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In which I explain the bog blog concept
Before Twitter and Facebook there was a time when blogging was the hip thing to do. This period lasted just a few years, from 2004 into 2007. By the end of it I was doing community ed classes about blogging and that’s how you know a trend died. While blogging is still relevant, it’s now…
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Brown on the Air: For days of Auld Lang Mine
I’ll be on 91.7 KAXE Monday morning at 8:10 to talk about the year ahead for the Iron Range and northern Minnesota. I’ll be dabbling in mining news and trying out some of my new riffs on the “fate vs. free will” concepts I’ve been working with lately. I’m going to make that so much…
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Ice dams are a thing
Reuban Saltzman from the Structure Tech Home Inspection Blog has a great post today on the MinnPost “Blog Cabin” about how to prevent or address ice dams. If you don’t know what an ice dam is you were just like me before I moved into my first 1920s-built home on the Iron Range. They are…
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The question facing the Iron Range
I had another conversation about the Iron Range yesterday. I have these talks from time to time. Along with a few working historians, a few journalists and no shortage of political leaders, I’m one of the people who get the call when someone wants the story — the real deal — about the Iron Range…
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Duluth Metals and Magnetation make the news
Here’s a couple developments in Iron Range mining projects. Unless something blows up this is my last newsy post for a while. Holiday features and good times on the way. Duluth Metals has acquired Franconia Minerals, consolidating two proposed nonferrous underground copper mining initiatives. This will simplify permitting and capitalization. We spent plenty of time…
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Iron Range agency OKs loan for PolyMet
The Iron Range Resources board approved the $4 million land swap loan to the PolyMet mining company Thursday afternoon. This was expected as the nonferrous mining project proposed by PolyMet for the eastern Iron Range is politically popular as a job creation plan. It’s a complicated deal, though, one that puts the Iron Range public…
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Range pensioners await (good?) news
Every place has its morose story of woe and heartache, its cyclonic sucking vortex of public and private outrage. For the Iron Range that story is the troubles facing pensioners from the former National Steel plant in Keewatin. A few hundred miners caught between owners of the plant, now run as Keewatin Taconite by U.S.…
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Johnny Cash and the Iron Range
My friend Jason Scorich wrote a history column for the Hometown Focus about the time Johnny Cash played the Iron Range (Eveleth, specifically) in 1958. This is worth a read. Scorich juxtaposes Cash with the Range’s own Bob Dylan. Then Robert Zimmerman, Dylan lived in Hibbing at the time of the Cash show and was,…
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Iron Range Resources: let the light shine in
It bears mentioning every time I find myself in complete and total agreement with a Bill Hanna editorial in the Mesabi Daily News. The Iron Range Resources agency needs reform, a refocusing on quantifiable results, and increased transparency. Iron Range Resources is a difficult agency to explain to outsiders, many of whom think it’s just…
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Range boondoggle dealt ironic setback: being ignored
This isn’t so much news as it is the gradual realization of the haphazard Iron Range economic development planning surrounding the Mesaba Energy Project, a coal gasification power plant proposed 10 years ago by the ethereal Excelsior Energy of Minnetonka. The U.S. Department of Energy recently removed the plant from its listing of so-called “clean…
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Tech infrastructure only the first half of the battle
In recent years I’ve advocated high speed internet infrastructure as one possible way to diversify the Iron Range economy and move us past the local dependence on natural resource industries to provide jobs. My reasoning, in truth, sounds more like faith than fact. I have faith that with high speed, world class communication capabilities, and…
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Mining vs. the Environment: a debate not centered in reality
The debate continues over new forms of mining in northern Minnesota, the way it always does: dueling op/eds. Deciding Iron Range issues via op/eds is like having zoning disputes being settled by a figure skating competition between Oksana Kryksstrkgghg and Svetlana Rokavrrrkgrrgh. What? What is going on? Who won? She did? Really? What I’m saying…
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MPR: "The giant, Mesabi, places a bet"
Minnesota Public Radio features a guest commentary of mine over at their website today. Titled “The giant Mesabi places a bet,” the piece is cut from the same flank of much of my writing but refined for the big city audience. This is the result of my lecture at MPR earlier this month. If this…
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Gogebic a go-go?
Here’s a Duluth News Tribune update by way of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on that proposed open pit iron ore mine in northern Wisconsin along the Gogebic Range. My prediction: developers overstating the number of jobs will do battle with environmentalists overstating the environmental risk. The result will underwhelm us all. I support anything that…