Washington, D.C. — Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced its decision to let a massive mining company exploit one of the nation’s most popular wilderness areas in northern Minnesota. The BLM agreed to renew leases issued more than five decades ago for Twin Metals Minnesota to mine near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness despite the risk of pollutants running downstream directly into the wilderness. Jenny Rowland-Shea, a senior policy analyst for Public Lands at the Center for American Progress, has issued the following statement:
These lease renewals are the latest in the Trump administration’s systematic effort to remove protections from the Boundary Waters watershed by shortcutting scientific assessment, ignoring local opposition, and bending the law. The agency’s decision to prematurely cancel one environmental study and rely on industry data in another has turned this entire process into a sham. The assault on the Boundary Waters is part of this administration’s broader attack on public lands and waters on behalf of mining industries—in this case, a mine owned by the same billionaire who rents a mansion to Ivanka Trump.
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