In Northern Minnesota, Two Economies Square Off: Mining vs. Wilderness
“If they stop this new mine, what’s the draw to be up here if there’s no jobs?” Also, he notes, those who oppose new mining jobs — “elitists”
and “hypocrites,” Forsman calls them — benefit from the same metals that blue-collar workers like him produce.
Boundary Waters activists argue that the very presence of mining — its disruption of this area’s natural character, not to mention the specter of pollution — could hamper the region’s “amenity-based” development in a multitude of tangible
and intangible ways, from destroying property values to stripping away jobs that feed off this area’s natural beauty.
The company believes the area’s valuable metals — copper, nickel, platinum, palladium, gold
and silver — can be extracted in an environmentally responsible way and can provide hundreds of jobs to the job-starved economy of Minnesota’s Arrowhead Region, along the northwestern coast of Lake Superior.
Geological coincidence makes Ely — one three-square-mile town in the northernmost reaches of the
continental United States — a focus of a national debate about the proper use of public lands.
After Rom and her husband, Reid Carron, retired from the largest law firm in the Twin Cities — she was a commercial real estate lawyer, he a management
labor lawyer — they moved north in 2012 to a modern log cabin they had built on land her father bought decades before on Burntside Lake.
