Danielson receives prestigious honor

Luke Danielson received the Antioch College Horace Mann Award on July 15.

Luke Danielson, Gunnison attorney, professor, researcher and expert on international minerals policy has been named the 2022 recipient of the Antioch College Horace Mann Award. 

According to the Antioch College website, the award “recognizes contributions by alumni of Antioch College who have ‘won some victory for humanity,’ following Horace Mann’s advice to the graduating class of 1859. Recipients are persons, or groups of persons, whose personal or professional activities have had a profound effect on the present or future human condition. Mann was the first president of Antioch College.”

Past recipients of the award include District of Columbia Congressional Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould, civil rights activist Coretta Scott King and Danielson’s mentor, the late Margaret Hansson, a pioneer for women in business.

“If there is any recognition in this award, I hope it’s for the cause and not for me,” Danielson said. “Being in that company is very humbling.”

Danielson described himself early in his career as a “traditional environmentalist.”

“I guess initially I saw that as stopping things, stopping development,” he said. “The first step along my evolution occurred in Gunnison County, when they proposed to build the Pitch uranium mine, and I was representing the opponents of the (project). At some point there was an incident outside the courthouse in the dark where someone poked a gun in the face (of the project manager) and threatened him. I started realizing that, although I had strong environmental values, I had other values, too.”

That led Danielson to shift to an approach that he has continued to pursue throughout his career: conversation and collaboration over conflict. As a result, the Pitch mine was approved, and is located above Sargents to this day, but without the mill tailings pile that was originally proposed.

“We actually succeeded in agreeing to a resolution, which was not perfect from our point of view,” Danielson said. “But the fact that we were actually able to sit down with a uranium mining company and come to an agreement that people were willing to live with opened my eyes to the possibilities.”

In the early 80s, Gov. Roy Romer appointed Danielson to the Colorado Mined Land Reclamation Board — just in time for “probably the biggest environmental disaster in our mining history,” he said. The Summit gold mine went bankrupt, leaving the state with a “lake of cyanide” and water pumps that were shut off because the electricity bill wasn’t paid. Helping oversee the aftermath of the event — and crafting legislation to remedy the situation — further cemented Danielson’s reputation as someone who could see the big picture when dealing with complex issues.

Since then he has increasingly worked on the international scene, beginning with an invitation to consult with the government of China to help reform their coal mining industry.

“I'd say that reforming the Chinese coal industry turned out to be maybe a challenge beyond my talents,” he said. “But, you know, I got to really understand more.”

That understanding has led Danielson to the firm belief that stopping outright the extraction of important resources in the U.S. only serves to push those industries into some of the least regulated countries in the world.

“Essentially, what we're doing is shoving these industries into countries where regulatory authorities are weak, where there's not a lot of capacity to manage things, and where the overall environmental impact on our globe is going to be greater,” Danielson said. 

Instead, he favors engagement toward sustainable development of these activities, not their elimination. In the process of working around the world, he’s also come to believe there’s another important element in the conversation that frequently gets overlooked: the people who depend on these industries for their livelihoods.

Danielson is currently focused on helping imagine the transition to renewable energy sources without “creating a social and environmental nightmare in the developing world.”

(Alan Wartes can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or publisher@gunnisontimes.com.)