Legal gaps let Benson Mines escape required reclamation, leaving an unhealable wound

Evidence

Current law demands restoration of mined lands, but Benson Mines fell between the legal cracks and has not been reclaimed. There were some half-hearted attempts at revegetation, but they all failed. Midwestern prairie grasses were planted in some places, but they couldn’t survive long without fertilizer and irrigation, which ran out about the same time that the business moved overseas. Someone planted trees; a few of the pines have persisted, yellow and stunted. I don’t know whether these were planted as acts of contrition or a façade of responsibility, but there wasn’t much sense to it, like painting a mural on a condemned building. It’s not enough to put plants here; there has to be something to sustain them and the tailings are a far cry from the humus-rich soils that now lie buried under the sterile sand. Now it’s officially classified as an “orphan mine.” Rarely is official language so direct and evocative—this piece of land is indeed without anyone to care for it. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 217

Categorization

• XREF: Law-as-institution failing land restoration ties the law/institutions course thread and ‘orphan mine’ as an environmental-justice concept. — connects to: The Benson Mines iron operation reduced a mountain to a thirty-foot-deep sand waste — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 215
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that soil — not seeds — is what restoration must restore, framed by the word ‘orphan’ applying to land nobody cares for, rewards sustained reflection on care, law, and reclamation.
• SEED: ‘Orphan mine’ as a term and idea — land nobody cares for — could anchor an essay on what legal categories reveal about who is responsible for wounded places.