches from the frontiers of extraction. James Crawford, thank you so much. Speaker 2 Thanks so much, Lee. Speaker 1 James Crawford is an acclaimed historian, publisher, and broadcaster. Again, his book Out Now, The Vanishing Earth, Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. Thank you for the calls, Ian. I’m sorry we ran out of time for you. Hopefully another time, I’m Lee Rayburn and you are listening to WPR News. You know, if it wasn’t for mining, Wisconsin never would have been the Badger State. The University of Wisconsin-Madison would have needed a different mascot. Don’t know exactly what that might have been. But it’s worthwhile then to take some time today to talk about the history of mining in Wisconsin. uh uh here on the Lee Rayburn show and our guest to do that is a senior lecturer emeritus from the Department of History at UW Platville If you have questions about the history of mining in Wisconsin or a story of your own that ties back to the legacy of mining in Wisconsin, you are welcome to join our conversation at 1-800-642-1234. That’s 800-642-1234, or you can send an email anytime to talk at WPR. org. Our guest joining us now is Tracy Lee Roberts. And Tracy, welcome back. Speaker 7 Thank you, Lee. Thanks for having me. Speaker 1 So let’s start with a little bit of geology, shall we? What what was it about the driftless region that made it so rich for mining? Speaker 7 Well, you know, the word driftless really means that we’re in an area down here in the lead mine district that is lacking glacial drift. That’s the heavy rocks, the soil, you know, the gravel, the sand, that glaciers pushed and crushed as they were moving southward. So we our area was missed, which means we didn’t um end up under m feet and feet, maybe even, you know, maybe even a mile of drift material. That means the lead that was perkling up from the, you know, bowels of the earth three hundred and sixty million years ago was actually um closer to the surface because we didn’t have the drift on top. made it easier to find that letter. Speaker 1 That makes a lot of sense. Before we get to the European settlers who made this the Badger State. What’s this history of Native Americans and mining in the Driftless region? Speaker 7 Well, Native Americans were mining here way before white people showed up um in the area Um we have found, you know, I haven’t found, but archaeologists all over the country have found that there is our kind of lead ore all over the country in Native American sites So for example in Hopewell sites in Ohio we find um our type of lead ore there. So there is clearly a lot of trading going on. You know, lead is often um crystallized in um it’s in kind of crystal shapes. And it’s often combined with some silver, making it very s uh shiny. So it’s a really interesting kind of ore, um, which was prized by lots of people Um go ahead. Yeah. Speaker 1 Well and then we would have to do it. Speaker 7 I was just gonna say that um So we’re talking about, you know, very ancient pre contact Native Americans and Ho Chung people in our state say that they have been here forever, like they’ve been here since, you know, the last Pleistocene. So, you know, they’ve been here thousands of years. So they feel that they are the descendants of those miners Speaker 1 Sure. And but and I think what fascinates me is how far our lead could be found uh in native tribes across this country. Speaker 7 Yeah, it’s amazing. Speaker 1 So when it comes to the European settlers then, who were they? What m you know who were these incoming lead miners? Where did they come from? And how did they land on these mines as a resource? Speaker 7 Sure. Well, you know, um we had this on this continent there was this huge rivalry between the French, the British and the Spanish. You know, and we’re talking about way you know, early fifteen hundreds. So you’ve got sixteen hundreds. You’re talking about major rivalries between c uh colonial powers. So the French of course had gone up into Canada and of course you know the British were along the eastern seaboard and the Spanish had come up from the south and they were inhabiting all kinds of areas around the Mississippi River and into the south and they weren’t holding down the fort real well but the French certainly were in Canada. And so they started coming down into different areas and making maps We know about uh uh Louise Joliet, uh Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette. Um when they came around this area and I’m talking about my area, the lead mine district in southwest Wisqu Wisconsin in sixteen seventy two, they made a map called the map of new discoveries. And this map clearly shows the word like mine deplume, which in you know means mines of lead So they were quite aware of this lead. So different French people were starting to explore the area. But it was really when Julien Dubuque showed up from Canada he established the village of Dubuque, Iowa. But he was working with the Native Americans. He wasn’t working against them. He uh worked with Metis cultures which were combinations of French and Native American people. And they were mostly Muskoky, Sok and Menominee and some Ho Chunk. But mostly the Muskoke were uh working with him So that was at where Dubuque Iowa stands today. And that was in the late seventeen hundreds. So you can see the long progression of people discovering, exploring, and learning about these