A More Than Just Parks Project
in partnership with Save the Boundary Waters
A More Than Just Parks Project
in partnership with Save the Boundary Waters
The U.S. Senate voted 50-49 to open the door for a sulfide-ore copper mine in America's most visited wilderness. The fight is not over.
Senators Collins (R-ME) and Tillis (R-NC) were the only Republicans to vote no. Senator Hawley (R-MO) did not vote. Every other Republican senator voted to hand American public land to a foreign mining company.
But the mine doesn't exist yet. The withdrawal is gone, but this mine can still be stopped. The CRA has never been used this way before. Legal challenges are being filed. Minnesota holds veto power over state permits. And Twin Metals still needs years of federal environmental review it hasn't even started. This is not over.
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness stretches across one million acres of northern Minnesota, a labyrinth of more than 1,175 lakes connected by streams, rivers, and portage trails that have been traveled for thousands of years.
It is the most visited wilderness in the United States. A place where generations of Americans have learned to fish, paddle, hunt, and sit around a campfire under a sky so dark you can see the Milky Way reflected in the water.
Together with Canada's Quetico Provincial Park, it forms part of a 4.3 million-acre transboundary ecosystem — one of the largest intact boreal landscapes left on the continent.
— SIGURD OLSON, conservationist and author
Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of Chilean conglomerate Antofagasta PLC, wants to build an underground copper-nickel mine on the shore of Birch Lake — just five miles from the wilderness boundary, squarely within the watershed that feeds directly into the Boundary Waters and Voyageurs National Park.
Sulfide-ore copper mining is the most pollution-prone form of mining on Earth. When sulfide minerals are exposed to air and water, they generate acid mine drainage — a chemical reaction that, once started, can continue for centuries. It leaches mercury, arsenic, lead, and heavy metals into the water. And it cannot be stopped.
Twin Metals Minnesota is a wholly owned subsidiary of Antofagasta PLC, a Chilean mining conglomerate controlled by the billionaire Luksic family, which has maintained a 40-year partnership with the Chinese government oriented toward advancing China's economic interests and mineral processing dominance.
Any copper mined in Minnesota would be shipped to China, processed in Chinese state-owned facilities, and consumed domestically to fuel China's energy buildout. In 2025 alone, China added 543 gigawatts in new power generation capacity — equal to 40% of all installed capacity in the entire United States. No American copper sent to Chinese refineries is coming back.
The profits go to Chile. The copper goes to China. America gets the pollution.
Beneath this stillness lies a world of astonishing complexity.
Billions of organisms locked in a web of interdependence so precise that removing a single thread can unravel the whole.
It starts with the smallest: zooplankton, mayfly larvae, caddisflies, and the aquatic insects that form the base of the entire food web. Without them, nothing above survives.
Walleye, northern pike, and lake trout feed on the insects. Loons dive for the fish. Eagles hunt from above. Moose wade the shallows. Wolves patrol the shores. Every link depends on the one below it.
Sulfide ore meets water. Water meets air. A chemical reaction begins that cannot be stopped. Acid mine drainage seeps into the groundwater, carrying mercury, arsenic, lead, and heavy metals into the watershed.
Mayflies, caddisflies, and zooplankton — the organisms everything else depends on — are the first to disappear. They cannot tolerate even trace amounts of heavy metals. The base of the food web disintegrates.
Mercury doesn't dilute. It concentrates. A small fish eats contaminated insects. A larger fish eats the small fish. With each step up the food chain, the toxin multiplies — 10x, 100x, 1,000x.
A loon eats a contaminated fish. The mercury concentrates in its body. It lays eggs with shells too thin to survive. The chicks never hatch. The haunting call that has echoed across these lakes for millennia goes quiet.
Once acid mine drainage begins, it continues for centuries. There is no cleanup. There is no remediation. There is no going back. The ecosystem that took ten thousand years to build is destroyed in a generation.
Scroll to follow the water downstream from the proposed mine site, through the Boundary Waters, across the Canadian border, and into Voyageurs National Park.
The proposed Twin Metals mine sits on the shore of Birch Lake, just five miles from the wilderness boundary. The moment they break ground into sulfide ore, a chemical clock starts ticking that can never be stopped. Sulfide meets water. Water meets air. And acid mine drainage begins — a toxic cocktail that will seep, flow, and spread for centuries.
The lake right next to the mine is the first casualty. Mercury settles into the sediment. Fish absorb it through their gills. The walleye that families have caught here for generations become poisonous to eat. Loons that have nested on these shores since before Minnesota was a state stop coming back. The lake is quiet now. The wrong kind of quiet.
