Threats to the Boundary Waters

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and it’s a place that changes lives. People who visit often return home with a greater understanding of the value of the outdoors and the need to protect it. It’s also America’s most visited wilderness with over 1 million acres protected. As far as canoeing, it contains over 1,000 lakes and over 2,000 campsites. The lakes are connected by portage trails. It’s not exaggerating saying that for canoeing, the Boundary Waters is the most important area in the world.

It is in trouble.

With the new administration taking power in the US, one of their goals is building copper-nickel sulfide mines within the BWCA’s watershed. There has never been one of these mines in the world that hasn’t polluted. When sulfide containing rock is exposed to the air and water, it creates sulfuric acid and acid mine drainage.

Last summer when Donald Trump campaigned in St. Cloud, Minnesota, he promised the he would reinstate a lease that wasn’t renewed under Obama, then illegally renewed under the Trump admin, and then reversed under Biden. He said that he would renew it within the first 10 to 15 minutes of taking office. That lease was held by Chilean conglomerate Antofagasta, which is controlled by billionaire Andrónico Luksic. It wasn’t even their lease, they got it from another international company.

And just to note, it got its lease renewal from Donald Trump after it bought a mansion in Washington D.C. and then rented that back to the daughter and son-in-law of Donald Trump. Big surprise there. Corruption in government isn’t surprising when the government says it will engage in crony capitalism.

There are other mines planned as well. Those have had all their permits thrown out in court. I don’t want to cover the corruption that was uncovered, but a state agency, which was packed full of pro-mining bureaucrats captured by industry, conspired with the Donald Trump’s EPA to keep the EPA’s comments off the record.

After the court battles over the northern Minnesota mining permits were over, the EPA had to do its job. It issued the following about the Clean Water Act permit that was originally illegally issued, “EPA’s key recommendation is that the Corps should not reissue the CWA Section 404 permit for the NorthMet project, as proposed.”

The entire permitting process was regulatory capture at its worst, and another example of the big companies being able to do whatever they want to the environment regardless of the regulations and protections in place. I know this isn’t fair and you likely know it isn’t fair, that big companies can push around everyone including recreational users of the wilderness, but that’s just how it is.

When big companies get big, they have a lot of power, and in the US because of 40 years of anti-trust getting ignored right up until Lina Khan stepped in to chair the Federal Trade Commission, companies got big. She started the process of breaking them up, but she will be replaced with some big business friendly stooge come January. But don’t say anything bad about that stooge, because he has feelings. Ya, right.

These big companies also exist outside the US, and because the US is weakened from 43 years of budget cuts and dismantling the infrastructure put into place to protect it from foreign predators, big foreign companies can push Americans around and maybe bribe officials and get away with it, too. I’d love to see a muckraker journalist rake the backyards of officials and politicians involved with the permitting to see what they find.

As an example, the retired state senator who pushed that hardest for these copper-sulfide mines when a state senator is now a lobbyist for them (and also for cigarettes — seriously, dude, how low do you have to go?). Multiple times, that guy threated to throw Cook County, Minnesota out of the IRRR, which is a Minnesota fund designed to spur economic growth to get away from the boom and bust cycle of the mining industry. The IRRR is basically a tax break to the iron mines. When originated, it substituted property taxes for a slush fund that local politicians could use to reward supporters. Thankfully, it’s run differently now, but it is still structurally deficient and open to corruption. For example, any projects now have to display a sign that praises the mining industry that the fund was meant to get Minnesota away from. Here’s an example of how former state senator and lobbyist for the copper-nickel sulfide mines tried to use it to punish a local tribe. Why did he threated the tribe and Cook County? Because local politicians or political activists expressed support for the Boundary Waters and not copper-nickel sulfide mining. Why is Cook County in the IRRR? Cook County used to have a mining town which is nothing but a ghost town of broken streets now with a power plant that is getting torn down.

But, I digress. It was an important digression to show what is going on on the ground up here.

Regardless, the kicker is that none of the companies are American companies. They are massive foreign globalist companies with some known for bribing officials, and wrecking the environment where they break ground. Any metals that they mine will likely be shipped outside of the US, likely to China, and the profits will be sucked away to either Chile or Switzerland to enrich some billionaire-robber-baron policy failure.

If the new administration wasn’t bad enough for the protection of the Boundary Waters, there’s a bill in congress introduced by far-right congressmen that would strip the area of its protections and allow these mines to happen without any environmental review. They would have us return to rivers of fire — although they will always say that they support clean water like a snake hissing in the Garden of Eden.

Now maybe you don’t want to believe this, but it was promised during the campaign, and it appears in their plans. It has also been introduced as legislation, and it will likely be accomplished through budget maneuvers unless enough people convince old-school Republicans that are interested in protecting our hunting and fishing not to back it.

I don’t have much hope for that other than their majority is slimmer now and it would only take a few to not agree to this. The reason that I don’t have that hope is because back in 2017-2018, the last time they controlled the House and Senate and Presidency, they used a budget maneuver that isn’t subject to a filibuster to ram through oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR, pronounced as “ANN-warr”). As if we need more oil drilling — the US is already the biggest producer of oil in the world thanks to Biden. It produces more oil that Saudi Arabia and Russia. And even though we were on a path to electrification, they just keep it up. Why? Because the mining and oil and extraction companies are so big that they don’t want the money that they suck out of the ground to dry up — if that happened a few of the billionaires wouldn’t be able to have their multiple yachts.

In my opinion, the system that allows massive foreign mining companies and robber baron billionaires to suck all our resources away and screw Americans out of clean water is fucked. That’s right. Fucked. And guess what? I don’t use the word fucked lightly because it probably hasn’t been used on this website before. It’s pretty fucked up.

So here we are again. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is under threat from copper-nickel sulfide mines again. It’s worse than it was last time. It also shows that these places are only protected as long as they are protected.

Don’t let them ANWR the Boundary Waters.

Write the politicians that govern you. You can find them at this website: https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials.

To help protect the Boundary Waters, support the Friends of the Boundary Waters today on Minnesota’s Give to the Max day here: https://www.givemn.org/organization/Bwcaw Or do it direct here: https://www.friends-bwca.org/ Or volunteer for them if you can’t afford a donation.

We’ve had victories in the past, and we can have victories now. Victory is often temporary unless we work to keep it. Defeat often results in environmental destruction. It’s going to take all of us to keep the Boundary Waters clean and safe from from these robber barons.

Here’s something you can listen to about the upcoming threats to the Boundary Waters.