Photo by Barbara Hanson Clark, October 2021
My novel, Polar Deception, is set in Antarctica, a fragile wilderness protected by a treaty and a separate protocol to ban mining. One man is the face of the interests determined to mine it anyway—for a single prize. So when a version of that same threat played out in northern Minnesota this spring, it hit home.
Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Its Protections
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness covers roughly 1.1 million acres of boreal forest and over 1,100 interconnected lakes in northeastern Minnesota. It runs along the Canadian border and adjoins Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is one of the most visited wilderness areas in the country, prized for its silence, dark skies, and water routes that run for miles without ever touching a road.
It entered the National Wilderness Preservation System under the 1964 Wilderness Act, but the protections with real teeth came with the 1978 Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act, which ended logging and snowmobiling and limited motorboats to only certain lakes. That law banned mining within the wilderness and established a 220,000-acre buffer zone along its entry corridors—but it didn’t reach the upstream federal lands in the Rainy River watershed, where waters flow into the wilderness.
That gap is what a 2023 order closed. In January 2023, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland issued Public Land Order 7917, withdrawing 225,504 acres of Superior National Forest—the upstream watershed the 1978 law had left open—from federal mineral leasing for twenty years. The order rested on a Forest Service study concluding that sulfide-ore copper mining would pollute the Boundary Waters in ways that could not be fixed or mitigated. It made mining across those lands illegal, and it was the most significant federal protection added since 1978.
Congress’s Decision to Undo Existing Protections, A Two-Year Environmental Review, and Common Sense
After easily passing the House, on April 16, 2026, the U.S. Senate voted 50–49 to overturn the twenty-year mining ban protecting the Superior National Forest and the Boundary Waters. It was signed into law on April 27. Congress got there by ignoring the existing protections noted above and by setting aside a two-year environmental review that had drawn about 675,000 public comments, 98% of them opposed to mining. This vote now clears the way for Twin Metals to build a copper-nickel mine near Ely, upstream of the wilderness. The outcome wasn’t for lack of argument. The Senate debated the resolution for hours, from late in the evening of April 15 into the next morning. Both of Minnesota’s senators, Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar, spoke against it at length—Senator Smith held the floor for nearly three hours, noting, among other things, that the ore would be shipped overseas to benefit a foreign company.
The majority voted to override all of it. And they did it via an unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act, a law historically used to strike down agency rules within 60 days of submission to Congress, not a rule that had been in place for three years. Unable to change that rule, the administration manipulated the system. Working closely with Congress, the Trump administration’s Interior Department resubmitted the same twenty-year mining withdrawal rule, claiming the Biden administration had never properly notified Congress of the 2023 withdrawal. And they did this for the sole purpose of restarting the 60-day clock so Congress could strike the rule down! I’m not sure it gets more cynical than this. And the ramifications of a CRA are far-reaching: Once a protection is overturned this way, it requires an act of Congress to reinstate. So the vote didn’t just remove the 2023 protection. It barred that protection from ever being rebuilt by anyone but Congress itself.
And who did they manipulate the system for? A corporate vehicle named Twin Metals, owned by the foreign Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta. This innocuous-sounding name was not a mistake. ‘Twin Metals’ was chosen to ‘sound’ American and Minnesota-friendly. They are anything but. Their entire existence is tied to obtaining leasing rights to one proposed mine near Ely, Minnesota. They have lobbied for over a decade to open this watershed to sulfide‑ore mining, damn the consequences. Antofagasta has lobbied for much longer. Twin Metals is a foreign-owned subsidiary that has never mined anywhere. Ever. And apparently the only spot on the planet deemed worthy of mining is within one of the world’s most delicate ecological zones.
The Oldest Promise Being Trampled On
There’s a layer here much deeper than one Senate vote. The Boundary Waters sits inside the 1854 Ceded Territory. In the Treaty of LaPointe that year, the Lake Superior Ojibwe ceded 5.5 million acres of northeastern Minnesota to the United States — but kept the right to hunt, fish, and gather on that land.
Tribal advocates argue that because the proposed mines sit in treaty territory, treaty rights should come first since they are the supreme law of the land under the Constitution. Ojibwe bands asked the federal government years ago to ban sulfide-ore mining in this watershed. One of the resources most at risk is manoomin (wild rice), a sacred food. It is the only aquatic grain native to North America, and is still harvested in these waters. Opening the watershed to mining means breaking a promise the U.S. made more than 170 years ago.
Sulfide-ore copper mining has never been done in Minnesota. The list of reasons why is longer than can be covered in this post. Just know that it is a uniquely fragile landscape that will suffer a uniquely horrible and permanent fate. For example, the water here is naturally low in alkalinity, so it can barely buffer incoming acid. According to the non-profit group Save the Boundary Waters, “This type of mining generates waste rock full of sulfates, which, when exposed to air and water, becomes sulphuric acid, and leaches toxins like heavy metals into the surrounding water (emphasis added).” The sulfate rocks themselves speed up mercury methylation—the form of mercury that builds up in fish and moves up into the loons and eagles that eat them. And that sacred aquatic rice? Moose will take in heavy metals through that and other aquatic plants they feed on. Minnesota also has the highest loon population in the lower forty-eight, plus federally threatened Canada lynx, wolves, and black bears, who will also be affected.
Photo by Barbara Hanson Clark, Nov. 2016
Reality is Stranger than Fiction
In Polar Deception, the wilderness is Antarctica, currently protected by the Madrid Protocol—a treaty that bans mining on the continent. The ban doesn’t expire in 2048 as is sometimes claimed. According to the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, reports that the Protocol “expires” that year are a misinterpretation: neither the Protocol nor the Antarctic Treaty has a termination date. What 2048 actually marks is the earliest point at which a party to the treaty can request a review—and even then, per the Australian Antarctic Program, the ban can’t be lifted without a new binding legal regime in place, adopted by a supermajority of the treaty’s governing parties. On paper, it holds. In reality, both China and Russia have expanded their Antarctic presence in recent years. A 2022 U.S. Defense Department report concluded that China’s expansion was likely aimed at strengthening its claims to the continent’s natural resources—exactly the pressure the treaty exists to hold back, and exactly the pressure that will one day test its strength.
The Boundary Waters is also protected by a treaty and federal law ‘on paper.’ But that doesn’t seem to matter. Its historical and more recent protections were wiped out in an instant, not by a wildfire or other natural disaster, but with an up-or-down vote by politicians in a government building over a thousand miles away—most of whom likely never visited this wilderness. Just another routine Senate vote; a vote that ignores federal law, a two-year environmental review that laid out the devastating consequences of sulfide-ore copper mining, and a treaty in place since 1854. It was a vote to condemn this wilderness to a toxic and barren future. All in the space of one spring afternoon.
Some places, once polluted, don’t come back. The Boundary Waters is one of them.
Antarctica is another.
What YOU can still do
- Write to your members of Congress and tell them to pass a bill that permanently bans all mining in this region.
- Vote in the midterms and bring a friend.
- You can also donate to the Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness. They have beaten Twin Metals in court and in the legislature. They’re a 501(c)(3), so gifts are tax deductible. Plus, a gift of $30 or more makes you a member. The fight isn’t over. It’s just moved to the courts.
We’re not powerless, but we are at a turning point.
