Social Sciences Newsblog

From The Keweenaw Report

The Villages of Calumet and Laurium and Calumet Township all have highlights and their own challenges.

Dwindling populations and median household incomes well below the state average–especially in Calumet Village–have reduced the availability of services to residents over the years.

A team from Michigan Tech’s Department of Social Sciences has spent the last four months looking at the advantages and disadvantages of several options for the area.

Doctoral Student Kelley Christensen said, “We looked at five different possibilities.  We looked at keeping the status quo, we looked at intergovernmental agreements, revenue sharing, the possibility of the Village of Calumet dissolving into the township, and we also looked at the possibility of Laurium and Calumet Village becoming a city.”

Changes could take years to implement and a monumental effort would be needed by all community members involved, but Christensen says it all starts with people willing to talk about the possibilities.

Christensen said, “We just really hope that this starts a conversation.  Our purpose here was to provide information to them and give them a list of options, and then we’re hoping that it will facilitate discussion and participation in government.”

Their report is online for the public to review.

http://www.mtu.edu/social-sciences/research/reports/

• Executive Summary
• Full Report

The team will also post the power point presentation from Monday’s meeting online.  Questions can be directed to Dr. Richelle Winkler of Michigan Tech’s Department of Social Sciences.

John Baeten, IHA PhD Candidate,  recently had a post published by NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and Environment) for their “Seeds: New Research in Environmental History” Series, titled: “Busting Ghosts: Building an HGIS to Reveal Historical Mine Waste Producers and Develop Strategies to Mitigate Future Risk”

John Baeten, Nancy Langston, and Don Lafreniere recently published an article titled: “A Geospatial Approach to Uncovering the Hidden Waste Footprint of Lake Superior’s Mesabi Iron Range” published in The Extractive Industries and Society.

Article Abstract: “For decades, the Lake Superior Iron District produced a significant majority of the world’s iron used in steel production. Chief among these was the Mesabi Range of northern Minnesota, a vast deposit of hematite and magnetic taconite ores stretching for over 100 miles in length. Iron ore mining in the Mesabi Range involved three major phases: direct shipping ores (1893–1970s), washable ores (1907– 1980s), and taconite (1947–current). Each phase of iron mining used different technologies to extract and process ore. Producing all of this iron yielded a vast landscape of mine waste. This paper uses a historical GIS to illuminate the spatial extent of mining across the Lake Superior Iron District, to locate where low- grade ore processing took place, and to identify how and where waste was produced. Our analysis shows that the technological shift to low-grade ore mining placed new demands on the environment, primarily around processing plants. Direct shipping ore mines produced less mine waste than low-grade ore mines, and this waste was confined to the immediate vicinity of mines themselves. Low-grade ore processing, in contrast, created more dispersed waste landscapes as tailings mobilized from the mines themselves into waterbodies and human communities.”