The Boundary Waters area in northern Minnesota is one of America’s most beautiful wilderness areas. As one of its final acts, the Obama Administration refused to renew mineral rights leased to a company named Twin Metals to mine for copper and nickel very near the Boundary Waters and the city of Ely. As we all know by now, that’s all the motivation that the present administration* needed. From Minnesota Public Radio:

An opinion published Friday by a top attorney at the U.S. Interior Department concludes the federal Bureau of Land Management erred last year when it concluded that BLM had the power to grant or deny the Twin Metals lease renewals. The reversal means the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service must reconsider Twin Metals' 2012 lease renewal application… Twin Metals also filed a federal lawsuit to try to invalidate the Obama decision, but late Friday the company said it was no longer pursuing legal action against the federal government. "The [Friday] decision is an important first step to ensure the certainty of investments in U.S. mining projects and to reaffirm long-standing property rights and the rule of law," a statement released by Twin Metals said.

Here, in two examples, you can measure the priorities between the two administrations, as well as the respective value they placed on expertise in forming a government. This, from The Washington Post, is the statement released last December by the Obama administration when it rejected Twin Metals’ attempt to renew the leases.

“The Boundary Waters is a natural treasure, special to the 150,000 who canoe, fish, and recreate there each year, and is the economic life blood to local business that depend on a pristine natural resource,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a joint statement with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. “I have asked Interior to take a time out, conduct a careful environmental analysis and engage the public on whether future mining should be authorized on any federal land next door to the Boundary Waters.”

And here, from The Chicago Tribune, is a curious factoid of a kind that we’re also all coming to regard as business as usual.



The decision, made public Friday in an Interior Department legal decision, marks a win for the Chilean mining firm belonging to the family of billionaire Andronico Luksic, who rents a home to Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, in Washington.

Jared’s landlord. These people never cease to amaze and astound.

The Boundary Waters Getty Images

The Great Lakes generally are one of the areas most endangered by the administration*’s gleeful abandonment of the nation’s environmental commitments. Luckily, the EPA has appointed a stalwart guardian to watch over the region and protect it fro…oh, hell, who am I kidding? It’s another bad hire. From The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:



During Stepp's six-year tenure at DNR, fines for environmental violations dwindled, and the EPA twice stepped in to spur department action after residents complained of problems like manure-contaminated drinking water…"Of the seven DNR secretaries I have known, she clearly had the worst record in terms of standing up for protection of natural resources, whether it was water, air, or fish and wildlife," said George Meyer, a former DNR secretary who now directs the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation. "Under Secretary Stepp's watch, public health and the rights of future generations to clean and abundant water have been seriously eroded," said Kimberlee Wright, who directs Midwest Environmental Advocates, a public interest law firm that has mounted legal challenges to DNR pollution permitting.

Stepp has no college degree. This, of course, was no barrier to employment by Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. After all, he never graduated, either. But Stepp ran a construction business, and she liked to shoot animals in the woods, so that was all the resume she needed. It probably makes her overqualified for the job she holds in the administration*. When people say that this administration* is poisoning things, don’t take it entirely as a metaphor.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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