On Thursday, the United States Senate voted 50-49 to hand the headwaters of America’s most-visited Wilderness to a Chilean mining conglomerate.
That vote alone would mark a generational low. But we’ve been keeping a list. Thursday’s wasn’t the first. It wasn’t the worst. It was number forty.
An Arctic Refuge cracked open for drilling. A marine monument thrown to commercial fishing fleets. A 211-mile mining road carved through a national park. Forty-five million acres of roadless forest unlocked for chainsaws. A quarter of the Park Service workforce, gone. Three million acres of public land nearly auctioned off on the Senate floor. And now, the Boundary Waters.
No previous Congress has done anything close. Not the 104th. Not the 115th. Not any of them.
What’s happening amounts to a full-scale assault on this country’s greatest treasures. These are the places generations fought to protect. The places that shape our national identity. The places many of us knew as children and now risk being…
