The Most Visited Wilderness in America Has a Price. Turns Out It's 50 Votes

This past Thursday, the U.S. Senate voted 50-49 to pass House Joint Resolution 140, lifting a 20-year mineral withdrawal initiated by the Biden Administration in 2023 that barred mineral leasing across approximately 225,504 acres of federal land within Superior National Forest in northeastern Minnesota. This resolution removes a major federal protection surrounding the watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA). Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of Chilean-based Antofagasta Minerals, has sought since 2019 to build an underground copper-nickel mine just miles from the BWCA, which is the most visited federally designated wilderness area (FDWA) in the country. President Trump is expected to sign the resolution, which will mark a major victory for Iron Range communities that depend on mining in the area. For Ojibwe nations whose treaty rights depend on the health of these waters and conservation groups that have fought mining in the area for years, the vote represented a significant setback. But the vote obscures a more fundamental question: whether the mine's promise of economic revival has ever accounted for what it puts at risk.

 

The BWCA lies in the northern part of Superior National Forest in Minnesota, spanning nearly 150 miles along the U.S.-Canada border and is home to nearly 2000 lakes. The area was established as a FDWA under the Wilderness Act of 1964, which has since protected boreal forests that encompass a variety of habitats and endangered species. It plays several key ecological functions, including carbon sequestration and protected refuge for biodiversity, both of which strengthen resilience to climate change. The land is culturally significant to many Ojibwe nations, as it supports their legally enforceable rights to hunt, fish, and gather established by the Treaty of La Pointe in 1854. The BWCA Wilderness Act of 1978 reinforced the protections, formally banning logging and mining within the wilderness boundary. Although the proposed mine is outside the boundary, it lies within the watershed that feeds directly into the area, offering no meaningful ecological protection.

 

Just outside that boundary, Twin Metals has proposed a copper-nickel mine that scientists, local tribes, and economists warn could permanently damage the watershed. The mine is targeting copper-sulfide deposits, containing metals whose demand is driven largely by the clean energy transition, an irony that has lent the proposal additional political momentum. The primary environmental risk is acid mine drainage, which is the release of highly acidic water rich in toxic heavy metals into water sources. The risk is especially high for copper-sulfide mines specifically. Twin Metals has called acid mine drainage a “nonissue”, a characterization the data does not support. A 2012 study reported that all fourteen of the copper mines surveyed experienced pipeline spills or other accidental releases, according to Earthworks. For a watershed as interconnected as the BWCA’s, even a single significant leak could cause irreversible damage to the lakes and species protected since 1964, wild rice harvests that Ojibwe nations depend on under federal treaty, and to a recreation economy generating millions of dollars annually.

 

Beyond ecological consequences, the proposed mine also raises profound legal concerns for local Ojibwe nations, whose treaty rights depend on the health of the watershed. These rights to hunt, fish, and gather throughout the region are rooted in the Treaty of La Pointe in 1854, which the United States government is legally obligated to uphold. The courts have consistently affirmed the obligation. In Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians (1999), the Supreme Court held that off-reservation treaty rights remain enforceable even as land ownership has changed around them. The federal government’s trust responsibility to these nations means that any federal action that threatens those rights carries significant legal liability. 

 

That legal obligation has a specific and immediate focus. The Fond Du Lac Band and other tribes have identified wild rice, explicitly protected under the Treaty, as the most immediate victim of watershed contamination. Acid mine drainage would permanently alter the water chemistry it depends on. Under existing legal precedent, that destruction would constitute a federal treaty violation, exposing permitting agencies to legal challenges beyond standard environmental review. Conservation groups have echoed these concerns, arguing that copper-sulfide mining is fundamentally incompatible with the BWCA system. Proponents of the mine, including Iron Range communities that have experienced decades of economic decline, see the project as an opportunity for stable employment. This is an understandable position given the region’s long mining history, but one that may rest on significantly overstated projections. 

 

The mine’s economic case is contradicted by economic evidence surrounding the area’s existing economy. According to Twin Metals’ own projections, the mine is expected to create over 750 direct jobs and 1500 related jobs, along with $200 million to the state’s economy annually. The proposal reflects a broader national tension: the federal push for domestic critical mineral production, driven by national security concerns and technological goals, is increasingly colliding with the environmental and economic realities of the communities where those minerals are being extracted. Currently, wilderness tourism provides a sustainable economic benefit and in 2016, 513 completed surveys of BWCA permit trip leaders found that out-of-region visitors to counties surrounding the BWCA generated $78 million in total economic output and created 1100 full and part-time jobs, according to Ecological Economics. Minnesota’s outdoor recreation employment also grew by 4.2% in 2023 and its outdoor recreation economy maintains a steady 2.8% of state GDP, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Unlike the mine’s projected output, the economic output reliant on the BWCA depends entirely on the watershed staying intact. Furthermore, a 2020 Harvard University study found that copper mining could cost the region up to 22,791 jobs and $288 million in lost visitor spending annually, figures that suggest the mine's promise of employment would come at the expense of a larger and growing economic base. 

 

The battle over the BWCA is not simply about the single mine in question. It is about whether federal law, long-term economic sustainability, and local environmental matters can hold against short-term national resource demands. That the moratorium survived one administration, was reinstated, and now has been overturned by a Senate vote illustrates how vulnerable long-term environmental protections are to political momentum. Twin Metals still faces a multiagency permitting process at both the federal and state level and Minnesota’s DNR has the authority to deny a permit if it determines the project poses unacceptable environmental risks. The evidence is clear. The mine eliminates a growing and documented recreation economy for a finite extraction operation that carries irreversible environmental risk, federal treaty liability, and projections that research suggests are significantly overstated. The permitting process that remains is the last meaningful check on a decision made without a full accounting, one that includes treaty rights, the watershed, and the recreation economy that Washington’s 50-49 vote never bothered to count.