mines and being excited about it But Dubuque really being able to make that connection where he made friends with these folks and intermarried with the Muskokie people and therefore made the connections needed to create a led mining camp there. Speaker 1 Tracy, what was the lead mining process like? How how did they extract ore? How did they dig? What kind of tools were they using? Did they have furnaces to smelt with? Speaker 7 So we’re using like picks and gads at first and then just uh basic simple tools. So they’re digging a hole They’re digging down maybe six to eight feet, something safe where you’re not having to, you know, build up the walls too much where you won’t have to worry about a cave and seeing if there’s any lead Or and if there is, they’re gonna follow that um on the horizontal. So you’re going down vertically and then you’re gonna go check if that vein of lead is running, you know, horizontally along a certain um at a certain elevation. If they find that lead, they’re gonna keep digging and they’re gonna start propping up the sides and as more technology comes into the area, they’re able to start, you know, getting the water out of mines that are deeper. So technology plays a huge role here. In terms of smelting lead ore, um Native Americans had smelting, but it was a little more crude and didn’t create the product that made for a very um malleable lead It didn’t it didn’t uh drive off enough of the sulfur molecules and the other things that can be in lead that make it brittle. So it was when the lead furnaces of the eighteen forties came in, the blast furnace, that that really the lead ore was uh much better quality in that point Speaker 1 Tracy Lee Roberts, our guest, senior lecturer emeritus from the History Department at UW Plattfield, taking a look at the lead district and the mining history of the Badger State. And if you have a question or a story to share, you can join us at 1-800-6421234. That’s 800-642-1234. Or send an email to talk at WPR dot org. You talk about the French explorers making their way down from Canada, but I am certain, Tracy, that there are many nationalities that ended up becoming w who we call today as the Badgers And some of the miners in the driftless region. Speaker 7 Yes, absolutely. So as soon as uh Americans are hearing about all this lead ore coming out of the area they’re pretty excited about it and start moving toward the area. Well, Native Americans controlled this whole region, so it wasn’t like nobody was here. Right. And they were adamant that they were gonna keep their minds The minds that Dubuque started with these Native American groups, um, once he died in eighteen ten, they weren’t gonna let go of that. They never gave Dubuque that land, they did a lease with him Other white people said, No, no, Dubuque owned the land so I’m I’m a descendant or he owes me money so I get to own the land now And they’re like, No, that’s not true and if you come into our land we will kill you So there were lots of skirmishes between eighteen ten and eighteen twenty one to keep out white minors. But finally, um actually it was southerners who came first before the immigration of um folks from Europe So we’re talking about some really powerful Americans like Colonel Richard M. Johnson became Vice President of the United States, not too much later. He was supposedly the killer of Tecumseh at the Battle of Thames, um that was um I think eighteen thirteen. And he, you know so he and his brothers showed up in the Lead Mine district, but they showed up with military troops US troops on horseback. So now the late Native Americans are like, Oh oops, maybe we don’t, you know, maybe we can’t hold on to this and sure enough he bought a very important major mine uh that was actually in the Galena, Illinois area, um, for only three hundred dollars. And the thing produced unbelievable amounts of m uh lead ore So it was mostly those folks. So, you know, we talk about um the southerners coming up from Southern Illinois, Missouri Kentucky area. Then we talk about how folks showed up from the East Coast. So we’ve got these Yankees showing up with a very different view on how things should be done And then of course we s have our immigrant population. So maybe you’d be interested in talking about that at this point. Speaker 1 Yeah, that be because Tracy, uh the Yankees and the Southerners, I I guess I did not know. I always thought of it as sort of a opportunity for immigrants to America who made their way all the way into the heartland and this is what they found as their best bet to eke out a living, to carve out a little peace for themselves, quite literally when it comes to the the caves that they would they would uh sleep in. But w I I I didn’t know about the Southerners that came up and then claimed the mines and brought m you know s uh uh sort of an ar a small army with them And what kind of resources they must have had to come up here and take this land? Speaker 7 Well some of them had some resources in terms of knowing how to mine lead or because Um in Missouri there was a big lead mining industry and it really was bigger than the industry we have in Wisconsin for a while. It’s just that their industry was about fifty miles from the Mississippi River, making it hard to transport the lead the finished lead or two a way to get it down to St. Louis. Down to you know I mean down to um New Orleans. Speaker 1 Mm-hmm. Speaker 