After A Hard Month for the Boundary Waters, Advocates Push On

At the end of a portage, there’s a moment of bliss as I heave the canoe back to the ground. My gaze lifts from my bug-bitten legs to the pines and spruces and I hear birdsong as my breath slows. Beneath my grimy brow, the next lake never fails to look inviting, even tempting a dip before reloading the canoes and pushing off again. 

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is a million-acre landscape extending from northern Minnesota into Canada. Without roads, it’s only traversable by canoe, necessitating portages between the over 1,000 lakes and rivers carved throughout it. The strict protections on the Boundary Waters (as well as a history of advocacy from indigenous groups and environmentalists) have kept the water quality of these lakes some of the best in the United States. They cradle an abundant ecosystem including bears, moose, fish, beavers, and dragonflies, as well as the thousands of paddlers who camp among them each summer. 

“The Boundary Waters has been my favorite place on earth since I was 10 years old,” said Samantha Chadwick, the associate director of Save the Boundary Waters, an advocacy coalition fighting to protect the area from mining projects. Chadwick said she inherited her love of the Boundary Waters from her grandparents. “My kids are now fourth generation Boundary Waters paddlers,” she said. 

But for this and the next generation of Boundary Waters advocates, the battle to secure the area’s future has become particularly fraught. In mid-April, the U.S. Senate narrowly approved a resolution—H.J. Res. 140—to overturn a ban on mining the federal land near the Boundary Waters. Last month, Trump made it official when he signed the resolution. 

The mining moratorium overturned by H.J. Res. 140 was enacted during the Biden administration following a decades-long back-and-forth over proposed mines for copper, nickel, and precious metals on land adjacent to the wilderness. A large deposit of copper-nickel, perhaps the largest untouched stock on earth, sits partially beneath the region’s headwaters. Groups like Save the Boundary Waters have long advocated against mining this deposit because harmful copper-nickel mining byproducts, like sulfuric acid, are likely to contaminate the waters. The interconnectedness of the area’s waterways, long a natural miracle for indigenous transportation and recreational canoeing, would allow the contaminates to spread quickly through the Boundary Waters’ fragile ecosystem. 

“That protection was put in place after extensive careful review, including looking at the best science, studies, expert input, and giving the public opportunity for input,” Chadwick said. “None of that underlying reasoning for the ban has changed, but Congress chose to undo the protection anyway.”

While the resolution removed federal roadblocks for mining in Minnesota, companies will still have to face the state’s environmental review policy to secure permits, a process that could take several years. As for the activists that have spent countless hours advocating for the now-overturned mining ban, there was little time to mourn. They are already advocating for a bill in the Minnesota state legislature that would permanently ban copper mining in the Boundary Waters headwaters. 

“Minnesota has an incredibly important role to play now as a backstop,” Chadwick said. 

The beauty of a Boundary Waters trip comes as much from the chaos of the place as the peace. For every moose I’ve quietly paddled by, there have been evenings so thick with mosquitos that I’m in my tent before dusk. Many still sunset campfires have come after a devastatingly difficult day of windy paddling. It is a place that instills resilience and where apathy has no place. The people fighting for these lands have learned from them. And they’ve seen what’s at stake. 

“[The Boundary Waters] is a place I discovered my own strength, a place I find peace, and have experiences that break me out of the stressful rhythms of everyday life and remind me what is most important,” Chadwick said. 

—Ryley Graham

Photo: Jim Brekke