River in Ireland Cautions Us to Protect Minnesota's Boundary Waters

   Whenever politicians try to roll back rules on sulfide mining for metals like gold, nickel  or copper, I flash back to June 2005 when my wife and I toured Ireland with my parents.

   About 40 miles south of Dublin, we pulled into Avoca, a small town in County Wicklow, to visit Fitzgerald’s Pub. Mom and Dad wanted to see the pub because it was featured in a 1990s BBC TV show called “Ballykissangel,” the show’s fictional name for Avoca.

   If you ever watched “Ballykissangel,” maybe you saw a sign outside the fictional town’s post office that used original Irish to spell that name “Baile Coisc Aingeal.” It means “The town of the fallen angel.”

   My parents headed inside Fitzgerald’s Pub while I parked our car. Before joining them in the pub, Penny and I walked along the nearby Avoca River, which flows southeasterly into town from the Wicklow Mountains. After leaving town, the Avoca tumbles along to an estuary of the Irish Sea at Arklow.

   This pretty, rock-strewn river looked like many other trout and salmon rivers we passed during our two-week drive around Ireland, and so I hoped to find fishermen to chat up. When we saw no one fishing, we headed for Fitzgerald’s. After our server took our order, I asked about fishing the Avoca. She looked hurt, maybe even annoyed, as if surprised someone would ask something so clueless.

   “There’s no fishing here,” she said. “Mining killed our fish years ago. All of them.”

   Hmm. Got it. The town of THAT fallen angel.

     Hunters and anglers are lobbying U.S. senators to protect Minnesota’s Boundary Waters region by rejecting efforts to allow sulfide mining for copper and nickel in the Superior National Forest.     — Photos by Patrick Durkin

   Maybe folks like Congressman Pete Stauber, R-Minnesota, should visit Avoca, Ireland, before opening the Superior National Forest to copper-nickel mining. After all, the SNF is part of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. A firsthand look at the unintended, long-term environmental damage to the Avoca River seems reasonable before risking similar harm to a far larger, more vulnerable region at home.

   Sigh.

   Come on, Congressman. Most people realize our society needs copper for AI centers, electric vehicles and other high-tech electronics. But rational folks also want to understand the risks and costs of mining copper. They know it’s unrealistic, even childish, to oppose all mining in our backyards. Minnesota, for example, has operated iron-ore mines for over 140 years. It’s not pain-free, of course. It’s caused serious problems, including acid-mine drainage from certain pyrites (fool’s gold), and air pollution from mercury and asbestos fibers.

   But sulfide mining that extracts copper and nickel poses far greater risks than iron-ore (taconite) mining. Unless mine operators can forever shield their mountains of extracted sulfide-infused rock from air and water, they’ll forever risk environmental damage downhill and downstream. And without proven protections against those deadly acids from leached metals, citizens shouldn’t trust the Chilean-based company Stauber supports to protect the Boundary Waters’ long-term health. Taxpayers also can’t entrust those miners with all the downstream wetlands and waterways flowing northward into Canada and beyond to Hudson Bay.

   Mining’s many challenges in protecting the Superior National Forest appear more daunting than those still plaguing the Avoca River’s 7.5-mile stretch between former mines and the Irish Sea. Before closing in 1982 after about 12 years in operation, Avoca’s two open-pit mines created “Mount Platt,” a nearly 800-foot-high mountain of waste rock totaling over 915,000 cubic yards in size. Because of its toxic leaching, Mount Platt remains nearly devoid of vegetation nearly 45 years later.

   Likewise, that 7.5-mile river section of the Avoca remains one of Ireland’s most polluted systems, mainly because of acid-mine drainage. True, conditions in the Avoca River have improved slightly since that Fitzgerald’s Pub server declared it dead to fish and fishing in June 2005. But the Avoca-Avonmore river system was once home to large runs of Atlantic salmon before mining began over 200 years ago. Some salmon still reach their spawning areas in the upper rivers, and young salmon still turn up in recent surveys, but their numbers remain low.

   Restoration work is ongoing but slow because of Ireland’s year-round wet climate and lush greenery. Think northeastern Minnesota without subzero winters. As such, the Avoca River’s waters are particularly “soft,” much like the very soft waters of northeastern Minnesota. Science tells us that soft water has little capacity to handle acids and other pollutants.

     Patrick Durkin, foreground, visited the Avoca River in southeastern Ireland in June 2005. The river was once home to large runs of Atlantic salmon, but pollution from copper mining killed off most of the river’s native fisheries.

   Acids draining from Mount Platt relentlessly plague the Avoca River because the giant rock pile can’t generate enough vegetation to resist erosion from rain and wind. Lacking such cover, it also struggles to contain or divert surface-water runoff, which contaminates surrounding vegetation, causing a significant dieback of trees.

   Once those acids and metals reach the river, they settle in bottom sediments to create a reservoir for long-term exposure. They dissolve again in the water and get absorbed by fish through their gills, much as birds and other wildlife eat the plants and algae absorbing the contaminants. And from there, the toxins move up the food chain, concentrating in people and anything else consuming them.

   No one should assume Ireland sat idle after mining operations devastated the Avoca River. But undoing such damage is daunting. A 2003 study of treatment options concluded that none would greatly slow the pollutants leaching from the mines. Ongoing monitoring and “remediation work” from 2013 through 2020 cost $5.8 million and improved water quality from “bad” to “moderate.”

   The Avoca River case suggests Congress wasn’t prudent when it passed Rep. Stauber’s resolution Jan. 21 to overturn the Biden administration’s 20-year mining moratorium for 225,000 acres of the Superior National Forest. The past six weeks, conservation organizations like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters have lobbied the U.S. Senate to reject Stauber’s resolution.

   Joining that opposition are four Republican descendants of Theodore Roosevelt, the man who created the Superior National Forest in 1909 during his presidency. Three of TR’s great-grandsons and one great-great-grandson said they’re appalled by their party’s efforts to expose northeastern Minnesota to sulfide mining.

   In their letter to GOP senators, the Roosevelts implored them to embody TR’s three pillars of life: leadership, conservation and citizenship. They wrote: “It’s one thing for politicians to say they believe in these three pillars, and it’s quite another thing to act that way.”