7 So Galena, Illinois became the port town of the lead mine district of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin River was as well And so these are places that are much closer to the Mississippi River, making it cheaper and easier to move really heavy or over land. But these folks, these um Yankees and Southerners had, you know, names for each other. I mean that’s even the Southerners like they called the uh southern Illinois folks suckers because like the sucker fish, right? They would show up in the summer and they’d leave in the winter. They’re only there for a couple of months of the year And they do a little mining and then they go back to their farm and their homes, you know, south. So they all had names and the badger name, you seem interested in that and I want to just talk about that for a minute if I could. I did a big study on a thing called Badger Huts and I had that article published in the Illinois Journal called uh Illinois Heritage Magazine and that was a publication of Illinois State Historical Society And badger huts are actually not just caves but they’re actually built from s limestone. They still are on the landscape. So I went around this whole region And I found as many Badger huts as I could. There I found twelve still standing. Speaker 1 Huh. Speaker 7 And these there is the documentary evidence is quite clear that they were building these huts uh into hillocks or creating kind of a hillock by mounding up dirt and then building down and into to make a cavity that they would have um an arched building and this building would be about twelve feet deep and about eight feet wide and about seven feet high at the apex of the building And these are lovely, lovely little buildings. And they are all over our region from Galena into Lafayette County, uh Grant County. I have found a number of these. And so I found this fascinating because I first read about it in the historic documentation about the area that there were these buildings. I’m like, well are they still out there? Well yes they are. They still are out there So that’s kind of fun. And that’s how we got to be called the Badger State. It wasn’t so much that they were only um they weren’t exactly digging into a hole. I mean there was a little bit of that. But there were also these Badger huts. Which were not too bad. And they’ve they’ve been standing for two hundred years now. That’s what I’m saying. Saying either footprint wasn’t that much bigger than some of the log cabins that were in the area. Speaker 1 Let’s go to Stan DePier who has got a question for you, Tracy. Hi Stan. Speaker 8 Yeah, hi. We we understand today that that lead can be a possibly dangerous element and I’m wondering if if the early miners and the Native Americans were um afflicted with lead poisoning and what that looked like. Speaker 7 Right. That’s a good question. Um yes, m all mining, all extractive economies cause ecological damage and hurt animals, plants, and people. They do. So uh the problem with the mining of course is you’re not just bringing up lead ore, you’re also bringing up cadmium and you’re bringing up all kinds of arsenic. You’re bringing up toxic metals because that’s what’s in the deeper ground, right? Not maybe on our surface ground very much, but in the deeper ground. So you are bringing up things The smelting process itself in the 1800s, basically that process was you had a furnace And you were using a blast furnace, you’re getting that furnace to two thousand degrees Fahrenheit at least. That’s going to release the sulfur dioxide and the um uh nitrogen oxide molecules and those get uh reactive with oxygen and water vapors once they’re in the atmosphere up through the chimney. That creates sulfuric acid, nitric acid, that’s called acid rain. That harms the soil. It creates a very acidic soil. It harms the plants, the animals. The lead itself, like if you were just touching lead ore, like we have these at our museums in the area, and they let children and other people touch the lead ore in its um in its um sort of state of um being in the matrix of the limestone, that’s not very dangerous. I mean you probably wouldn’t want to lick your hand afterwards, right? But it’s really when the lead is being crushed and when it’s being processed and all that d dust and stuff comes up into your lungs. Now you’re getting lead poisoning into your lungs and it made people irritable, it made them slower and dopey over time. You know, it definitely had a a bad effect. Yes. Speaker 1 Thank you for the call, Stan. Tracy, what happened to the lead mines of the driftless region? Did we just run out of lead? What was the inevitable outcome? Speaker 7 We ran out of the easy lead, I’d say that. Most people will say that there’s still a lot of lead under the ground, but it’s not economically feasible to take it out Same with zinc. Um other countries are taking their lead out much cheaper and these are n international commodities. These aren’t just local things that we need in our country. Lead right now is mostly used in car batteries. We’ve tried to get it as much out of the environment as you know. It’s not in our gasoline or our paint anymore, thank goodness. But you know, we are using it for batteries and other things and it’s used, you know, internationally. So it didn’t uh it went away because of economics. It was no longer it didn’t pay to do it Also the easy ore was taken, so it