At a recent campaign rally Donald Trump promised one of the fastest reversals of a Biden-administration protection. Within the first 10 minutes of being in office, Trump said he would overturn a 20-year mining ban that protects Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Boundary Waters is the crown jewel of the upper Midwest. Located in Superior National Forest, Boundary Waters comprises 1,090,000 acres of pristine forests, glacial lakes, and streams. Affectionately called “canoe country” by Minnesota’s hunters, anglers, kayakers, and conservationists, Boundary Waters is the most visited national forest in the country. Photographers flock there to capture vivid landscapes and playful animals. Scientists flock there to study bird migration patterns, geology, ecology, and the climate.
The watershed also a lucrative place to extract copper, pitting the aforementioned groups against industrial mega corporations that want to open up the land to toxic mining.
I bet you can guess which side Trump is on.
Earlier this year at a $100,000-plate dinner in Mar-a-Lago, Trump told oil and gas executives that if they gave $1 billion to his presidential campaign, he would rollback President Biden’s climate regulations that they felt were unfairly onerous to their industry and bottom line. Trump has a long history of taking billionaire bribes in backroom deals to dismantle protections for public lands.
“I rescinded the federal withdrawal of, in Superior, you know, Superior National Forest, did anybody ever hear of Superior National Forest?” Trump has bragged. “Well, I opened it up. What’s wrong with that?”
Boundary Waters is the cornerstone of Minnesota’s outdoor recreation industry, a boon that brings nearly $10 billion to the state. But copper mining in the area threatens so much more than Boundary Waters itself. It also risks the 4.3 million acre ecosystem surrounding it, including Voyageaurs National Park, the Superior National Forest, and Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park.
Beyond that, if Trump is re-elected, it will be the beginning of a dark turn in America’s long history of protecting public lands. The authors of Project 2025, the conservative plan for a second Trump term, want to repeal the Antiquities Act, a popular bipartisan executive tool for protecting lands as national monuments.
The Antiquities Act was established in 1906 to protect historical and ecological artifacts from being plundered by European newcomers.
The Antiquities Act
Requires individuals to secure permission from federal land managers to conduct archeological investigations and remove objects from federal lands.
Penalizes excavation and removal of objects.
Authorizes the President of the United States to establish national monuments from existing federal lands.
Authorizes the Secretaries of Agriculture, Interior, and War to review and grant permits to qualified institutions.
Requires excavated materials be permanently preserved in public museums.
President Joe Biden used the Antiquities Act to restore protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, which were dismantled by Trump as one of his first acts in office. And just last year, Biden used the same tool to protect nearly 1 million acres of public lands sacred to the Indigenous Arizonians in the Grand Canyon watershed.
Project 2025 not only wants to kill off the Antiquities Act, but also dismember the places it has protected and make the land available for extraction by the oil and gas industry.
The damage from Trump’s first term isn’t enough.
According to American Progress:
Project 2025 calls these rollbacks “insufficient” and proposes another monument “review.” This proposal suggests that more monuments in more states are under threat of being downsized or abolished, specifically calling out monuments designated by the Biden-Harris administration.
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but his hands are all over it. After all, the author of the section about public lands is William Perry Pendley, former director of Trump’s Bureau of Land Management, the agency that manages the majority of U.S. public lands.
Pendley’s record includes publicly denying climate change and has called for a massive sell-off of public lands. His views are so extreme, even some of the most radical right-wing Congressional leaders refused to confirm him to manage BLM.
In November, voters will choose between Harris-Walz who have pledged to sustain protections that have worked for more than a century to or a lying conman who will allow oil and gas mega corporations to endanger our climate and take public lands out of the publics’ hands.
Onward, Democracy Defenders!
I summarized a portion of this post from this petition to protect Boundary Waters. If any of this resonated with you, please sign the petition.
A heart is definitely not the right emoji for this one. But I heart your substack.
Ivanka & Jared we're living in the Washington residence of the owner of the mine Co that wants to mine the boundary waters & rescinded the ban on mining there. There are no coincidences