Water doesn't wait. The South Kawishiwi River picks up the contamination and carries it north. These waters are naturally low in alkalinity — they have no ability to neutralize acid. The poison doesn't dilute. It concentrates. Every mile downstream, the contamination builds. The river that canoeists have paddled for a century becomes a delivery system for heavy metals.
The chain of lakes near Ely falls like dominoes. White Iron Lake. Farm Lake. Mercury levels climb. Sulfate pours in. The aquatic insects that feed the fish begin to disappear. The fish that feed the eagles begin to sicken. The people of Ely who drink this water, who built their livelihoods around it, watch their world turn toxic. Lake by lake by lake.
Fall Lake is Entry Point 24 — one of the most popular gateways into the BWCAW. This is where the contamination crosses the line. Not a political line. Not a buffer zone. The actual wilderness. The place politicians said would be "protected." But water doesn't read legislation. The acid doesn't stop at a sign that says Wilderness Area. It just keeps flowing. And now it's inside.
One of the most iconic lakes in North America fills with contaminated water. Mercury settles into the lake bed and enters the food chain. Mayflies absorb it. Small fish eat the mayflies. Walleye eat the small fish. Eagles eat the walleye. At every level, the poison concentrates. Basswood straddles the Canadian border. The contamination is now an international crisis.
The Basswood River carries its toxic load west over Lower Basswood Falls into Crooked Lake and the border lake system. On one side, the BWCAW. On the other, Canada's Quetico Provincial Park. Both poisoned by one mine that was never supposed to exist.
Mercury doesn't just poison the water. It bioaccumulates. A loon eats a contaminated fish and the mercury concentrates in its body. It lays eggs with shells too thin to survive. The chicks never hatch. The wolves that drink from these shores grow sick. The silence spreads across the wilderness like the poison itself.
Sixty miles downstream from one mine, a national park fills with poisoned water. Namakan Lake. Rainy Lake. The lakes that French-Canadian voyageurs paddled 300 years ago. One mine. Two national treasures. A wilderness and a national park, connected by the water that was supposed to protect them both.
The Rainy River carries the contamination 137 miles along the U.S.-Canada border to Lake of the Woods. Hundreds of miles of rivers and lakes. Thousands of square miles of watershed. Two countries. One international incident. All from one mine on one lake that a Chilean mining company wanted to dig — for copper that would be shipped to Chinese Communist Party-controlled smelters under a zero-cost deal, processed for China's energy buildout, and never returned to the United States.
— JOHN ADAMS, 1770
Listen to the hearings and Rep. Pete Stauber long enough and you'll hear the same talking points on repeat. Modern mining. State-of-the-art technology. Dry stack tailings. Zero discharge. Progressive reclamation. As if those phrases somehow repeal chemistry and gravity. Here's what they're actually saying — and what the evidence actually shows.
Twin Metals says it will create 750 direct jobs and support potentially 1,100 more. Studies point to a more accurate figure being 1,100 total jobs including direct and indirect. Surely those jobs are worth sacrificing America's most visited wilderness over, right? Let's compare.
The Boundary Waters wilderness economy supports over 17,000 permanent jobs — guides, outfitters, lodges, restaurants, and gear shops. Jobs that are permanently safe so long as the Boundary Waters stays intact and unimpaired. The mine's jobs last only as long as the copper. Then they're gone. The wilderness economy lasts forever. Or it did, until now.
And the jobs? Twin Metals' own spokesperson has stated that Minnesotans lack the necessary technical skills and that employees would be sourced from elsewhere. The people whose water would be poisoned wouldn't even get the jobs.
Dry stack tailings are not some miraculous innovation. They don't eliminate toxic waste — they create vast piles of it, still chemically active, still requiring perpetual management. That's the core problem, and no tailings technology solves it. It only determines where the waste sits while it waits to fail.
“Zero discharge” is an absolute fiction in northern Minnesota, where groundwater is shallow, lakes and streams are all interconnected, and water moves whether you want it to or not. Liners fail. Covers degrade. Freeze-thaw cycles crack systems that look flawless in permitting documents. All of it depends on constant, meticulous maintenance, forever.
This is why there is not a single sulfide-ore copper mine in the world that has operated without contaminating water. Not one. And the failures usually aren't dramatic. They're slow. Incremental. Easy to deny at first. A seep here. A breach there. A treatment system that works until it doesn't. In a watershed like this, even small failures compound quickly and permanently.
