Every summer since our daughters were very small, they’ve spent time in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the spectacular network of pristine lakes in Northern Minnesota on the United States-Canada border. We used to take them to Camp du Nord, a family camp run by the YMCA on the edge of the Boundary Waters in Ely, Minnesota, every year. As they got older, they paddled and portaged their way through longer and longer summer trips run by the adjacent Camp Widjiwagan, culminating in a forty-day expedition through the Canadian Arctic.
These experiences shaped the strong, confident, nature-loving adults they are today. Skilled outdoorswomen, they’ve taken charge of our family trips to the Boundary Waters, carrying heavy gear, building fires, finding our routes. They’ve seen wolves, moose, and hundreds of loons, filled their water bottles straight from crystal-clear lakes, soaked up the joy of direct, physical contact with the world. All of us treasure the time we’ve spent in the Boundary Waters, as do many other people—the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is the most-visited wilderness area in the entire country.
So it was a gut punch to see the U.S. Senate decide by one vote to overturn federal protections against toxic mining in the Superior National Forest, right on the edge of the Boundary Waters, this spring.
Senator Tina Smith, Democrat of Minnesota, argued forcefully, late into the night on the Senate floor, against the decision. “You may be wondering why I am standing here at nearly midnight keeping everyone up. Here’s why: Because I know people in Minnesota are wondering whether anybody in this building cares about what they think,” she said. J. Patrick Coolican, editor-in-chief of the Minnesota Reformer, stayed up to listen as Smith read the letters she’d received from some of the large majority of Minnesotans who oppose the Twin Metals mine, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chilean mining company Antofagasta with a record of toxic spills.
The proposed copper-nickel sulfide mine would, environmentalists say, inevitably leak sulfuric acid into the interconnected waterways of the region, with devastating effects.
Thomas Tidwell, the head of the U.S. Forest Service under President Barack Obama, wrote that acid mine drainage could cause “serious and irreparable harm” to the Boundary Waters, explaining the federal government’s decision to deny the leases Twin Metals sought (a decision the first Trump Administration reversed). Years later, Tidwell supported legislation to permanently protect the area, writing that “sulfide-ore copper mining in the Boundary Waters watershed is incredibly risky,” and that since his 2016 decision to deny Twin Metals leases, “the scientific record has only grown stronger.” That record includes a near-100 percent incidence of pipeline spills or failure to control accidental mine seepage from the top fifteen sulfide-ore copper mines in the United States.
In April, Republicans in the Senate withdrew a Biden Administration moratorium on mining in the Boundary Waters, which was based on decades of research showing the harm mining could do to the area.
Still, Minnesotans have not given up. Just as they stood up to the masked federal agents who descended on Minneapolis to tear immigrant families apart, state residents are organizing to fight Twin Metals as it seeks state permits to open up its toxic mine. While proponents tout the mine as a job creator (ignoring the economic costs of destroying the nation’s most-visited wilderness), the Senate’s action mostly benefits a foreign mining company that has a history of flouting environmental regulations and creating toxic spills, and which will likely sell the copper it extracts from Minnesota to China.
Activists are pushing the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to cancel Twin Metals’s state lease for the project, since 36 percent of the ore the company plans to mine is on state land and requires state leases. The DNR has the power to cancel the lease because of a provision that allows the state to bail out if a proposed mine hasn’t moved forward for thirty-five years.
“This issue has been around since the 1960s and 1970s,” Pete Marshall of the nonprofit Friends of the Boundary Waters tells me when I call him to talk about the mine and his group’s efforts to stop it. Plans for the mine were dormant for decades, in part because the concentration of ore in the area was so low. But demand from China and the exhaustion of ore deposits in Chile and around the globe made it attractive again.
“As the years go by, the concentration of copper gets less and less,” Marshall explains. “When I was a kid growing up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, they would pull out chunks of 40 percent copper from the ground. That has all been mined now.” The ore body near the Boundary Waters is less than 1 percent copper, he says. “But that’s about what most ore reserves are now.”
Meanwhile, the price has gone up, as the copper, nickel, and other metals Twin Metals hopes to pull out of the ground in Minnesota fuel the construction of phones, electric car batteries, and solar panels. The rise of the market in China makes those metals profitable.
Activists like Marshall have been frustrated by the DNR’s reluctance to assert itself and cancel the project. “Often they try to kick the can down the road and avoid decisions.”
The same is true of the state Democratic Party, he says. “There are members who really want to stop the mine, but leadership doesn’t want to take difficult political decisions.”
Labor unions, hungry for the 700 jobs Twin Metals has promised, have supported the project—even though not all those jobs will be filled by local workers. Automation and specialization have made mining less of a local job creator than it once was, since much of the work now involves technical skills in data analysis and robotics, and companies bring in their own specialists.
Still, the political environment that pits blue-collar workers against environmentalists is a problem for Democrats, and freighted with symbolism, even if the economic reality of the mine would be a net loss, generating a few hundred short-term jobs in exchange for the permanent destruction of the much larger tourism-based economy, not to mention threatening the largest fresh water supply in the world.
“Labor, irony of ironies, is supporting the plan of a foreign mining conglomerate with a pretty bad labor record,” Marshall says. “There are a lot of contradictions to navigate.”
Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, distinguished herself from other Democrats running for President in 2020 by refusing to oppose the Twin Metals plan, tying her openness about the jobs it might create to her pragmatic, centrist politics and family history of mining in the Iron Range. More recently, she joined Smith’s crusade to protect the Boundary Waters, expressing her concerns about “this administration’s disregard for science” and the huge body of research showing the danger of the mine.
Marshall calls Klobuchar’s position “an evolution.” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat who is leaving office and who Klobuchar hopes to replace, has also “been unfortunately quiet about this,” he says.
Friends of the Boundary Waters is urging people to contact Walz and tell him “cement your political legacy. Stand up for Minnesota,” Marshall says, and to call for a hearing on the mine, its safety, and common-sense protections.
In the Minnesota legislature, advocates are pushing for a bill to ban mining near the Boundary Waters based on a Wisconsin law that was in effect from 1997 until 2017, when it was repealed by the Republican-dominated legislature and Governor Scott Walker. The “Prove It First Law,” as it was dubbed, imposed a moratorium on mining until companies could show an example of a metallic sulfide mine that had been safely operated for ten years and then closed without polluting the environment over another ten-year period. No such mine has managed to meet that standard.
As the Trump Administration runs roughshod over public land, democracy, and ordinary people, the political winds may be shifting.
“In my more optimistic moments,” Marshall says, “I think the overreaching attacks of the Trump Administration on Minnesota, including by [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement]—and I’m not trying to directly compare that to the Boundary Waters or say it’s the same thing at all—but it does have that overbearing, overreaching federal government feeling that isn’t sitting well with people.”
He adds: “I think there’s this solidarity, this neighborliness that’s sprung up in Minnesota as a result of Trump’s attacks, and that extends to our natural resources. I think that’s going to lead to some incredible things in this state and, I hope, protections for the Boundary Waters.”
Who doesn’t want to be part of that?