Tribute to Dr. Al Gedicks....by Zoltan Grossman

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We Beat Crandon Mine!

Wisconsin (and the world) has lost a giant. Dr. Al Gedicks, a driving force of environmental justice alliances against mining companies in the Midwest, passed away on Saturday, May 9, 2026 after a long bout with cancer. His brother Bob Gedicks reported that Al “was at peace and surrounded by family.”

Below is the April 26 tribute I read for our friend Al at the 2026 online spring assembly of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice (he had been the 2013 WNPJ Peacemaker of the Year). It was recorded (including powerpoint visuals), with Al in the Zoom room and offering remarks at the end.

You can see the 10-minute tribute on YouTube (7:20 - 17:00) at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOG9In-Rubw

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“Al Gedicks has long been the quintessential scholar-activist, serving both as sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, and director of the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council (WRPC).

He came to anti-mining organizing not through environmentalism, but solidarity with Latin American resistance to U.S. corporate rule. As a U.W.-Madison grad student with Community Action for Latin America, he studied Kennecott’s extraction of copper wealth in Peru and Chile, up to the 1973 Chilean military coup that was backed by copper companies.

In the mid-‘70s, he saw the same Kennecott corporation seeking to mine copper by the Flambeau River, and befriended the Rusk County farmers Roscoe and Evelyn Churchill, who stood in the way of the Ladysmith mine.

In an era when most progressives focused only on national and state governments, Al understood that the best way to fight multinational corporate power is with multinational people-power movements carrying out ‘globalization from below.’ For decades before the slogan ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’ was coined, he was making those connections at the local scale of towns and counties. Al was anti-globalization before anti-globalization was cool.

His 1993 book ‘The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations’ dealt mostly with the struggle in northern Wisconsin against metallic sulfide mining.

After the Ladysmith mine, he began to fight Exxon’s proposed Crandon zinc-copper mine site next to the Mole Lake Ojibwe Reservation and its ancient wild rice beds [in Forest County], upstream from the pristine Wolf River trout stream.

In the mid-1990s, our grassroots movement drew together Native Americans and sportfishing groups, who since the late ‘80s had fought over treaty-backed tribal fishing rights, but later came to cooperate to protect the same fish from mining companies.

The movement also brought together environmentalists concerned about acidic and cyanide wastes, with unionists concerned about company health and safety track records, and united rural residents and their local governments concerned about the effects of a mining ‘boom-and-bust’ on their tourism-based economy, with urban students concerned about the corporate subversion of local democracy.

The Midwest Treaty Network formed the Wolf Watershed Educational Project, and met monthly to learn from Al and others about the company plans and track records, and then together to plan our people-power strategies from the frontlines. Our little underfunded groups on reservations and border towns hosted the meetings, fed us, and circulated get-well cards for ill members, and sympathy cards for the new mining company officials that were cycled in to defeat us. (Somebody wrote on one of those sympathy cards, ‘You should rent, not buy, because you’re not going to be here for very long!’)

I told this story in my own book Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands.

Resource extraction companies are used to dealing with predominantly white, urban-based, upper/middle class environmental organizations, which they could easily portray as yuppies or hippies not concerned about rural jobs.

What the mining companies faced in northern Wisconsin was a multiracial, rural-based, middle and working class, multigenerational movement, which meshed the rural populist traditions with anti-corporate activism emerging out of the WTO protests [in Seattle].

Wisconsin organizers kept in contact through the web with their counterparts abroad, leading one industry journal to complain about the global reach of ‘barbarians in cyberspace.’ Other mining journals identified Wisconsin as one of the global battlegrounds for the future of the global industry.

Al’s 2001 book Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations examined the global network of Indigenous peoples and their environmental and labor allies. His book helped to blur artificial distinctions between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ policy, and between the ‘local’ and ‘global’ scales. He covered resistance to the companies centered on Wisconsin, Nigeria, Colombia, Ecuador, and [Indonesian-occupied] West Papua.

As I made the transition from activism to higher education, inspired mainly by Al’s example, I’ve not only assigned his book to students, but named an Evergreen State College course after his book. (On our campus, our students began to be called ‘Resource Rebels.’)

These movements were led by Indigenous peoples, whose lands the corporations have coveted as holding some of the last unexploited natural resources. The companies portrayed Indigenous rights groups as backward-looking movements seeking to protect quaint cultural relics from progress. Even supporters of Native rights have often romanticized Indigenous cultures in much the same way that many environmentalists celebrate wildlife. At best, Native peoples have been seen as mere ‘victims’ of the steamroller of corporate development.

But Al told stories of Native peoples not just as victims but as active and sophisticated agents in shaping their own political strategies. Al shifted the view of Native movements from the irrelevant fringes of policymaking to the center of the global movement for environmental justice. Some of the foremost converts to this view are the companies themselves, who have been stymied by some of the same Native activists they had earlier dismissed as backwoods warriors.

We finally defeated the Crandon mine in 2003 after 28 years. Al later played a central role in more quickly forming alliances against the Penokees iron mine upstream of the Bad River Ojibwe reservation [and Lake Superior], and the Back Forty mine in Menominee ceded territory [in Michigan], with similar but even quicker success. Al is always there, where he’s needed, at the right time.

Al understood that in the same way that Asian and South American activists are forcing corporations to calculate ‘political risk’ and the ‘social license to operate’ into their resource projects, North American activists are pressuring the same companies to see their environmentally and culturally destructive projects as ‘risky investments.’ That’s how you win, even if governments try to block you.

Al’s planned book Extractivist Battlegrounds shows how, instead of relying on governments to protect their interests, the movements are putting direct pressure on corporations through media exposure, global boycotts, and local and international laws. Despite overwhelming odds, these local ‘resource rebels’ are achieving some victories against the world’s largest corporations, and at the same time building bridges for a more sustainable future.

That’s what Al has taught us, to believe in ourselves and our neighbors to make change, and protect our connection to the Earth. We’ll be forever grateful (as Fran Van Zile calls you), ‘Dr. Al.’

And now I’d like to turn it over to Al…..”

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Al: “Thank you, Zoltán, that was a great synopsis of 40 years of anti-corporate and anti-imperialist resistance. I’m glad you started out with the example from Chile and Peru and Rusk County, because that was really the foundation for this solidarity between Third World liberation movements and rural Wisconsin resource protection movements.

I’m so grateful for all the friends I’ve made over the years, and as Roscoe Churchill used to say, the best thing about the mine battle is that it has brought him together with some of the most important friends in his life. And I include among those friends Dan and Sherry Poler, and their children Omar and Ascension, who have been absolutely critical in helping me cope with my cancer.”

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I will post [on facebook] any information we receive from Al’s family about a memorial.

As George Rock of the WRPC commented today, Al “was instrumental in getting us riled up.”

Al Gedicks, ¡Presente!

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To see Al Gedicks’ writings, presentations, interviews, and film:

Wisconsin Resources Protection Council (WRPC)

http://www.wrpc.net/

Research Gate articles

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Al-Gedicks

Midwest Treaty Network archives

https://web.archive.org/web/20210314032121/http://treaty.indigenousnative.org/content.html