Reporter talks environmental, health impacts of mining efforts near Boundary Waters

WTIP spoke to Benji Jones, Senior Correspondent at Vox Media, about what environmental and health experts are saying about the proposed Twin Metals mining project in the Boundary Waters Watershed.

Jones’ article “Mining these metals could be a boon for the climate — but there’s one big catch,” is currently available at vox.com.

Below is an excerpt of the interview:

WTIP: Benji Jones is a senior correspondent for Vox. He wrote a piece called “Mining these metals could be a boon for the climate — but there’s one big catch.” How are you today, Benji?

Jones: I’m good. How about you?

WTIP: I’m doing well. I want to know about the big catch, but let’s just start with how this story got on your radar.

Jones: Yeah, I’m often looking for stories that play around with various tensions in the environmental movement and the fight for cleaner air, water protection for biodiversity and what really struck me about this story is that it kind of puts this tension between the fight against climate change and the conservation of biodiversity a little bit at odds with each other.  And that was really interesting to me, because we’re seeing this play out more and more across the country as we’re trying to build more clean energy technologies as a way to address climate change.

And then it first got on my radar when I saw that Congress, and then President Trump had overturned this 20 year — essentially a ban on mining in the Boundary Waters, which you know about. I think President Trump signed it in April, so I saw that news, and I was like, “Hmm, this seems like something that would be worth digging into.” Especially given that we are likely going to see the kind of push for more mines across the country, across the world. That does raise questions about what that means for wildlife and for some of the most pristine places in the US and elsewhere.

WTIP: So once it grabbed your attention, Who did you speak to, and what were you hoping to learn from them?

Jones: So this was a bit of a complicated one, as far as stories go, because there are so many different folks with strong opinions about this, and so I wanted to kind of hear from as many people as I could. I wanted to talk with the company that’s behind this mine: Twin Metals. I wanted to talk to some of the politicians, so Stauber, I wanted to talk to Falconer, and then also, of course, as many scientists as I could get a hold of quickly, who could kind of lay out what the actual risks are here. And then also some of the environmental advocates. The Save the Boundary Waters campaign, who have been pushing pretty hard against the development of this mine.

So I really wanted to hear from as many folks as I could to try to tell a complete and fair story, because there is, yeah, this is not an easy story to tell. Because with stories about mines, often it’s about trade-offs, and it can be difficult to capture the nuance of those trade-offs.

WTIP:  I found that as I’ve interviewed people, and then tried to condense that into talking with friends or relatives about the coverage, it’s really hard to describe the story without suddenly taking over the conversation for 15 minutes to be like, “Well, this person would say this and this person would say that.” And you do get a lot of conflicting narratives based, and you’re trying to contextualize all of them as well.

Jones: Yeah, and I will just say, like, just something as simple as, like, “Okay, mining is bad.” I understand the root of that point, because there’s lots of examples of where mining has been incredibly destructive. I mean, it is one of the most destructive industries out there, but there is a lot of like asterisks when it comes to explaining. Like what exactly is bad? Is this particular mining technique worse? Is it better than what’s been done before? What does better actually mean? Just as soon as you peel one layer down, it becomes much harder to understand and really difficult to explain. Especially if you don’t have like thousands and thousands of words if you’re writing a story about this.

The full conversation with Benji Jones can be found below.

Josh Hinke June 28, 2026