gets more expensive when you have to go deeper underground and now you’ve got a water table problem. So how are you going to get the water out? Well now you need a steam engine And then you need all kinds of other equipment uh to get it out. So it’s no longer an easy two man process with, you know, a windlass and a bucket and uh picking a GAD, which is all you needed in the early days Speaker 1 So when did that lead mining industry s slow down or close? Speaker 7 By eighteen sixty five it was definitely slowed down. There was a peak during the Civil War, but then you know, right after that war. You know, leads used for making shot bullets. Um, you know, lead ore ha was used for uh joining and seaming uh metal to stone or metal to metal. Um so when the Spanish actually, um it’s an international commodity, they started being able to produce it more cheaply and ours wasn’t as easy to get to. So it was kind of a lull in mining and everybody went to farming if they hadn’t already done that. And then our zinc mining started building up. Zinc is often found with lead ore. So the zinc is usually deeper though. So it takes more equipment, more expensive equipment, and much more processing, very complicated processing methods. to get the zinc. You know, we use zinc for like galvanizing, right? For s iron, steel. It prevents rust and it was used to make white paint, you know, like zinc oxide. So um, you know, these industries died for an economic reason and then by nineteen seventy-nine we finally have an EPA saying You are, you know, adding a lot of toxins to the environment. We need to clean this up. And we do have a couple of super fun sites that are related to mining in our area. Speaker 1 So the zinc mining followed the lead mining in the Driftless region. Were there folks who made millions off this? Were there were there Mining magnets from this area? Speaker 7 Well, mostly, you know, by the time eighteen sixties comes around, um if you look at like plat maps Most of the land by that time was owned m the lead mining land and later zinc mining land was owned by large corporate interests. It wasn’t like a couple of guys with a mining lease anymore. My family came here in eighteen thirty four as lead miners. So I got really interested in this topic, you know, as a historian because I had a personal connection to the Leadmine District and to this industry. So I got you know, much more interested than I might have been. Um but I I think that the mining um was the thing that made the boom of this part of Wisconsin. I mean we were the most populated area of Wisconsin when Wisconsin became a state. You know, the population was really down here And of course over by Green Bay in the east. But you know, the rest of the state wasn’t that well populated yet. Speaker 1 And I’d imagine part of that has to do with uh r uh river travel, lake travel up in Green Bay and the ability to get around before we had uh roads. But I I also wonder, you know, how Where can I find these badger dens today? W if I wanted to go see these and are they protected lands? Speaker 7 So all of them are on private land. Oh but um I don’t know if it’s okay to tell you that I’m giving um tour of Native American lead mine district on Sunday, September twenty seventh. And we’re gonna start from Galena at quarter to ten. We’re gonna get on a air conditioned bus. There’s room for forty people and I still have seats. And I’m doing this with the Galena uh Joe Davis County Historical Society. So if people want to go to galenahistory. org, they can find the bus tour and join us. We’re going to go buy a badger hut besides seeing a whole bunch of other sites related to Native Americans, the mining culture, and the actual mining industry in the area. This should be a fun tour. It’s a five-hour tour. Speaker 1 Sunday, September twenty-seventh, through the Galena Historical Society online at galenahistory. Speaker 7 org. That’s correct. Speaker 1 I like that you threw A C in there, Tracy. Speaker 7 That is always I I know after this Summer, who knows? September could be hot again. Speaker 1 Exactly. Tracy Lee Roberts, what what are you still curious about in this story of Wisconsin’s history? What are you still researching and looking to find out more Speaker 7 Well, you know, I had to learn about the lead mining industry itself so that I could talk about it as the base But I’m actually more a social historian. I’m really interested in the abolitionists that were here. I’m really interested in cultural history and the ethnic groups that came. My family came from Northern England That’s a lead mining district. They came with unbelievable skills. They were already miners in England. And when you talk about these Cornish miners, they were already highly skilled miners So they’re not just the southern guy showing up for three months as a sucker and then going back down, you know, and just using a picking a gad. These guys had some s some different kinds of uh skills that were more technologically advanced. So by the eighteen forties we we’re getting these immigrant miners who really know what they’re doing. Speaker 1 And then do do we still see legacies of that today? Are there still institutions or organizations Is there still a place where we will find this history existing now? Speaker 7 I’d say in every single town in the lead mine district, we’re seeing the evidence of the early ethnic groups that came here