URGENT: The Boundary Waters Is Our Biggest Public Lands and Waters Fight Right Now
Take action now to prevent mining near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness
Northern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is one of the greatest Wilderness Areas in the lower 48 states. It’s also the most visited.
A million acres of lakes and forests stitched together by waterways. No roads. No engines. No buildings. Just paddles dipping noiselessly into clear lakes, loons calling at dusk, and generations of people learning what real quiet sounds like—what true solitude feels like.
For paddlers, anglers, hunters, and families, this isn’t just a vacation spot. It’s a living example of what public lands and waters are supposed to be: clean, accessible, and protected for everyone.
Right now, it’s at the very center of our biggest and most urgent public lands battle outside of Alaska. Nowhere else do we have as much to lose as in the Boundary Waters.
Here’s what’s going on—right now, as you read this.
The danger comes from a little-known congressional measure called H.J.Res. 140.
Introduced last Monday, January 12, by Republican Representative Pete Stauber (who literally has a mine as his Facebook page banner), this is a resolution that’s currently moving through Congress and would strip away federal protections designed to keep industrial mining out of the watershed that feeds the Boundary Waters.
If passed, it would reopen the door to sulfide-ore copper mining in the very landscape where the Boundary Waters’ lakes and rivers begin.
In plain terms: it would allow one of the most pollution-prone forms of mining to move upstream of one of the cleanest, most connected freshwater wildernesses left in North America.
And once that door is open, it may be impossible to close again.
Supporters of H.J.Res. 140 describe it as a technical fix or a reversal of federal “overreach.” But the consequences are anything but technical.
This is about water. (And I’ve talked about the crucial importance of rivers and other waterways recently.)
It’s about whether the lakes people fish, the wetlands that support waterfowl, and the forests that support deer, moose, and grouse remain intact—or whether they become collateral damage in a risky industrial experiment.
For anglers, the Boundary Waters is not just scenic. It’s functional. The region’s walleye, lake trout, smallmouth bass, and northern pike depend on clean, cold, interconnected water. Pollution here doesn’t stay put. Lakes flow into rivers. Rivers feed other lakes.
When contamination enters a system like this, it can spread far beyond a single site and linger for decades. There is no realistic cleanup plan once heavy metals enter a wilderness watershed like this. Prevention is the only option.
Healthy wetlands also mean ducks and geese. Intact forests mean grouse covers, deer habitat, and migration corridors. A lack of development means pristine night skies, including, occasionally, the Northern Lights.
Mining doesn’t just remove trees, though—it brings roads, noise, light, and long-term disruption. It changes how wildlife moves and where people can go.
The Boundary Waters isn’t surrounded by empty land. It’s connected to national forests and other public lands, including Voyageurs National Park, that depend on the same clean water and intact habitat.
For outdoor recreation and local communities, the risk is nothing less than existential.
The Boundary Waters is the most visited Wilderness Area in the country. Outfitters, guides, resorts, bait shops, shuttle drivers, and small businesses across northern Minnesota rely on people coming specifically because this place is clean, quiet, and protected.
You can’t market a wilderness if people are worried about water quality. You can’t maintain a paddling and fishing economy around uncertainty. Once the perception of risk sets in, visitors go elsewhere—and those jobs don’t come back easily.
Mining supporters often argue that modern technology and regulations make this safe. But sulfide-ore copper mining has a long track record of pollution failures across North America.
Even well-intentioned projects can leak. Tailings dams fail. Treatment systems require perpetual maintenance. And in a place like the Boundary Waters—where lakes are shallow, interconnected, and impossible to isolate—“acceptable risk” is just another way of saying permanent damage.
What makes H.J.Res. 140 especially dangerous is how it works.
This resolution wouldn’t just undo one specific protection. It would use a congressional shortcut designed to erase rules quickly—and once erased, it would make it extremely difficult for future administrations to restore similar protections, even if new science, new economic realities, or overwhelming public support demand it.
This is not a careful reconsideration. It’s a figurative legal bulldozer now—and a literal one on the ground in the near future.
That matters because the Boundary Waters has been debated, studied, and fought over for years. Protections didn’t appear overnight. They followed environmental reviews, public input, and recognition that this place is simply too special—and too vulnerable—to gamble with. H.J.Res. 140 sidesteps all of that.
It doesn’t replace protections with better ones. It just removes them.
This is not a choice between jobs and nature either. Northern Minnesota already has an outdoor economy that works—one built on clean water, healthy wildlife, and public access. Mining would offer a short-term boom for a narrow sector, while putting a long-term, widely shared economy at risk. Once pollution happens, there is no do-over.
Here’s another kicker: the mining company that would almost certainly destroy the Boundary Waters watershed is Twin Metals, which is a Chilean-owned company.