In the hasty attempt to pass House Joint Resolution 140, Republican members of Congress stood on the House floor wrapped in the stars and stripes and lecturing anyone who would listen about patriotism. Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT) held up a poster filled with images of missiles and aircraft, solemnly explaining that this mine — this copper — is essential to our military, essential to national defense, essential to keeping America safe. It was a great performance. It was also complete nonsense.
It's worse than that. This copper would be mined by a Chilean company that has secured zero-cost smelting contracts with state-owned Chinese companies. Every pound of copper pulled from Minnesota's Superior National Forest would be shipped directly to Chinese Communist Party-controlled processing facilities — for free. The refined copper would then be consumed by China's own massive energy buildout, not returned to the United States.
This isn't a supply chain that strengthens American national security. It is a direct pipeline from American public land to Chinese state industry. A Chilean company extracts the copper. China processes it. China keeps it. America gets nothing but polluted water and a destroyed wilderness.
So ask the obvious question proponents of the mine refuse to answer: how does jeopardizing the Boundary Waters so a Chilean billionaire family can ship American copper to Chinese state-owned smelters strengthen U.S. national security? How does any of this make America-First sense at all?
Republicans pushing this mine love to sneer that environmentalists are “crying wolf” because the proposed Twin Metals site sits outside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness buffer zone. They repeat it like an incantation: outside the buffer, therefore safe. Case closed.
That argument is either profoundly ignorant or deliberately dishonest.
The buffer zone is not a magical force field. It does not stop water from flowing downhill, contaminants from moving through interconnected lakes, or heavy metals from entering a watershed. It's a line on a map that Congress drew decades ago to limit surface development near the wilderness boundary — not to bless high-risk mining just beyond it.
The proposed mine sits squarely within the Rainy River watershed — the same watershed that feeds directly into the Boundary Waters and Voyageurs National Park. Water does not care about political boundaries, buffer zones, or congressional talking points. Pollution moves through watersheds. Always has. Always will. The watershed doesn't stop. The risk doesn't stop. And pretending otherwise isn't just wrong — it's morally bankrupt.
House Joint Resolution 140 doesn't just threaten the Boundary Waters. It threatens every protected public land in the United States.
The CRA was designed for a narrow purpose: overturning last-minute agency regulations within 60 days. Land withdrawals are not regulations. They are exercises of presidential power granted by Congress through laws like the Antiquities Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Presidents of both parties have used them for more than a century.
The Congressional Review Act has never been used to overturn a land withdrawal. Land withdrawals are not agency regulations. They are exercises of presidential power granted by laws like the Antiquities Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. That legal distinction has never been tested in court. Legal challenges are being prepared. If the courts rule that the CRA cannot be used this way, the withdrawal is reinstated and every other protected public land in the country is safer for it.
The state of Minnesota holds veto power. Twin Metals cannot operate without a state Permit to Mine from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. It cannot discharge water without permits from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. It needs state wetlands permits, dam safety permits, and air permits. If any single one is denied, the mine cannot proceed. The federal government opened the door. Minnesota can close it.
Even with the withdrawal gone, Twin Metals has not begun the federal environmental review process. A full Environmental Impact Statement under NEPA for a sulfide-ore copper mine in this watershed would take years, involve massive public comment, and produce findings that opponents can challenge in court. The U.S. Forest Service's own prior studies found "irreparable harm." That scientific record doesn't disappear because 50 senators voted to ignore it.
The Senate vote was one battle. The war is not over. Here's how to fight.
Reported by More Than Just Parks
Follow the latest threats facing America's public lands at morethanjustparks.substack.com
Your script
Hi, my name is [your name] and I'm calling from [your city and state]. I'm calling to ask Governor Walz to use every tool available to the state of Minnesota to prevent the Twin Metals sulfide-ore copper mine from being permitted in the Boundary Waters watershed.
The Senate just voted 50-49 to strip the mineral withdrawal. But Minnesota controls the state permitting. The DNR can deny the Permit to Mine. The MPCA can deny water discharge permits. The state has the power to stop this mine regardless of what happened in Washington.
The Boundary Waters is the most visited wilderness in the United States. It supports 17,000 jobs. The proposed mine is owned by a Chilean company that would ship the copper to China. Minnesota should not sacrifice its greatest natural treasure for a foreign corporation's profit.
Please direct state agencies to apply the highest possible standards and protect the Boundary Waters. Thank you.
Calls take less than two minutes. You don't need to be from Minnesota. This is a national treasure.
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