Um, we have their churches, we have their buildings, we have their institutions, their cultural institutions. Um, you know, uh the Primitive Methodist Church is a really important British um institution that came here from England and really made a big splash in this area. It’s one of the biggest rural church groups in the area. Um, it’s very small now but still mighty. And you know, Catholic Churches, Father Mazakelli, one of our great leaders in this area, came from Italy and he was an early eighteen thirties Catholic uh priest here that made a huge difference. He was also an architect. He built buildings. He’s created institutions. girls schools so that girls could learn science in the eighteen fifties. I mean so we have these folks who just helped us create communities and the Irish tended to stick together so we’ve got Irish old communities, we’ve got You know, old British communities are still called places like Irish Hollow, British Hollow. You know, these places exist in our area. Speaker 1 Tracy Lee Roberts, I find that fascinating. Of all the fascinating things uh we’ve you’ve shared here this half hour, looking at what we see in the driftless today and being able to see all the way back in time to our mining history. Fascinating and I thank you so much for sharing it with us. Speaker 7 Sure, it was fun. Thank you so much Speaker 1 Again, that tour with Tracy Lee Roberts is Sunday, September 27th through the Galena History uh Historical Society. Tracy Lee Roberts is a senior lecturer emeritus from the Department of History at UW Platteville. I’m Lee Rayburn and you’re listening to WPR News. The solution to any problem, work, money, whatever, is to go fishing. And the worse the problem, the longer the time should be That’s from the website of Wisconsin Clear Waters chapter of Trout Unlimited online at wcwtu. org and joining us next on the Lee Rayburn Show. is the President Peter Jonas. And if you’ve got questions about trout fishing or trout streams, I want to invite you to join our conversation this half hour at 1-800-642-1234. That’s 800-642-1234 or send an email to talk at WPR. org. And Peter Jonas, welcome back. Speaker 9 Well thank you very much, Lee. I’m happy to be here. Speaker 1 So give us a little bit of an update. It is August and uh how is our trout and how are our trout streams? Speaker 9 For me, this is the most wonderful time of year to fish for trout because it is grasshopper season. Speaker 1 Okay, make that connection for me, Peter, please. Speaker 9 Well, trout feed quite heavily on all types of terrestrial insects. Ants, beetles But grasshoppers are the creme de la creme because they are a big bite, a lot of calories compared to the other insects that might find their way into a trout stream. So you can use larger flies, which for me as an angler of a certain age is a nice thing, be able to see the fly easily. The other thing is that trout will really move for ’em. Really? Yes. Sometimes if you’re using a smaller insect, you have gotta put it right in there feeding lane, but for grasshoppers, you can be a little sloppy with sometimes actually being a little sloppy with your casting is an advantage, because if the the fly goes splat on the water, that is a key to the trout. So it’s a a great way for beginners to fish. Speaker 1 Thank you for that. I have never been fly fishing before. It’s always been a rod and reel and I’m always a little reluctant to think of whether or not I could actually make a cast with fly fishing. How you how much work does it take to get off the ground? Speaker 9 I feel the the best way to start learning how to fly cast is to fly cast on your lawn five or six times. Seriously. And of course you’re gonna attract comments from your neighbors, you know, how’s the fishing and all of this kind of which is just an added bonus. But but it takes away the the whole, you know, the water’s moving, there are obstacles, everything else. Speaker 1 Takes the pressure out of it because you know you’re not gonna catch anything on the front line. Speaker 9 Exactly. So you throw a baseball you throw a baseball cap on the ground about fifteen, twenty feet away and just keep trying to hit the thing with the end of your fly line. And, you know, you can watch a number of YouTube videos for the the basic technique of how to do that and that’s useful. But to do it about ten, fifteen minutes a day for a week, so you don’t if you try to do it for an hour, you’re gonna you’re gonna bust the fly rod over your knee and you d fly rods are expensive, you don’t wanna do that. And and so, you know, ten, fifteen minutes, put it away, take it up the next day and before long you’ll be casting. Speaker 1 Well, how long does grasshopper season last here, Peter? Because it seems like that w window might be closing. Speaker 9 The the funny thing about the last few seasons, and uh I think it is a bizarre I’d hate to call it a benefit, but almost a bizarre benefit of global warming, which of course not a good thing. Don’t don’t want anybody thinking I think it’s a good thing But it grasshopper season has just kind of gone on forever the last few years. Oh wow. It has our trout season ends October fifteenth And really, I’ve fished hoppers right up till almost that last that last week of the season, definitely through September and into the first week of October So there’s some s there’s some time yet. I should mention one of the things about