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Chapter five describes how historical memory became a battleground on the postwar Iron Range. Amid conflict over the future direction of the Iron Range's economy, the region turned to heritage tourism. The centerpiece of heritage tourism on the Iron Range was a museum and entertainment complex known as Ironworld. Ironworld was a microcosm of the larger problems of historical memory on the Iron Range and in other declining industrial regions, where residents were torn between a desire to honor the industrial past and the challenge of moving into a post-industrial future.

Chapter two continues taconite's story into the mid-1960s when Minnesota added a taconite amendment to the state constitution. The amendment prevented taconite taxes from rising disproportionately to other business taxes. The amendment dispute cleaved Minnesota's DFL Party throughout the first half of the 1960s. Eventually, the forces in favor of the amendment won, but it set the stage for future arguments against corporate taxation that continue today. Also woven throughout this chapter are examples of decline on the Iron Range during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Chapter four describes the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board and economic development policy on the Iron Range. The IRRRB was formed in the 1940s to diversify the Iron Range's economy and ensure that tax money from mining was spent on long-term investments. Yet the IRRRB was enmeshed in controversy from its birth. In the late 1950s and 1960s it became a model for a short-lived national agency designed to support declining regions: the Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA). This brief federal program was soon abandoned. The IRRRB has also struggled to develop new industries on the Iron Range, often coming under fire for well-publicized boondoggles.

The conclusion offers a brief overview of the Iron Range in the years since 2000. The region's mines are now tied to a volatile global commodities market and uncertainty is perhaps the only reasonable prediction for the region's future. New forms of mining, including copper-nickel deposits, have the potential to create lucrative new mining ventures but also may lead to more extensive environmental harm. New mining has also resurrected old debates about the balance between mining jobs, the north woods environment, and the region's industrial culture.

Chapter one describes how taconite technology was offered as a painless fix for the declining region in the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on engineer Edward W. Davis, known as “Mr. Taconite,” this chapter describes the decades of work required to perfect low-grade taconite ore milling and shift the iron ore industry from older hematite mines to new taconite mines, which required work in politics and marketing as well as engineering.

Chapter three describes the major pollution lawsuit that affected the mining region, Reserve Mining Company v. USA. I argue that the trial must be understood within the context of taconite's development as a technological fix for decline on the Iron Range. Taconite's technological and engineering feats were only possible because they shifted costs onto the environment. When those costs could no longer be ignored—as when spreading taconite tailings began discoloring Lake Superior—people reassessed industrial development. For many miners, the case was also their first glimpse of the new environmental movement that would challenge their livelihood.

This chapter offers new data from a Magnitude Estimation acceptability task that show that Iron Range English (IRE), which is spoken in the Arrowhead region of Minnesota, has long-distance reflexives. IRE reflexives (e.g., him-self) are long-distance reflexives, despite not, on the surface, sharing characteristics with long-distance reflexives in other languages: they are bi-morphemic, can co-refer with subjects or objects, and exhibit both Blocking Effects and subject-verb agreement. However, IRE reflexives are neither indeterminate between anaphors and pronominals, nor true logophors. This chapter suggests that IRE reflexives are operators that move successive-cyclically in LF to the edge of each clause, where they are in a local relationship with potential antecedents in higher clauses.

Earth’s crust is largely composed of oxides, so the biosphere we inhabit is dominated by interactions between oxides, water, and living things. Part Six of this book, on environmental geochemistry, focuses on these interactions and serves as a review of many of the chemical concepts that form the basis for the rest of the book. As such, the final two chapters frequently refer back to previous chapters for more in-depth discussions of specific chemical phenomena. In this chapter, however, we highlight how the diverse environments on the surface of Earth modify the structure, composition, and chemistry of oxide minerals by weathering phenomena. Conversely, in Chapter 18 we explore how oxide minerals and their weathering products modify the structure, composition, and chemistry of the environments they inhabit. These environmental interactions are influenced by life, and are critical to the health and well-being of all living things. Minerals have a natural life cycle on the surface of Earth. Most oxides emerge from Earth’s interior in the form of igneous rocks that form and are stable at the high temperatures and pressures of subsurface environments (see Chapter 18). These minerals usually do not represent phases that are thermodynamically stable in ambient-temperature water. As a result, any pristine rocks exposed to air and water are subject to the physical and chemical degradation processes we call weathering (Fig. 17.1 and Plate 20). Weathering processes facilitated by water convert anhydrous oxides formed at high temperatures into hydrous oxides, oxyhydroxides, hydroxides, and dissolved by-products. It has been estimated that volcanic rocks represent only 8% of the rocky outcrops on Earth’s surface whereas 26% are more coarsely grained plutonic rocks of igneous origin. The remaining 66% of rocky outcrops represent the decomposition products of these igneous parents, including sandstone (16%), claybased rocks such as shale (33%), and simple ionic salts such as limestone (16%) and evaporates (1.3%). The focus of this chapter is on the physical and chemical processes that form and affect these decomposition products under ambient-temperature conditions.