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Greetings John,
There has been a lot of news coverage about the Boundary Waters lately, both because of wildfires and the growing momentum around protecting the Wilderness from toxic copper mining.
Below is your Boundary Waters weekend reading list:
Two of our nation’s foremost conservationists, former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Ted Roosevelt IV, the great-grandson of former president Theodore Roosevelt, urge the Biden administration to protect the Boundary Waters from sulfide-ore copper mining.
From the article: “The last thing that this watershed needs is to be the location of a massive industrial copper mining development, but that is precisely what a mining industry behemoth is proposing. Thousands of acres of processing plants, waste rock piles, tailings piles, roads, railroads, pipelines, power lines, ventilation stacks and other infrastructure would destroy terrestrial and wetland habitat and risk feeding mining pollution directly into waterways flowing into the Wilderness and beyond.”
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Star Tribune: "Protect the BWCA and complete study" (Aug. 21, 2021)
A powerful piece from the Star Tribune’s editorial board calling on the Biden administration to take federal action to protect Minnesota's Boundary Waters Wilderness. The editorial calls for the completion of a mineral withdrawal study cancelled at the last minute by the Trump administration. The Trump Interior Department changed the legal interpretation of five previous presidential administrations (both Republican and Democrat) in order to side-step the US Forest Service's 2016 finding that a Twin Metals mine posed an unacceptable level of inherent risk to the Wilderness, and that any damage could not be fixed or mitigated.
From the editorial: “...ensure that science, not a Chilean mining conglomerate's political influence, drives decisions about the fate of the beloved BWCA. That logical action: completing a halted two-year study of copper mining's risks to the BWCA watershed. The study was begun during the Obama administration and could have led to a 20-year mining moratorium on federal lands near the BWCA, as well as paved the way for Congress to enact permanent protections.”
Read the editorial here in Minnesota’s major newspaper the Star Tribune.
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From the article: “State standards allow for pollution and environmental degradation at levels that would permanently damage the water quality and fragile ecosystem of the Boundary Waters and its watershed. Shockingly, Minnesota’s permitting process does not recognize social and economic impacts, such as the destruction of a healthy and sustainable recreation-based jobs engine. Further, the process assumes that mitigation and reclamation are possible – but no amount of damage to the interconnected Boundary Waters could ever be cleaned up.”
Read the MinnPost article here by a former U.S. Department of the Interior press secretary and Patagonia global communications director, Adam Fetcher.
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Boundary Waters paddler from Charlotte, North Carolina’s Letter to the Editor
“Just before the Forest Service closed the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to further travel, my family and I spent a week exploring its riches. Hailing from North Carolina, where there is no wilderness as true as that of the North Woods, the experience was as novel as it was transcendent. We swam the boatless, crystalline lakes; delighted in the long, strenuous portages; and savored the serenade of howling wolves, in what for us was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Each time our group had a moment of euphoria, however, it was dashed by the thought of Twin Metals Minnesota — the mining juggernaut that, if permitted, would render the Boundary Waters something less than it is today.
Do we need copper? For sure. Do we need to extract it in a way and in a place that is sure to destroy the Boundary Waters? Absolutely not. Our time in the wilderness only reinforced this conviction. Entrusting the health of the BWCA to industry would be madness. I applaud the Star Tribune's Editorial Board ("Not this mine. Not this location." — November 2019) and all those in Minnesota and beyond fighting for this special and irreplaceable place.“
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Our National Campaign Chair Becky Rom responds to recent public relations attempts by Antofagasta’s Twin Metals to greenwash its proposed sulfide-ore copper mine in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters.
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