fishing in high summer that is very important. is to carry a stream thermometer because trout are very susceptible to high water temperatures, they’re threatened by those If water temperature is above sixty-five degrees, you really should should quit fishing where you’re fishing. Speaker 1 Above sixty-five. Mm-hmm. So these are cold water. Speaker 9 Correct. Trout are a a cold water indicator species and and they don’t handle high water temperatures well. They can get Very stressed. That’s tough. Speaker 1 It it might be great for grasshopper season. It might be rough for the trout. Speaker 9 Well, you gotta find uh find the right balance of You know, part of it is knowing what streams run colder that maybe have better thermal resiliency. Sure. Part of our tr brook trout reserves that the DNR has designated, one thing about those streams. is that almost all of those streams are therma thermally resilient. That’s one of the reasons why they’re brook trout reserves, because brook trout require the the coldest water of any of the trout we have in Wisconsin. But I I just carry a uh cheap Speaker 6 Uh food thermometer should meet thermometer. Speaker 9 Uh because they make thermometers that are specifically for anglers, but Generally y you gotta let them sit in the water for a while. I’ve got no patience, so I have an instant read thermometer. Speaker 1 I thought it was about being cheap For me. Well that too. Speaker 9 No money and no patience, Lee. Speaker 1 chapter of Trout Unlimited serving northwest Wisconsin counties and you can join us at 1-800-642-1234 or talk at WPR. org and let’s go to Porter in Sun Prairie. Hi Porter. Speaker 10 Hey, how’s it going? Thanks for taking my call. Speaker 1 Yeah, what do you have for us? Speaker 10 So uh I I mostly trout fish in the winter in Lake Michigan, but in the summer I get my fix for trout uh fish and form in the creeks, uh inland Wisconsin. I don’t I don’t fly fish. I I do spinning spinning gear but um I I noticed this year in the trout regulation book that I pick up every year and I look at the map and then have color coded as to what streams or creeks are you know, classified as class one, two, and three. And I I I noticed if you compare the two maps from last year and this year, there is a whole heck a lot of green uh and yellow and very little red, meaning that there’s no hardly any class one streams anymore. Is there any reason why the DNR uh kind of demoted a lot of these streams uh to a class two or three as opposed to a one. Speaker 9 Can can I ask what area of the country or what area of the state you live in Speaker 10 Yes, I live uh south central Wisconsin. I’m in I’m Madison area, so I fish a lot of Dane County, uh Columbia County, and Grant County. Speaker 9 Okay The stream classification and I’m not a DNR employee and or a spokesperson for the DNR. I do try to keep up on a little bit of this stuff, but just disclaimer there. But their stream classification system is by what they try to make objective standards. So a class one stream means that that stream Supports natural reproduction of wild populations of trout. So that is that is kind of the bottom line. A class two stream may have some natural reproduction. but generally is considered where it might need a little stocking to uh enhance its fishery. And a a class three stream is simply a put and take type of fishery where where it can only support stocked fish and it might not even support those fish through the whole season. So not knowing exactly uh what uh streams you’re talking about and I I wouldn’t recommend naming your secret spots over uh statewide radio bro. That’s gonna be my next question for you, Peter. Um it’s hard to say. I do know that, you know, streams in the Dane County area are obviously going through a period where there’s a great deal of d development and intensive land use and so that may be affecting how they are classifying some of these streams. Speaker 1 With less class one streams, does that suggest perhaps warmer waters than these fish can handle? Speaker 9 The class system is based not only on water temperature, but also say the quality of the st substrate, so if it’s primarily a a heavily silted substrate where fish have difficulty reproducing. That might be a prime class II stream where it can support an adult population of trout, but it may not support a lot of natural reproduction And of course water purity and so on and so forth. Speaker 1 Quality, temperature, substrate. Interesting observation, Porter, and I’d be s interested to see where the DNR moves from this year to next year considering where it moved in the last year. So thank you for sharing. Thank you for calling. Let’s go to Josh in Green Bay next. Hi, Josh Speaker 11 Hey, thanks for taking my call. So a couple years ago, the a parasite called whir or known to cause whirling disease in trout was found in Elton Creek at Silver Moon Springs Trout Farm. And um that was because they were allowed to reroute all the water in Elton Creek into their ponds and then back out. And then the guy who ran uh won for the for Republican governor last night was the guy who gave him a law to do that. Are there any other infestations of whirling disease in the state of Wisconsin other than the tributary waters of the Wolf River. Speaker 9 Josh, thank you. Whirling disease? I have not heard anything about whirling disease, Josh, but one thing I do want to mention in