Quite literally—and yes, that’s how insane things have gotten—there’s an active bill in Congress that would offer enormous profits to a foreign company, without any—any—benefits to American taxpayers, while destroying one of the nation’s most pristine, intact, and biggest wilderness areas.
Let me put that in a slightly different way: this bill would allow a South American mining conglomerate to pillage a world-class wilderness and remove American resources basically for free.
Under the General Mining Act of 1872—which dates from a time mining was done with pickaxes and shovels, and still governs mining on our public lands today—companies that mine hardrock minerals (such as gold, silver, lithium, zinc, and, in the case of the Boundary Waters, copper) do not pay any royalty to the U.S. government for the minerals they extract.
So, in a pretty literal sense, while we, the American taxpayers, fund agencies that manage our public lands and waters, mining companies can remove resources from those very places essentially free of charge.
If that sounds completely absurd, that’s because it is.
As the map above shows, pollution from the Twin Metals mine would severely impact large parts of the Boundary Waters.
And it would destroy Voyageurs National Park.
“The Boundary Waters is an incredibly special place that, through an immense and thorough process involving science, public, has had its watershed put off limits to toxic copper mining,” said Ingrid Lyons, Executive Director of Save The Boundary Waters.
“Now, Representative Stauber is trying to force it through using an unprecedented approach and for what? To benefit a Chilean mining company that sends its minerals to China, will destroy America’s most visited Wilderness area, and leave the mess up to the American and Minnesotan tax payers. Is this what America first means these days?”
And this isn’t just about Minnesota either.
The Boundary Waters belongs to all Americans. It is part of the National Wilderness System. It represents a national commitment that some places are worth protecting not because they are useless—but because they are irreplaceable.
If Congress is willing to roll back protections here, upstream of a world-class wilderness, then no public land with (nearby) mineral potential is truly safe.
H.J.Res. 140 forces a clear question: do our representatives in Congress still believe that clean water is worth more than speculative extraction? Do they believe that hunting, fishing, paddling, and wild places are legitimate uses of public land—or just obstacles to be cleared?
This is a moment that calls for immediate attention and swift action. Because once protections are stripped away, once leases are issued, once the first damage is done, there won’t be—nor can there be—a congressial vote to undo a poisoned lake or a lost fishery.
And when I say swift action, I mean take action right now.
This bill was introduced just last week and there’s already a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on it scheduled for tomorrow, Tuesday, January 20.
The full House could vote on this Boundary Waters pollution bill as early as this Wednesday.
How to Take Action
Below are all Republican members of the House Natural Resources Committee, ranked alphabetically by state/territory, along with their Facebook and/or Instagram pages. (In case you’re not on those social media platforms, I’ve also included their phone numbers.)
Please take a minute today to message them on Facebook/Instagram or—probably even more effectively—leave a comment on their latest social media post and tell them to vote against H.J.Res. 140.
The reason I’m focusing specifically on social media instead of the traditional phone calls is that Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the most pro-conservation politician in Congress, said the following on the MeatEater Podcast earlier this month:
“People just stepped up and the spontaneous nature of their pushback was very much rooted in social media. And so normally, as an elected official, you can choose to ignore the people calling the front desk. You can choose to ignore the email, but any member of [Congress] is on their phone a good couple of hours a day, and they couldn’t get away from it.”
(That’s an episode that’s very much worth watching, by the way.)
So, from now on, I will share the social media of congresspeople. And, going forward, I’d recommend all of us to start pushing back against anti-conservation or anti-public-lands bills or proposals on those platforms first.
Let’s flood their posts with Boundary Waters comments.
REPUBLICAN HOUSE NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE MEMBERS
Nick Begich (Alaska)
Amata Coleman Radewagen (American Samoa)
202-225-8577
Paul Gosar (Arizona)
202-225-2315
Bruce Westerman (Arkansas)
Tom McClintock (California)
Lauren Boebert (Colorado)
Jeff Crank (Colorado)
Jeff Hurd (Colorado)
Daniel Webster (Florida)
202-225-1002
Mike Collins (Georgia)
Russ Fulcher (Idaho)
Tim Walberg (Michigan)
PETE STAUBER (MINNESOTA)
202-225-6211
Mike Ezell (Mississippi)
Mark Amodei (Nevada)
Addison McDowell (North Carolina)
Cliff Bentz (Oregon)
Wesley Hunt (Texas)
Mike Kennedy (Utah)
202-225-7751
Celeste Maloy (Utah)
Jen Kiggans (Virginia)
Rob Wittman (Virginia)
Tom Tiffany (Wisconsin)
Harriet Hageman (Wyoming)
202-225-2311
Thanks for reading and for defending our precious public lands and waters!
See you out there,
Bram
Image 1: Nate Ptacek / Save The Boundary Waters
Image 2: Alex Falconer / Save The Boundary Waters
Image 3: Save The Boundary Waters
Image 4: Save The Boundary Waters