Minnesota’s Boundary Waters are pristine. Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ could pollute them forever

A little-known provision would open thousands of nearby acres to a foreign mining company, risking acid drainage

A little-known provision of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would open thousands of acres of public lands at the edge of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness to a foreign-owned mining company.

The move amounts to a giveaway “in perpetuity” to a company that has lobbied in Washington for years, environmental campaigners say, potentially opening up one of the US’s most famous wilderness areas to water-pollution risks.

Earlier this month, conservationists cheered when Congress withdrew from the reconciliation bill several provisions that would have sold off hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land in Nevada and Utah. Those provisions had sparked fury among public land advocates and staunch opposition even from some Republicans, including the representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, who vowed to oppose the bill if the land sell-off provisions were retained.

Despite that fury, a lesser-known public lands giveaway remained in the reconciliation bill. If approved as currently written, the provision could lease in perpetuity land near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness, an enormous complex of pristine lakes and untrammeled forests, to Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta PLC.

Becky Rom, the national chair of Save the Boundary Waters, a campaign to protect the wilderness area from mining, described the provision as “a giveaway of critical and sensitive federal public land forever to a single mining company”.

“It is a giveaway,” Rom added. “This is forever.”

An ‘irreplaceable’ wilderness area

First set aside by Congress in 1964, the 1.1m-acre Boundary Waters canoe area wilderness, as it is officially known, is the only large-scale protected sub-boreal forest in the lower 48 states. Each year, about 150,000 visitors come to partake in the all-American tradition of canoe travel and enjoy a pristine landscape where wolves, moose, loons, bears and bald eagles thrive. Those who come to explore it help contribute to Minnesota’s $13.5bn outdoor recreation economy. According to the US Forest Service, the landscape contains “healthy forests with extremely high water quality”. It is “irreplaceable”.

But the Boundary Waters also sit atop mineral-rich lands. Antofagasta has for years sought to develop a copper and nickel mine on public land near the wilderness, amid the headwaters that feed its famous lakes. The company and its American subsidiary, Twin Metals Minnesota, came close to success during the first Trump administration, which overturned an Obama-era denial and renewed mining leases for the project.

The Biden administration, recognizing the threat the proposed mine posed to the environment, subsequently rescinded those discretionary leases, arguing that they were legally deficient. The Biden administration also issued an order that prohibited mining for 20 years in the portion of the Superior national forest where Antofagasta wants to extract copper and nickel. Twin Metals Minnesota, which declined to comment for this story, filed litigation to fight the Biden policies in court. That lawsuit is ongoing.

Meanwhile, the companies went to Capitol Hill in their quest to build their mine, which they say will directly employ more than 750 people and could revitalize “the entire region”. In the last three years alone, Antofagasta and Twin Metals have poured more than $1.6m into lobbying efforts in Washington DC, according to OpenSecrets.

Among the lobbying shops they retained is Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, the powerful firm that was the longtime home of David Bernhardt, interior secretary during Trump’s first term. Brownstein’s employees and its political action committee, in turn, were together among the top 10 donors last election cycle to the campaign committee of representative Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, the powerful chair of the House natural resources committee.

Last month, that lobbying apparently bore fruit. Westerman’s committee unveiled its portion of the president’s reconciliation bill and it contained a major win for Antofagasta and Twin Metals.

The bill, which passed the House and is now being considered by the Senate, includes provisions that rescind the Biden administration’s 20-year mining prohibition in the Superior national forest and grants Twin Metals 20-year mining leases to pursue its copper-nickel project on nearly 6,000 acres (2,500 hectares) of public land near the Boundary Waters. It also grants Twin Metals rights in perpetuity to lease renewals and it prohibits judicial review of the leases, meaning that citizens cannot sue to challenge them. Only one party retains rights to judicial review per the legislation: Twin Metals. If the federal government fails to comply with the reconciliation bill, Twin Metals can sue to enforce it.

“The reconciliation bill compels the issuance of four leases forever,” said Rom. “To get there it expressly overrides four federal laws, it expressly overrides BLM regulations, so all of those rules that apply to everybody else in the world, the laws, the regulations, for Antofagasta they don’t apply.”

“There is a heavy hand in here,” she added. “The heavy hand of Antofagasta.”

Pollution fears and pushback

Neither Antofagasta nor Westerman’s office responded to requests for comment. Twin Metals has said its mine will provide a supply of strategic minerals that are important to national security and the emerging green energy economy.

For conservationists like Rom – who grew up helping her father run an outfitting business in the Boundary Waters wilderness and has since spent decades working to protect the wilderness area – the major threat from Twin Metals’ proposed mine is water pollution. That threat was described in a 2016 letter by the US Forest Service, when it initially denied its consent to the Twin Metals mine leases during the waning days of the Obama administration. There is “inherent potential risk that development of a regionally-untested copper-nickel sulfide ore mine within the same watershed as the BWCAW might cause serious and irreplaceable harm to this unique, iconic, and irreplaceable wilderness area”.

The agency’s letter particularly drew attention to the risk of acid mine drainage, a potent form of water pollution that is a well-known risk of the sort of sulfide-ore mining that Twin Metals and Antofagasta wish to undertake. Any drainage from the “mine workings and mining wastes are likely to be highly acidic”, the agency said of the Twin Metals mine. Any failure to contain such waste could have “potentially severe consequences for the BWCAW” and could “cover a very broad region”.

Cover photo:  The 1.1m-acre wilderness area is the only large-scale protected sub-boreal forest in the lower 48 states. Photograph: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images