Recent court decisions call into question key permits for massive PolyMet project in Lake Superior watershed, recognize rights of Fond du Lac Band.
Excerpt from this story from Earth Island Journal:
Lake Superior’s vast shimmering blue looks like an ocean, but this is freshwater — ten percent of our entire world’s fresh surface water, as a matter of fact. The port city of Duluth, Minnesota sits on its edge, at the western tip of the interconnected chain of Great Lakes. This will be an increasingly vital place, as climate change, drought, and water scarcity accelerate, and the need for freshwater access intensifies nationally and globally. Yet Minnesota has another legacy: the mining industry, which has long exploited iron reserves in its famed “Iron Range” that extends 175 miles around the north shore of Lake Superior, and has caused significant environmental pollution.
Approximately ninety miles upstream from Duluth, near the towns of Babbitt and Hoyt Lakes, a web of waterways weave their way through peat wetland. Endangered wolves and lynx roam this area, along with moose and deer. Abundant medicinal plants grow in this site, sacred to the Chippewa tribes, which are now part of the 1854 treaty land where the tribes have the right to hunt, fish, and harvest wild rice, maple syrup, and plant medicine. These are the headwaters of the St. Louis River, the largest freshwater estuary in North America, and the largest tributary to Lake Superior. Deep underground the wetlands here is a massive deposit of copper.
This is also the site of the proposed PolyMet Mining Corporation copper-sulfide mine, NorthMet, which would be the first mine to extract copper-nickel and other minerals from a large, untapped deposit in the area. The massive project, which is slated to occupy some 19,000 acres, would destroy more than 1,000 acres of wetland. This type of open-pit mine design has a 100 percent failure rate, and is particularly dangerous in a water-rich environment, according to research by the mining watchdog group Earthworks.
“We know that the waterways are connected,” says Chippewa elder Ricky DeFoe, “It’s like in the human body all the veins are connected, so it is with the waterways.” If NorthMet were to happen, activists fear it would pave the way for a 100-mile corridor of copper mines in Northern Minnesota, including the proposed Twin Metals project in the Boundary Waters. Tens of thousands of acres of mineral leases have been sold in the region. As the first proposed open-pit copper mine to make it through permitting in Minnesota, NorthMet may set legal precedent for future mine proposals nearby.
For 15 years, tribes, environmental groups, and citizens have been voicing concern about NorthMet, plans for which made it all the way through permitting in a process that activists say was mostly behind closed doors, without an unbiased decision maker looking at the evidence. According to environmental groups, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) leadership under the Trump administration colluded with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to cover up EPA staff members’ voices of concern, and the agency blocked the Fond du Lac Band of Chippewa from having a voice by refusing multiple requests to investigate downstream effects.
This past spring and summer, however, a string of victories brought renewed hope to the groups working collaboratively to protect the Lake Superior watershed.
At the federal level, the Biden administration’s EPA determined that pollution from PolyMet “may affect” the Fond du Lac Band, which is the first time ever that a tribe has won the same legal consideration that is given to downstream states under the Clean Water Act. And at the state level, three key decisions mean PolyMet — which was originally given a “forever permit” with no specific end date — no longer has a permit to mine and that the project will have to undergo further review.
