Ingrid Lyons: The next fight to save Minnesota’s Boundary Waters

We took a rollercoaster ride that is trying to save the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness with Ingrid Lyons last week. Lyons is the executive director of the nonprofit Save the Boundary Waters. The Boundary Waters is a million-acre expanse of lakes and forests along Minnesota’s Canadian border — one of the most remote and cherished wilderness areas in the U.S. It’s long been shielded from development, but now faces renewed threats from foreign-backed mining operations just upstream. Lyons breaks down how a Chilean billionaire-owned company is pushing to mine near the area, why that poses a serious risk to the wilderness, and how protections for this fragile ecosystem have swung back and forth depending on who’s in the White House. The latest move comes from the Trump administration, which has announced its intent to overturn a 20-year mining ban put in place by President Biden — citing the need to boost domestic mineral production. But Lyons points out that the mining would be done by a foreign company, with the minerals likely headed overseas to China. We also discussed other foreign mining projects moving into Minnesota and Wisconsin to extract resources and ship them to other countries — while locals are left to deal with the environmental consequences.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.