Amy Klobuchar Has Been Weirdly Quiet About A Massive Mining Controversy In Her Home State
On a snowy afternoon last February, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) announced her bid for president of the United States while standing on the bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. She noted how waterways like the Mississippi unite us and how they have helped many cities prosper. And she told the story of her immigrant grandparents, who’d arrived with only a suitcase and managed to build a life as her grandfather found work underground in the iron-ore districts of northern Minnesota, known as the Iron Range.
“I stand before you as the granddaughter of an iron ore miner,” Klobuchar said, promising to fight for “every worker, farmer, dreamer and builder” if elected to the White House.
Yet those underground mines where Klobuchar’s grandfather toiled morphed into massive open-pit operations ― the scars of which can easily be spotted from satellites. And even those operations, like the nation’s mining industry as a whole, have struggled in recent decades as the number of jobs declined by about 22% from 2000 to 2018.
Now Twin Metals Minnesota, a wholly owned subsidiary of Chilean mining giant Antofagasta, is looking to breathe new life into this small sector of the state’s economy with a $1.7 billion underground copper-nickel mine just a few miles from Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The pristine 1.09-million-acre landscape near the Canadian border is the most visited wilderness area in the country, a vast network of protected rivers, lakes and creeks that has helped small towns throughout northeastern Minnesota get ahead. It’s a proposal that many Democrats and environmentalists fear could forever destroy the beloved wilderness, as extracting sulfide-bearing minerals like copper and nickel can lead to acid mine drainage that can persist indefinitely.
The planned mine, unlike anything the Land of 10,000 Lakes has ever seen before, has become a political lightning rod. In the final weeks of President Barack...
