Trump’s lust for mining lucre now too close for comfort

I get a sinking feeling when I read news stories about the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota. And it’s a familiar sinking feeling.

More so when those news stories included the revelation the Trump administration has reopened the process that could allow a giant copper mine near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, one that would be operated by a Chilean mining enterprise.

Copper demand is high, in part from construction needs for heating and cooling data centres. And about one-third of the known copper reserves in the U.S. are located in the area that could potentially allow mining, after a reversal of earlier protected status.

The Boundary Waters flow into the Rainy River watershed, into Lake of the Woods and eventually into Lake Winnipeg. And while the Boundary Waters Treaty from 1909 provides stewardship by the International Joint Commission for waters shared by Canada and the U.S., Donald Trump’s America-first (and always) stance means we can’t depend on guarantees that exist now.

Put bluntly, that means that, even with treaties in place, we can’t necessarily depend on our neighbours to live up to their commitments to protect the water that crosses from their country into ours.

Yes, we need economic development. Yes, we need raw materials. But at what cost?

Modern mining is far from a guaranteed environmental failure. The company proposing the project promises high standards and an underground mining operation without tailings dumps. But there are always risks, and there are always companies that end up not living up to their promises.

Face it: the market is always looking for the cheapest supply of materials to produce the lowest-cost goods. That often means mining or harvesting easily accessible materials in untouched settings. Economic necessity may well be a calculus that’s fine for any of us who are older and won’t live to see the effects.

But just like there are a limited number of sources of raw materials, there are a limited number of untouched natural areas.

While we’re keen on nation-building with big projects, we should also be keen on nation-building with big protections for the most valuable of our currently unprotected natural areas. Resource projects play out, and what’s left behind is not a return to what was there before. The best of reclamations is still a reclamation.

You get one chance to save something unique. There are exceptions, though. Before it became a national park, sections of Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland were comprehensively logged, including clear-cutting.

But that’s an exception, rather than the rule.

So, as the federal government moves to fast-track projects with national scope, it should set up a parallel nation-building process that can move just as quickly to protect more of Canada’s wildland gems.

South of us, there are plans to open up huge portions of U.S. national forests to logging — plans to allow oil drilling in pristine Alaskan areas. Changes to allow easier disposal of toxic heavy-metal-contaminated coal ash. Plans to broaden all sorts of extractive projects to “make America great again.”

It is almost as if Trump, a creature of New York City, has never walked alone in a high wildland meadow. Has never just sat in the summer heat along the side of a small boreal creek, listening to the water falling over a low falls. Because he seems to see no value in anything that isn’t a cash transaction, falling on the profit side of the ledger.

American nature photographer Ansel Adams said in 1983, “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.” That saying is apt again in the U.S. — let’s not make it apt here as well.

There may be great immediate wealth in the process of strip-mining the future to provide for economic success in the present, but it doesn’t leave a heck of a lot for our children and grandchildren. It’s gold leaf on the walls today, lead in the drinking water tomorrow.

A country’s greatness is also measured by how well it balances all of its resources — economic, environmental and beyond.

Perhaps it’s selfish of me, but natural areas are, to me, the best of respites. I can feel my soul recovering when I’m in the woods near Pinawa or lying on my back somewhere far from city lights, watching the purple boil of the Milky Way bulge and curve in the night sky above me.

Don’t get me wrong; I have watched the “man-made lava flow” of the Monsanto phosphate-production operation in Soda Springs, Idaho, where glowing industrial slag waste runs down the side of the mammoth slag pile. The 1,000 C calcium silicate is created by a plant that uses as much electricity every year as Kansas City, so it is a wonder of sorts.

But not, somehow, as fine to me as watching a cat’s paw breath of wind track across tall grass in a meadow, or as finding single small and unfamiliar orchids demonstrating their unique design to absolutely no one in the middle of a summer bog.

I’ll pick cool, clear, clean water over a data centre’s output of AI imaginings of lost nature any day.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca