Month: July 2025

My favorite professional baseball team is the Detroit Tigers. My mother was a huge fan and watched or listened to every Tigers’ game, and the radio broadcast was the soundtrack of my summers in the 1970s and 80s. The Tigers in 2025 have the best record in Major League Baseball (MLB), and we were looking to go to a game during our visit to the USA. Unfortunately, Michigan is a big state, and Comerica Park, where the Tigers play, is an 8-hour drive from Caspian. The Milwaukee Brewers (4 hours) and Minnesota Twins (5 hours) are actually closer to my hometown than Detroit (8 hours). When I saw the glamorous Los Angeles Dodgers playing the Milwaukee Brewers this week, I decided to see the final game of a 3-game series yesterday. It was an afternoon game, so we could drive down in the morning and return in the evening.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are “glamorous” because their principal owner, Mark Walter, is a very wealthy man (estimated $12 billion in personal wealth). The team is part of the Guggenheim Partners portfolio, a global financial firm controlling $335 billion in investments. The Dodgers have the MLB’s highest annual payroll at $338 million. The average MLB payroll is $171 million. Being able to spend twice as much as the other teams gets you players like Shohei Otani ($70 million/year) and yesterday’s pitcher, Tyler Glasnow ($33 million/year). The Milwaukee Brewers, as a small-market team, have a payroll of $115 million.

We had a great family day at the American Family Field stadium in Milwaukee. The Brewers came from behind to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth inning and win it in the 10th inning 3-2 on Venezuelan centerfielder Jackson Chourio’s single.

The main attraction in the game was to see Shohei Otani. He didn’t have a particularly good game with 2 strikeouts, two walks, and a fly out to center field in his 5 plate appearances. His size (6 feet 4 inches tall) and speed on the bases were impressive! We got to see a close game and some outstanding, athletic plays by world-class athletes. American professional sports really know how to provide a comfortable and entertaining fan experience. There was free WiFi, bars, restaurants, food stalls, shops, etc., on the concourses around the stadium. Our seats were in the sun so the girls spent much of the game walking around the stadium and enjoying the atmosphere of the game. Oliver, Owen, and I focused on the game.

I remembered during the game the last time I attended a Milwaukee Brewers game, exactly 40 years ago this summer. In 1985, my godfather, Bill Leonoff, who was working for the local radio station, WIKB, aired Brewers games on the radio then, and so he took me up into the press box for a two games against the then-Oakland Athletics. I remember getting all the free food I wanted, and it was cool to receive the media packet of statistics for both teams.

Overall, it was a great experience. My one complaint is the cost of attending a game. We paid $30 per ticket (5x=$150) plus $40 for parking, $12 beers, and a tank of gas to drive there ($60). A day at the ball park costs between $300 and $400 for a family of five. That is OK for a one-off experience, but I don’t see how people can afford to attend a lot of games. The attendance was over 33,000 people for a Wednesday afternoon game, so it has not hit the point of being too expensive, obviously. It would be nice if everyone involved in MLB would take less money to provide a more affordable experience for fans. I don’t think this will happen, though.

Ernest Scheyder, a senior correspondent for Reuters, has written a fascinating book about mining for the critical minerals that are the foundation of green and renewable energy technologies. Copper, Lithium, Antimony, rare earth metals, etc. are components of electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, LED lighting systems, iPhones and high-end electronics, computer processors, magnets used in wind turbines, etc. Sourcing these is driving humanity’s move away from fossil fuels and possibly saving future generations to the ravages of climate change. There is a cost however to this as mining for minerals is complex, costly, and damages the environment. Often these mines are huge open pits, requiring transportation links to the outside world, have toxic tailings ponds or evaporation pools, that may damage the local ecosystems. One of the challenges of trace minerals huge amounts of rocks need to be dug out, crushed, chemically treated to extract the desired mineral. Scheyder goes around the country and into South America to interview the key players in this story. He gives the views of all sides, mining company executives and engineers, government officials, environmental activists, etc. to tell the historical and modern story

