MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD...Call your representative today. Last week an unprecedented anti-public lands, anti-national monuments bill put forward by Minnesota Representative Tom Emmer passed in a close a vote by the House Natural Resources Committee (17-13). This bill (H.R. 3905) will now be considered for a vote by the full U.S. House of Representatives.
The proposed bill would threaten the world-class hunting and fishing of the Boundary Waters, eliminate the President’s authority to establish new national monuments in Minnesota and put the future of Minnesota’s public lands in the hands of a foreign mining giant with a history of environmental violations.
The Boundary Waters needs your help now more than ever. Please call your Representative right away and tell them you are opposed to this bill and want to see the Boundary Waters protected, not put at risk from sulfide-ore copper mining.
Call using the Congressional switchboard: 202-224-3121. Choose the House of Representatives, enter your zip code and you will be connected to your Representative's office.
Sample script: "I'm a constituent and I'm calling to tell [Rep. X] to protect the Boundary Waters from proposed sulfide-ore copper mining on the Wilderness edge. The Boundary Waters is a world class hunting and fishing destination and has come under direct threat from an outrageous bill that just passed the House Natural Resources Committee. I'm asking [Rep. X] to oppose this anti-public lands bill (H.R. 3905) and support the current study the Forest Service is already conducting to determine whether the Boundary Waters watershed is the wrong place for sulfide-ore copper mining."
Once you've called, you can also send a message to all your members of Congress expressing your opposition to this bill.
Please make a call right now: 202-224-3121
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A message from Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters
“This radical bill from Tom Emmer is anti-science, anti-public lands and anti-Boundary Waters,” said Jason Zabokrtsky, Chairman of Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters. “This bill puts Minnesota’s sporting heritage at risk by eliminating a science-based environmental review - a review supported by 79 percent of Minnesotans – in favor of singling out Minnesota as unworthy of our nation’s bedrock public lands protections. It’s time for Tom Emmer to join with sportsmen and women across the country by standing up for Minnesota’s conservation heritage and ending his misguided attacks on the Boundary Waters.”
Defend & Protect,
Lukas Leaf
Sporting Outreach Director
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More information on H.R. 3905:
H.R. 3905 would grant the right to mine on Superior National Forest lands next to and upstream of the Boundary Waters forever, a significant change to federal mineral leasing policy. The mineral leases would be granted without any meaningful consideration of the environmental, economic, or social impacts that would likely be caused by allowing America’s most toxic industry (according to the EPA) next to the most-visited Wilderness in the nation, a Wilderness made up of interconnected lakes, rivers, and groundwater. The leases would be given to Antofagasta, a giant Chilean mining company with a track record of water pollution and labor strife. Finally, this bill would stop the comprehensive two-year Forest Service study on the potential impacts of sulfide-ore copper mining in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters, a study that is supported by Agriculture Secretary Perdue and Interior Secretary Zinke. More than 126,000 people have already participated in the two-year study. H.R. 3905 would shut out all Americans and block them from participating in the fate of the Boundary Waters and the determination if public lands in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters should be off-limits to sulfide-ore copper mining for twenty years.