Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
Some of the world’s biggest mining companies are working with South Africa’s government on a 27 billion rand ($1.5 billion) water project to supply major platinum and chrome operations and several hundred thousand people with drinking water. Glencore Plc and Anglo American Platinum Ltd. are among the companies attempting to secure half of that amount in financing by the end of the year with the rest of the funds to be sourced by municipalities and the government.
The Corps said the permit did not comply with the water quality standards set by the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, whose reservation on the St. Louis River is downstream from the mine and processing plant sites near Babbitt and Hoyt Lakes. The project has long been criticized by environmental and tribal groups for its potential impacts on water resources, but it has also come under increasing fire in recent months from former Gov. Arne Carlson, a Republican who served from 1991-99. In addition to the risks to water quality, Carlson has sounded the alarm about the influence of big mining corporations on Minnesota politics.
A trio of Conservative MPs called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the federal government to be more responsive to attempts by Swiss-based Glencore to take over Canadian mining giant Teck Resources Ltd. through a shareholder deal. Kootenay-Columbia MP Rob Morrison was joined by Rick Perkins, MP for South Shore—St. Margarets and opposition critic for innovation, science and industry, and Foothills MP John Barlow, along with Elkford mayor Steve Fairbairn.
When Barbara Sherwood Lollar sent water samples to a colleague at the University of Oxford for testing, she knew this was no ordinary water. The geochemist had spent much of her career wandering around some of the deepest mines in the world, finding and extracting water that was millions of years old. She waited and waited for results that should’ve come back promptly. So she dialled up the U.K. researcher in charge of the test. “I said, ‘Hey, what’s going on with the samples?’ ” she recalls. “He said, ‘Our mass spectrometer is broken. This can’t be right.’ ” The tests pegged the mean age of the samples, extracted from a mine north of Timmins, Ont., in 2009, at 1.6 billion years old—the oldest ever found on Earth.
