The Writing is on the Wall for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

We just spent a week in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which currently faces the threat of copper-sulfide mining on its border. The BWCA is one of America’s greatest treasures and to think that people would want to build a type of mine with 100% track record of polluting right next to it for 20 years of jobs shows the writing on the wall for this special place.

The only thing protecting the BWCA is a law, and it wouldn’t take much for the law to be repealed. Recently, we saw this with the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the largest national wildlife refuge in the country, which was protected by President Eisenhower. ANWR was opened to the extraction industries by a sneaky budget maneuver engineered by the anti-federal land party in power. As global warming continues to displace people from the south, those with money will want their lake views in cooler northern Minnesota. If the mines start to dig and run out of the low-grade base metals they are trying to extract, they will want to chase those veins into the BWCA. They will change the law that protects the Boundary Waters. Once the law is gone, those with wealth will pressure the government to open up the land to cabin and housing development and further mining. It’ll happen in the same way they did it to ANWR.

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Already most private land near the BWCA is developed with cabins. Old family hunting shacks or cabins are being replaced with half a million to a million dollar homes. Once the the pressure becomes too great, the lakes inside the border of what was the BWCA will be privatized first and then built up. Roads will be built into the interior lakes that escape the mining pollution, and those lakes will become cabin after million dollar cabin.

They’ll do this with the promise of jobs — and there will be construction jobs — but the real reason is because the privileged robber barons want their spoils and they’ll do anything to get it. It’s the same story with the foreign mining robber baron that wants to mine next to the BWCA. He bought a mansion in D.C. to rent to the daughter of the former resident of the White House. Right after that he got his permit. He promises mining jobs to the locals, but he’ll take all the profit south of the border — as Ross Perot said in a giant sucking sound. He’ll mine this place and leave the Boundary Waters an industrial wasteland.

I’m hopefully pessimistic that the BWCA will survive as a protected place in the future. I’m hopeful that the mines will be stopped, but if we’re willing to throw the Boundary Waters under the bus for a foreign mine, then it stands no chance as global warming increases and migration pressures take hold. Enjoy it and fight for it now while there’s still a chance.