The Bedrock Is Eroding
"Nothing can be changed until it is faced." — James Baldwin
Tomorrow my grandpa Joe would have turned 101.
The son of Italian immigrants, he served in two wars, moved his family from New York to Michigan to California, and built a comfortable life working for Akzo — the chemical company, now Akzo Nobel. He was, by most measures, exactly who Tom Brokaw had in mind when he coined “the greatest generation.” I’m not sure I’d frame it that way, but I digress. We thought he’d outlive us all — until a careless moment, a car door, a windy day, a shattered shin, and six months later he was gone.
Last week I wrote about sand. This week I’m reading about salt. Ancient, elemental, extracted. The earth keeps offering itself up and we keep taking. Iron is next.
Toward the end of his life our conversations deepened — an uptick in those final months when I could visit more often than usual, and when he’d call after receiving one of my postcards. Usually we talked about weather. Gradually we talked about waste. About disconnection. My father is one of seven and they inherited a certain withholding — there’s love there, real love, just not the outspoken kind. Grandpa Joe was a devout Catholic and sometimes it felt like he was trying to confess something he didn’t quite have the language for. I didn’t know the right questions to ask.
I keep wondering what he made of it all. Whether somewhere in those decades at Akzo something accumulated. Not guilt exactly. More like a question he couldn’t finish asking.
Two German chemists figured out how to pull ammonia from the air itself — feeding billions, preventing famine, arguably tipping the balance of human survival. Salt gave us fertilizer, soap, the conditions for modern life. It has done more for human civilization than we will ever fully account for. Ingenuity we have always had.
Restraint is another matter.
Gunpowder is also a salt. My grandfather served in two wars. The same company that exhausted Chilean workers mining saltpeter for ammunition is now coming for the Boundary Waters. Some extractions never end — they just find new ground.
Yesterday Congress voted to allow Antofagasta — a Chilean copper and salt conglomerate — to mine the Boundary Waters for copper. A wilderness watershed that has no legal standing to object. A foreign corporation does. Here’s what stopped me cold: the chapter I’ve been reading this week in Material World opens in Antofagasta, Chile. The same company. The same place. Now trying to extract from one of the most sacred watersheds in North America. I had to put the book down.
The fight isn’t over — environmental groups will take this to court, and with any luck nature gets some well deserved justice, as so often isn’t the case. But the fact that we’re here at all says something.
It says we keep falling for it. Meta runs commercials lamenting that Congress hasn't regulated them — while lobbying the same Congress to ensure it never does. Antofagasta doesn’t even bother with the commercials. Our government and corporations shouldn’t require this level of watchdogging — and yet here we are, which is why jobs like mine exist that shouldn’t have to. Maybe that was part of what Grandpa Joe couldn't quite say. Not just guilt about what he'd participated in, but the dawning sense that the bedrock was eroding long before anyone said so out loud — and that someone should.
Spring arrived in full swing after weeks of bipolar weather — the kind of whiplash that used to feel unusual. I moseyed over to the Senate side of Capitol Hill to shake my fist at the clowns that continue to disappoint. I’ve been doing some version of this since I cast my first vote in 2004. Twenty plus years of watching the Democrats fumble — not just on public lands, not just on extraction, but across the board, on issue after issue, election after election. The problem isn’t lack of opportunity. It’s that they keep running to the center when the moment calls for something harder and faster to the left. Charlie Brown, Lucy, the football. Every time.
Fire is the latest boogeyman they’re hiding behind — extraction justified in the name of forest health, logging dressed up as disaster prevention. The system cannot be fixed if we do not acknowledge every last flaw in it, especially this one. The bedrock environmental laws we relied on to prevent exactly this are eroding — not metaphorically, but in real time, vote by vote.
The chemical industry's recklessness gave us the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act. The bedrock. Now salvage logging moves into burned forests in the name of restoration — dragging heavy equipment through naturally recovering landscapes, spraying pesticides on the very ground fire just renewed — while the same laws meant to prevent this get twisted into justification for it.
Meanwhile nature doesn’t fumble. The Korean DMZ — sealed off from human activity since 1953 — now hosts over 6,000 species. One human lifetime of being left alone. Fire, flood, disturbance, death begetting life. Nature self-regulates, brutally and without apology, in ways corporations are structurally unwilling and financially incentivized never to. Our economic system only knows exponential growth. Our natural world is finite and has earned an overdue rest.
Which brings me to the thought I can't shake: Twin Metals, owned by Antofagasta — a Chilean mining giant — has more rights in the Boundary Waters than the Boundary Waters does. A corporation has legal standing to extract. A wilderness watershed does not.
Imagine if that were flipped. Not managed. Not extracted from. Just left alone, with the legal standing to stay that way.
Grandpa Joe was trying to say something toward the end. The son of immigrants who believed everything this country promised, for better or worse, he lived long enough to sense that the costs of that building had been pushed forward — into the water, into the air, into this moment. He didn’t have the language then.
We do now. The question Baldwin already answered for us: nothing can be changed until it is faced.
