Boundary Waters advocacy groups say they are concerned that a proposed platform for the next Republican president would have devastating environmental impacts by allowing mining in a protected, roughly 225,000-acre swath of national forest land adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Project 2025 is a proposed conservative platform for the next president that was organized by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. The project has been disavowed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, even though some of his former cabinet members helped assemble it.
Democrats have helped raise the profile of Project 2025 with frequent criticism of its contents, and say it must be viewed as a blueprint for a possible second Trump presidency. One paragraph in the nearly 900-page document calls for the president's administration to abandon the "withdrawal" of land for mineral leasing that President Joe Biden's administration ordered in 2023, which was meant to protect the Superior National Forest for 20 years. Chris Knopf, executive director of Friends of the Boundary Waters, said he is "very concerned about what the future of the Boundary Waters holds" if Trump is elected and mining is allowed.
"This would be catastrophic, and it would absolutely decimate the Boundary Waters as we know it," Knopf said. Project 2025 also calls for removing the protections on the Thompson Divide of White River National Forest in Colorado, and the 10-mile protected buffer around C.