regards to infestation of exotic species. is that New Zealand mud snails were recently found in the Seas branch of Kickapoo Creek. And C’s branch is I’ve fished that stream myself. It is a beautiful native brook trout stream. absolutely gorgeous runs in runs into the west branch of the Kickapoo. New Zealand mud snails are a big problem because they really feast upon the very tiny microlife of the stream, the very bottom of the food chain. And they are basically undigestible by trout. Um so they are they are taking, if you will, food out of the food chain and they’re not passing it along to things that are bigger than themselves. So uh Uh this has been a alarming development. And I see Lee has a a bit of a puzzled look on his face about how New Zealand mud snails may have arrived. Um, unfortunately, I’m afraid this one is probably on us anglers because New Zealand is a is a destination site for Uh folks who can fish for trophy brown trout, there are incredible trout fishing opportunities in New Zealand and people who have the capacity to fish internationally and I think it is a testament to how popular the driftless region has become that people who fish all around the world fish in the driftless. And it probably, I mean, I d I’m only speculating at this point, but it’s likely that it they arrived in some sediment that was on the bottom of somebody’s waiting boots. That’s a a likely cause in this scenario. It underscores the importance of thoroughly cleaning your waiting boots and your waiters after you’ve been fishing somewhere where there are uh Yeah, probably anywhere, frankly, but particularly if you fish somewhere where there have been um forms of life that were trying not to pass on, uh exotic species, this sort of thing. So yeah, that’s that certainly is a a big issue, whirling disease that is uh first sprung up out west on the Madison River has come to our area uh through the situation Josh mentioned and now we’re dealing with new New Zealand mud snails, so we’ve we’ve got some some issues here Speaker 1 I gotta tell you, I did not know that our trout were so it feels like they’re coming at you from just about every angle, from the environment to the invasive species, to the disease. You feel like I’m wonder I’m worried about our trout, Peter. Good. Speaker 9 Because Well, I’ll tell ya, before I get into some of the details of this must be the the bad news section of the show at the moment here. Um But, you know, I’m a firm believer that people come to l care about the environment and advocate for the environment and change their behavior. More out of love than out of guilt. I mean guilt can motivate, but When someone falls in love, whether it is fishing for trout or whether it is rock climbing or following butterflies, whatever it takes, that I like to think is a portal to start to see larger and larger concentric circles of connections and to really make an environmentalist. And of course this is the Wisconsin idea really with Aldo Leopold. You think about how he integrated his own personal experience as a hunter and an angler with his scientific research And and so I’m I’m glad you’re concerned about our trout because they are worthy of our concern. Speaker 1 And there’s reason to be concerned. Speaker 9 Yes, absolutely. Speaker 1 Um here here’s another one that came up on our show about a uh a week ago, and I did not think this would be a contentious issue, but Jeff and Bayfield’s on the line and he’s gonna lay it out for us. Jeff Hi. Jeff, are you there? Speaker 12 Yeah, uh thanks for the show. Um about four three or four years ago I attended a beaver trout One-day conference in Hayward, Wisconsin. And um I wonder if our um our our guests could uh update me and our listeners on the latest scientific data on Trout versus beaver. I know Wisconsin DNR is currently updating the beaver management plan, a 10-year plan. And just wonder if you had any new information on the beaver trout controversy Speaker 9 Thanks, Jeff, and thanks for for throwing me that question that I am certain is gonna get me into hot water with somebody. Speaker 1 So there’s no right answer here, Peter. But we talked about this about a week ago. Yes. And there is uh varying opinions on this, and there is, you know Uh the question about how to coexist. You talk about the interconnec connectedness and how important that is and how there’s a balance in nature and whether or not we are reinforcing that balance or taking that putting that balance out of whack and how we can respect the populations of both wild species in a way that that defends their habitat as well as their existence. Speaker 9 Exactly. And d I do wanna direct your attention, Jeff, to if you go uh to the Wisconsin Public Radio site to Lee’s site, there is the interview of a couple fellows, I forget their name, that are definitely in the Beaver Believer camp and they presented very well, I felt. their position on on all of the advantages that beavers can bring to an ecosystem. For myself the I I don’t share the real some trout anglers absolutely just loathe beavers and and I learned that last week. Yeah. Um I consider myself neither a beaver believer nor a believer hater. I consider myself beaver curious that I think there are lots of different ways that trout interact with beavers and and beavers interact with a watershed that we don’t fully understand. I will say there is a scientist, Matt Mitro, at the