Ely, MN-- In a piece published Friday the National Audubon Society included Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on a list of five special places in America a Biden-Harris Administration could spare from destruction. The Boundary Waters was named alongside Bears Ears in Utah, and Bristol Bay and Tongass National Forest in Alaska.
In naming the Boundary Waters as a top place to protect the Audubon piece reads:
In its last days in office, the Obama-Biden administration granted a reprieve to the nation’s most-visited wilderness area, Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. Its review of a proposed copper-nickel sulfide ore mine on the sanctuary’s southern edge found that it “might cause serious and irreplaceable harm to this unique, iconic, and irreplaceable wilderness area,” including contaminating its pristine lakes with harmful heavy metals and disturbing habitat for gray wolves, Canada Lynx, Common Loons, and the highest diversity of breeding wood warblers known in the world—24 species.
Obama’s BLM rejected a lease renewal for the project and the U.S. Forest Service began a study for a possible 20-year moratorium on mineral leasing in the area. But the Trump administration reinstated the mining company’s leases and scrapped the study. The project is still under review, and groups have filed state and federal lawsuits to stop it.
Biden hasn’t yet made any public statements about what actions, if any, he would take to protect the area. But Jeremy Drucker, senior adviser to the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters, urges the president-elect to step in. "We are hopeful that a Biden-Harris Administration will restore good governance to America's public lands and follow science-based decision making—both of which say the Boundary Waters needs to be protected from proposals for sulfide-ore copper mining on public lands in the headwaters of the Wilderness."
You can read the full piece here.