My life has been greatly influenced by the mining industry. I grew up on Iron County in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the 20th century, there were approximately 70 iron ore mines but many ended post World War II as higher percentage iron ore mines developed around the world. A few mines hung on into the 1960s and 1970s when I was a child, the last mine, the Sherwood Mine closed in 1978. In my village of Caspian, there were six iron mines with the Voroner Mining Company operated three mines:

• Baltic (1900) – It by the way is the name of my street.
• Young’s (1904)
• Fogarty (1907)

Other mines included the Caspian (1903), Berkshire (1908), and Dober (year unknown). The population of Caspian has dropped from 1,912 in 1920 to 800 in 2020 and declining at a rate of an average of 8% per decade. When I was a kid, the entire woods around Caspian and Iron River was covered in red dust/rock, and the Iron River going through the town was known to us kids as the “Red River”. 50 years later nature has healed itself. The open pits are now filled with water and create wetlands for wildlife and recreation, there are iron ore waste piles that have been mostly covered up by trees, and the Iron County museum preserves the Caspian Mine Headframe and tells the story of the mining industry here. There is a spider web of underground shafts and tunnels in the county. Back in the 1950s the road between Caspian and the neighboring village of Gaastra caved-in, killing a young man driving home in the middle of the night. I’ll do a blog post someday of that incident. Caspian was part of the greater Iron Range, an area in the Upper Great Lakes from Minnesota, through Wisconsin, to Michigan. Scheyder reports from Ely, Minnesota in the book about the attempt to develop mining in the Boundary Waters National Wilderness area just north of the town. It would be nice to have mining companies come back through the Iron Range, looking for these critical minerals in the remnants of the iron mines.

I got my first teaching job in Nevada thanks to the need for schools because of the gold mines in Elko County. They mined microscopic gold and along within came a booming economy but also cyanide-laced, leaching ponds and huge mountains of waste rock. Scheyder spends a lot of time out in the American west, in Nevada, Idaho, and Arizona, detailing the challenges of developing mines in the face of environmental concerns and indigenous people’s rights.

The book gives an overview of the global critical metals mining industry, with of course, China leading the way. It is a strategic need for governments around the world and Scheyder contrasts the policies of Trump and Biden, as well as spending a lot of time in our other home of Bolivia. The Salar de Uyuni is the biggest salt flat in the world and underneath it is a brine of dissolved lithium and salt, the largest lithium resources in the world. Due to its elevation, distance from markets, difficulty of extracting lithium, and poor governance, it just has not been developed yet. Nadia and I spent a summer break touring the Salar de Uyuni in the late 1990s, one of the most striking landscapes on Earth. I should try to find the photos from that trip and digitize them.

I also found it interesting that the mining industry will eventually end when recycling takes over. The lithium and copper in batteries can be recycled over and over again without degradation. Scheyder interviews a couple of companies trying to start recycling businesses. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn more about mining. I think it would be a good career to get into and I will encourage my students to consider a career in mining engineering.

Other facts I learned:

• A 55.4 kWh Tesla car battery has around 6 kilograms of lithium. A typical Tesla car needs 10 pounds of cobalt. The conditions of “artisanal miners” in Congo supplying the cobalt is appalling.
• The USA is moving its petroleum dependence on OPEC to mineral dependence on China, Congo, and others. The geopolitics around OPEC countries and the West is moving towards nickel, magnesium, graphite, cobalt, lithium, and rare earths.
• USA holds 24% of world’s lithium reserves but only produces 3% of annual lithium ready for use.
• Mining has a big impact on the environment. Chile is the world’s largest copper producer and #2 in lithium and 65% of the country’s water is used by the mining sector alone.
• The average 747 Boeing jetliner has 135 miles of copper wiring, and the average American house has 400 pounds of copper wiring and piping.
• If I have time, I should read the Standard for Responsible Mining (June 2108) IRMA – Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance
• Parking your car backwards is a mining industry safety standard because backing up a vehicle in an emergency is considered a safety hazard.
• The Great Basin Resource Watch is a nonprofit focused on biodiversity in the American West.
• Center for Biological Diversity is another environmental group that advocates for rare slivers of the plant and animal kingdom.
• EV (Electric vehicles) generate 500,000 tons of battery waste in 2019, will rise to 8 million tons by 2040.
• I would like to visit the Salton Sea in California, which is similar to the Salar de Uyuni in regards to the potential of filtering the salty brine could produce a lot of lithium for the USA.
• Lithium is the lightest metal on the Periodic Table of Elements, so great for batteries.
• “Despite attempts to find alternative ways to produce metals for the green energy transition, there was no way around the fact that mining is loud, dangerous, and disruptive and will remain so for the foreseeable future, a reality that continued to fuel the global battle over our collective future”

