Anderson: Amy Klobuchar needs to do more to protect the BWCA than voting to uphold the mining ban

When I lived in Ely in the late 1970s, the Boundary Waters were on fire. Not literally — the region’s pines, spruces and birches weren’t burning. Instead, the topic of how to federally regulate the more than 1 million-acre wilderness was again up for grabs, and Congress would be the decider.

At the time, newspapers had more influence over public opinion and public policy than they do now, and the Minnesota scribe who wrote most frequently about the state’s border region was Jim Klobuchar, an Ely native and Minneapolis Star columnist.

Klobuchar, who died in 2021, was the father of Democratic U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who recently announced her candidacy for Minnesota governor.

By all accounts, this father-daughter duo had a loving and adventuresome relationship. They biked 1,100 miles together from Minneapolis to Jackson Hole, Wyo. The also biked and camped from the Twin Cities to Ely. And one time they tried to bike from Yale University, in Connecticut, where Amy attended college, back to Minnesota. But they broke down in Michigan.

As the son of a northeast Minnesota miner who was also a wilderness advocate, Jim Klobuchar understood as few Minnesotans did the competing interests that fought during his lifetime — and still do — over management of the BWCA.

Before passage in 1978 of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act, logging, mining and motorboat advocates wanted at least limited access to the BWCA. In opposition were paddlers and others who believed the lake-, river- and island-dotted area should be managed as a wilderness.

As admired as Klobuchar was as a Twin Cities newspaperman, he wasn’t well liked among some Ely residents. He didn’t win any local friends when he changed the pronunciation of his name from Klo-BUTCH-er, as the family was widely known in Ely, to the more consonantly acceptable KLO-ba-shar.

A low point in the relationship occurred in 1980, when a coalition of Boundary Waters multiple-use advocates took out an ad in the Star accusing Klobuchar of possessing a “blind and uncontrollable hatred of the people of northeast Minnesota.”

But Klobuchar never backed down from his belief that wilderness protection — meaning, especially, no mining and no logging — was best for the BWCA.

“The Boundary Waters is a world unlike any others,” he wrote in 1995, near his retirement, “where ordinary people can become lake dwellers or adventurers, for a day or a week, skimming the water, marveling at the sunrise or the unearthly sound of the loons, or embraced by silence. It has strengthened thousands of families. It has brought something profound into the lives of other thousands who dreaded their first night in a tent, and left with a new understanding of their relationship to the Earth and a thrill of proprietorship. ...

“Years ago a powerful industry wanted to dam the waters feeding the Boundary Waters’ streams and forests. It was stopped not only because there were strong men and women who opposed it, but also because a public consensus said it was wrong.”

Now, as Yogi Berra once said, it’s déjà vu all over again.

At issue is copper-nickel mining — often called sulfide mining — which has been proposed near the BWCA by Twin Metals, which is part of a large, foreign-owned conglomerate.

As a senator, Klobuchar has been a strong, and vocal, supporter of iron ore, or taconite, mining, and the favor has been returned by northeast Minnesota steelworkers, who consider her a friend.

But she’s been far more wishy-washy about Twin Metals and sulfide mining. Backers say the mine near Ely will create 750 jobs, while critics counter that no similar mine has operated safely anywhere in the world, and that toxic runoff from the mine is a possibility. The waters of the state’s northern border region, they say, are too valuable to risk.

Give Minnesota’s senior senator credit for saying she will vote against a proposal to undo a mining moratorium on about 225,000 acres of federal forest lands adjoining the BWCA. But that’s a far cry from declaring she opposes sulfide mining on the edge of the Boundary Waters, and will continue her opposition if she’s elected governor.

One of Jim Klobuchar’s favorite pastimes was pillorying politicians who tried to have it both ways with the BWCA.

“And so the candidate [Quie] voted to lock in permanently the motorization of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area,” Jim Klobuchar wrote. ”When that bill was defeated by the pro-wilderness votes, the candidate then voted for the pro-wilderness bill."

Amy Klobuchar would do Minnesota — and her dad’s memory — a favor if she said flat-out “no” to sulfide mining in northern Minnesota.

The state’s permitting process would still play out. And maybe, in the end, her opposition notwithstanding, Twin Metals would still get its mine.

But at least this one time, the equivocation that has coursed through the veins of so many Minnesota politicians over BWCA protection would end.

But don’t count on it.