The Biden administration has canceled two leases near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness - a remote, lake-pocked region at the center of a blistering fight over whether to mine near one of the nation’s most popular wilderness destinations.
On Wednesday, the Interior Department said it found that the leases to extract copper, nickel and other valuable metals in northern Minnesota were improperly renewed under Donald Trump. The Biden administration’s decision will help protect the hundreds of lakes, streams and wetlands in the nearly 1.1 million-acre wilderness area hugging the Canadian border from the potential toxic leaching from mining.
“The Department of the Interior takes seriously our obligations to steward public lands and waters on behalf of all Americans,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement. “We must be consistent in how we apply lease terms to ensure that no lessee receives special treatment.”
Each year, Boundary Waters attracts roughly 150,000 Boy Scouts and others visitors looking to canoe, fish and reconnect with nature. The glaciers that gouged the region over the past 2 million years left behind a rugged terrain that today is home to wolves, moose, bobcats, beavers, bald eagles and peregrine falcons.
More recently, the wooded wilderness west of Lake Superior has been knotted in a tug of war between Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington.
A month before Barack Obama left office, the Interior Department blocked a mining company’s request to renew a lease to extract copper and nickel near the southwest border of Boundary Waters over concerns about the ecological and economic impact.
Two years later, the Trump administration changed course and eased the way for Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta, by curtailing a detailed environmental review of the project. The prospect of a $3 billion copper-nickel mine, and the jobs it would bring, divided nearby residents, who disagreed over how best to harness and protect the region’s natural resources.
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Ann Marie Bledsoe Downes, the Interior Department’s principal deputy solicitor, wrote in a legal opinion signed Tuesday that the Trump administration fell short in its legal obligations by conducting an inadequate environmental analysis and by sidestepping the U.S. Forest Service, which manages the land, in its decision-making.
The announcement garnered praise from environmentalists and Democratic lawmakers.
“The Boundary Waters is an ecological marvel and an economy engine,” said Jeremy Drucker, senior adviser for the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters. “Today is a good day for the millions of Americans who love the Boundary Waters.”
Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., called the decision “a victory for sound science and protecting a precious and irreplaceable natural resource.”
“Some places are simply too special to mine,” she added in a statement, “and it is our obligation to ensure these unique and valuable lands and waters remain intact for generations to come.”
Twin Metals Minnesota called the Biden administration’s decision “disappointing, but not surprising given the series of actions the administration has taken to try and shut the door on copper-nickel mining in northeast Minnesota.”
“This is not about law; this is a political action intended to stop the Twin Metals project without conducting the environmental review prescribed in law,” the company said in a statement. “We have proposed a world-class underground copper, nickel, cobalt and platinum group metals mine that deserves to be evaluated through the established environmental review process.”
The company added that “we are confident that a full environmental review will show that the science behind this modern mine will prove that we can advance this project safely under the highest of standards.”
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Joshua Partlow contributed to the report.