I like the quote, “Here was a corporate leader encouraging dissent, asking for free thought, and demanding frank dialogue.”

On Wednesday, we went to the FireBrick Bar & Grill for Trivia Night at the beautiful George Young Resort right here in Iron County. We had a lot of fun and scored 30 of 40 correct in the quiz. The winners had 33 correct, so we were not that far off the lead. The best part was spending time with the family and laughing over our general knowledge skills. It was full, and the kitchen and wait staff were struggling with getting orders out on time. I am noticing that while I am in the Upper Peninsula is there is a lack of younger people wanting or needing to work. Bars, restaurants, gas stations, contractors, plumbers, electricians, etc,. They are all complaining about a lack of workforce. I’ll blog more about that later this month. My daughter Ocean is looking more and more beautiful every day. What an angel.

We had a quiet Independence Day Celebration. I worked in the morning online, taking care of school business, and then did some banking/organizing our finances for most of the day. I did get out for a bike ride (36 kilometers). Iron County is great for cycling with almost no traffic and lots of country roads. The Western Upper Peninsula is not mountainous but has many hills that are the perfect slope for giving you a workout, but not killing you. Uzbekistan is like the Alps or the Pyrenees in the Tour De France. Michigan has the rolling hills of the French countryside. I am trying to ride my bike and do a yoga workout daily this break. In the late afternoon, Oliver, Ocean, Nadia, and I swam at Hagerman Lake. I love summer in the UP with the cold water lakes, the pure blue skies, the massive walls of green trees, and having time to talk with family. We skipped last night’s fireworks and had a Mexican dinner at home.

I managed to get the girls out for a 4-mile hike on the Lauterman Lake Trail System, just south of the Michigan/Wisconsin border, earlier this week. I am familiar with the trails only in winter, as the Department of Natural Resources keeps the trails groomed for cross-country skiers. It is much different in the summer, and we got a little lost trying to hurry up to get back home for Trivia Night. As you can see from the video, Nadia and Ocean survived the experience.

One of the most popular public beaches on an Iron County lake is Pentoga Park. The public beach, playground, and camping site are located on a former indigenous Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) settlement. The village was on the southeast shore of Gichi-zaaga’igan, meaning “big lake”, today known as Chicagon Lake, a corrupted form of the original Ojibwe name. When European settlers came to the area and set up mining towns, the local Ojibwe had peaceful trading relations with them. I think it was because there were never a lot of Ojibwe in the area, one account I read estimated 5,000 in the entire Upper Peninsula. Ojibwe Headman Meshkawaanagonebi, known as Chief John Edwards to area residents, abandoned the land in 1891 and left with his wife, Pentoga, to the Lac Vieux Desert reservation across the border in Wisconsin. The county purchased the land in 1924 and set up the park to preserve the burial grounds.

All that is left of the Ojibwe village is the graveyard. Ojibwe culture buried their dead and placed a wooden shelter over the grave to protect from the elements and keep animals out. The bodies were wrapped in birch bark along with their most prized possessions. The shelter had a small door and a family totem. They placed the door towards the west, the direction the Ojibwe thought Bangishimog, or heaven, was located. I like that idea of heaven being towards the setting sun!