Big Red Canoe - Friends of the Boundary Waters podcast · Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness

Boundary Waters Protection with Senator Tina Smith

·21 min

Chris Knopp talks with Senator Tina Smith about the Boundary Waters fight. The conversation centers on a Senate budget reconciliation bill with a provision that would hand hundreds of thousands of acres near the BWCA to a Chilean mining conglomerate and bring toxic copper sulfide mining to the doorstep of the wilderness. Smith calls the bill historically terrible. She widens the frame to the bill's effect on health care and SNAP, saying it would take away health insurance from millions of Americans and leave fewer people able to put food on the table. The episode keeps circling back to the bill's central tradeoff. Smith says Republicans want to use it to pay for tax breaks for billionaires and giant corporations, while Representative Stauber helped get the mining provision into the measure. The leases are described as effectively permanent. They would give the company the right to build the mine on the doorstep of the Boundary Waters. Smith says the scientific evidence and data already show what that would mean: the mine is bound to pollute the Boundary Waters. The conversation also lays out a special pay-to-play mechanism. It would speed up environmental review and then stop legal review of that process. The bill would also block court challenges, leaving the threat with very few immediate legal brakes. The episode keeps tying the bill back to clean water, wilderness protection, and the Boundary Waters as a treasured wilderness. Chris Knopp steers the discussion toward what is at stake and how the threat emerged. The show also gestures toward what each of us can do to defend the Boundary Waters. The closing frame returns to Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness and its work to protect, preserve, and restore the place for future generations. Taken together, the episode follows a political fight with direct consequences for a treasured wilderness.

As heard by us

A focused account of the Boundary Waters fight, the lease provision, and the broader harms Smith says are packed into the bill.

Big Red Canoe keeps its focus on the Senate budget reconciliation bill and the fight over the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, with Chris Knopp and Senator Tina Smith laying out a provision that would give Anaphagasta mineral leases on hundreds of thousands of acres near…

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Why you'd press play

When a budget reconciliation bill reaches for the Boundary Waters, you want the map and the fine print.

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