By John Myers, Duluth News Tribune
Published April 10, 2011
Len Anderson says you don’t have to be a scientist to see what the big deal is with sulfate. Just paddle a canoe on the St. Louis River.
“Upstream of where the Partridge River flows in, the St. Louis is choked with wild rice,” said Anderson, a retired Cloquet science teacher and self-described river rat. “But downstream from the Partridge, there’s a 120-mile dead zone on the St. Louis River. There isn’t one stem of wild rice.”
The difference, Anderson and others say, is the amount of sulfate in the water.
Up where mining has little influence on the river, sulfate levels are below 10 parts per million, and wild rice thrives. But where tributaries carry mining runoff into the St. Louis, sulfate levels jump, and wild rice fades away.
Anderson’s theory has become the focal point in one of the state’s most heated environmental issues in decades.
Tags: Legislature, Northeastern Minnesota, Sulfate Standard, Wild Rice