ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
In my home state of Minnesota, there's a patch of wilderness along the border of Canada.
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SCHMITZ: It's the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. There are no roads there. Motorized vehicles aren't allowed, and planes have to fly above a certain altitude over it so as not to disturb the sounds of nature.
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SCHMITZ: It's called the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It's filled with more than 1,000 interlocking lakes and rivers. And as a young man, I kept returning to this place - portaging and paddling a canoe, fishing, camping on islands, and enjoying solitude in nature with family and friends.
On Thursday, Congress voted to allow companies to start mining on the edge of that preserve, overturning a ban passed under the Biden administration. A Chilean mining company, Antofagasta, has planned for years to extract copper and nickel from beneath the area's watershed.
Proponents of the mine say it'll create jobs in the region and provide a domestic source of copper, a crucial element in cell phones, electric vehicles and military hardware. Those who oppose the mine say it could contaminate the region's rivers, lakes and streams with sulfuric acid, heavy metals and other toxins.
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SCHMITZ: Amy and Dave Freeman have spent more than a decade trying to preserve this wilderness area. You've actually been hearing them paddling in a Boundary Waters lake there. The pair told me they watched the vote unfold Thursday morning.
AMY FREEMAN: Honestly, we were devastated.
DAVE FREEMAN: You know, in the last month leading up to this, we were very hopeful, and it ended up being so close, but oof.
SCHMITZ: The FreemanS started advocating for the preserve in 2013. They once canoed from northern Minnesota to Washington, D.C., to collect signatures for a petition to protect the Boundary Waters. They spent a year living in the Boundary Waters as part of another campaign.
D FREEMAN: The silence is - it's hard to describe. And the night sky on a moonless winter night - and countless number of stars like you've never seen before. The only place I've ever seen stars like that are out in the middle of the ocean, hundreds of miles from land.
SCHMITZ: The Freemans worried this kind of stillness will be gone forever if the mine is built.
D FREEMAN: This is not a done deal, that this mine is - will be built. There's still a lot that is going to be done to stop this from happening.
SCHMITZ: But what about those in Congress who also oppose this measure? Tina Smith is a Democratic senator from Minnesota. She voted against the congressional measure to allow mining in the Boundary Waters Wilderness. But before she did that, she spoke for hours in opposition to it.
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TINA SMITH: You may be wondering why I am standing here at nearly midnight, keeping everybody up, and here's why - because I know there are so many people in Minnesota who are wondering whether anybody in this building cares about what they think.
SCHMITZ: Senator Smith joins me now. Senator Smith, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
SMITH: Well, thank you so much. I'm glad to be with you today.
SCHMITZ: There was a lot of emotion in your voice from that kind of tape that we just played. Tell me what that was like.
SMITH: Well, I was expressing the frustration of so many Minnesotans who feel like Congress is moving forward while completely ignoring what we think and what we know about this place. Minnesota is a big mining state. We're the No. 1 producer of iron ore in the whole country. But we understand that not every mine is right for every place, and this mine - on the border, on the doorstep of the Boundary Waters - is the wrong thing.
SCHMITZ: Now, this bill - it passed by a narrow margin. Tell us what happened there. Why did it come out like that?
SMITH: Yes, it was very close. We basically lost by a vote. And I think what was happening is, as more and more of our Republican colleagues started to hear about this and understand what was at stake, at the end what happened is that the White House weighed in and made their strong views known, and I think that that pressure was what kept us from getting the votes that we needed, even though many people would say to me privately that they thought that this was a mistake, which is doubly frustrating.
SCHMITZ: And you're saying folks who actually voted for - to lift the ban were telling you this.
SMITH: People who voted to lift the moratorium were telling me privately that they had a lot of concerns about what they were doing.
SCHMITZ: If this mine is built, who's going to benefit from it?
SMITH: The primary beneficiary here will be this huge Chilean mining conglomerate, Antofagasta, owned by a Chilean billionaire. The minerals that belong to the United States people will be brought up to the surface by this mining company, sent to China to be smelted. They have a sweetheart deal with a Chinese smelter there. And then it'll be sold back to the highest bidder, either used in China for their infrastructure or sold back to American consumers in some way. So this is not an America First strategy at all.
SCHMITZ: Now, won't some locals benefit at all from this? I mean, it could be a source of jobs. Could it be a source of domestically produced copper, which is used in all sorts of technology?
SMITH: Everybody who I have spoken to tells me that it is extremely unlikely that this raw copper would be shipped back to the United States to be manufactured into so-called American-made copper. You're right, and of course, of course, there are building and construction trades, jobs that would be - you know, be created by this mine. And there would be a relatively small number of permanent mining jobs because, of course, mines are much more automated than they once were.
You have to balance that, however, against the jobs that currently exist in the north country of Minnesota, where there is a vibrant outdoor recreation economy, thousands of jobs, millions and millions of dollars. And I think this is one of the reasons why so many dozens and dozens and dozens of small businesses in northeastern Minnesota sent a letter opposing the mine because of the impact it could have on their bottom lines.
SCHMITZ: Tell me about the environmental impact of this potential mine.
SMITH: o this is a kind of particular mine that is a copper sulfide mine, and what happens is copper sulfur rock is brought up to the surface, hundreds and hundreds of millions of tons of it. And when sulfur is exposed to air and oxygen - oxygen and water, which we have a lot of in northern Minnesota, it basically turns into sulfuric acid, and then it flows into the watershed. This mine is literally a mile or so from water that drains directly into the Boundary Waters and then into Voyageurs National Park.
SCHMITZ: And it's important to point out here that the Boundary Waters Wilderness is an area where you have more than 1,000 lakes, and many of them are connected with waterways. So if it is polluted, that pollution can be carried quite a long distance.
Before we let you go, you obviously care a lot about the Boundary Waters. We heard it in your voice in your speech this week.
SMITH: Yeah.
SCHMITZ: Do you have a favorite memory of a trip that you took there?
SMITH: I have memories of taking our sons off and leaving them at the Boundary Waters when they were young men in their teenage years, knowing that they were going to have a whole month in the wilderness and imagining what that was going to do to their sense of self and their sense of appreciation of nature and their role in it. I mean, just last summer, I was there. And just on a day trip, I saw two wolves just on one day trip.
SCHMITZ: Wow. That is U.S. Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat from Minnesota. Senator Smith, thanks for your time.
SMITH: Thank you so much.
SCHMITZ: We reached out to Twin Metals, the Minnesota subsidiary of the Chilean mining firm Antofagasta. In a statement, spokeswoman Kathy Graul said, quote, "any proposed project in this region, including Twin Metals, must undergo a yearslong multi-agency regulatory review before earning permits to begin construction of a mine."
In a phone call, she added that Senator Smith's claim about copper from the mine being processed in China is misleading and that the company is committed to keeping their minerals in the North American supply chain. Graul also told NPR that the mine is years away from operating.
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