Wisconsin DNR, who has done some outstanding research. One of the things that Matt has done in his recent search of Elk Creek and the Triflis is that uh at least in that setting, in an agricultural setting, beaver dams were a very real impediment to fish passage And I think sometimes some of the research that comes from uh what we’ll call the beaver believer end of things is often done on on western trout streams which are very different geographically than are midwestern streams that are often in an agricultural environment or in a Northwoods environment. I guess I think something that would be helpful to kind of turn down the adversarial rhetoric and arrive at more constructive solutions is I would love to see us really focus on individual cases like an individual watershed and do some hard research about how beavers might affect it. Um I do point people to Matt Mitro’s work. I think it is it is uh d I think your guest last week just they’re not here to defend themselves. I think they were a bit tough on the DNR, because I think I think the DNR has really done some serious research on this subject that um if it hasn’t been peer-reviewed would certainly pass peer review muster. So Uh that’s that’s my thought about that. Finally, just a personal note. I fished some streams with a lot of beavers in them, which I don’t mind, but I do wish they had more social awareness because they’re their eyesight is terrible and I’ve had a couple instances where they’ve just like swam right up to me and then wheeled the three sixty and Speaker 1 My the my old heart’s getting a little bit, Peter. Speaker 9 My old heart is getting a little f fragile for that uh that kind of scenario and and or if you get a tail slap when you don’t know they’re there. It Speaker 1 It is unnerving, but Jeff, I’m glad you called and I’m glad you asked, and uh that was a wonderful answer, Peter. So thank you for that. And and personal too. So let’s go to Tu Yang next in Madison. Tuyang, hi. Speaker 13 Hello, thanks for taking my call. Um I when I think of trout fishing, especially growing up, I imagine the fly rod and the dry fly, but growing up I realized that, you know, there are m there’s more than one way to fish for trout, in particular using a spin rod and reel. And I’m wondering if your guests can talk more about the different methods that uh fishermen and fisherwomen can use to catch trout. Speaker 9 Thanks a lot for that question. I am happy to do that. One of the things I think that Trout Unlimited could do a better job at. is to really reinforce the idea that we are not a fly fishing organization. Some that’s a lot of our ethos, and a lot of our members do in fact fly fish, but Trout Unlimited is intentionally not a fly fishing organization. And I think we have really burned or damaged bridges that we shouldn’t burn or damage by people g getting in to conflicts about uh, you know, one method of fishing is better. I’m personally for whatever method of fishing Gets you outside and gets you Just fishing is best. Yeah. That’s it. Yeah. Fish. It it solves a multitude of pr multi My grandmother used to say she never met a bad boy who fished. I I sort of feel that in my own personal experience I’ve seen that disproven at times. But the point is well taken. Yeah, exactly. You know. So um you can do that. So for example, even in grasshopper season, while while I do think a fly rod is a quite advantageous in that circumstance. You can with a casting bubble put a fly on a spinning rod and you’ve got enough weight to cast it out there and uh that is one way you can fish for trout. Another people are very uh I see people very effectively using spinners of various sizes for trout. I think some methods are starting to come together. For example, there are there are people who are their passion is kind of headhunting, fishing for very large trout in some of our downstream areas. with a spinning rod they might fish with a very large rappela and now we have fly anglers who are fishing streamer flies that are like the size of a large rapola with a little heavier fly rod and it’s a very interesting the methods are not that dissimilar from each other. So interesting. Yeah. So we have some some ways of doing that. In the steelhead and brown trout uh the fish that run out of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, there’s a form of fishing called centerpin, which actually I have dabbled in a little bit myself. that you fish with a reel that sort of looks like a fly rod reel, very long rod, you cast a float And you can the thing that attracted me was I was out on the Brule one day watching someone with one of these center pin rods and I had drift envy. The person could make a drag-free drift that was so long. It was like a good 150 yards. And, you know, I’m getting like fifteen yards adrift on my fly rod and I thought, this is killing me. Speaker 1 I gotta try this. Peter, we are out of time, but we have so much more to tie. We’re out of time. Look at that. That went by so quick as fishing often does Sir, I invite you back anytime. Thank you so much for joining us today. Peter Jonas is president of the Wisconsin Clearwaters chapter of Trout Unlimited, serving the counties of Northwest Wisconsin. I’m Lee Rayburn and you’re listening to WPR News. Wisconsin Public Radio, © Copyright 2026, Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System and Wisconsin Educational Communications Board.