The Conservation Alliance harnesses the power of businesses from a wide range of industries to protect outdoor spaces and wild places. We drive a proactive agenda to protect nature utilizing strategic advocacy and grantmaking, leveraging business influence, and building deep partnerships with grassroots organizations and local communities to collectively deliver high impact conservation outcomes, protecting North America’s outdoor places and wild spaces for everyone. Since 1989, we’ve helped protect over 124 million acres and 4,964 river miles, remove or halt 43 dams, purchase 22 climbing areas, and designate five marine reserves and one national marine sanctuary.
In 2025 and 2026, we are investing additional advocacy resources in six priority campaigns. We have chosen these campaigns utilizing a variety of lenses, including where our member base is strong, how much we have previously invested in these campaigns, and the likelihood that our business voice can successfully move the needle and help our on-the-ground partners meet their goals. Many of these priority campaigns may also have a bipartisan opportunity to retain or gain protections. We announce our Advocacy Priority Campaigns once a year. In collaboration with our grantees, we work to identify land and water conservation opportunities that are urgent, vital, and need national attention.
Protecting the Boundary Waters
What’s at stake?
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in northeastern Minnesota is the most visited wilderness area in the United States, and is part of a 4.3-million-acre system of parks and wild public lands that stretches across the Canadian border. The Boundary Waters is home to 1,100 lakes, 237.5 miles of hiking trails, and 2,000 designated campsites. Each year, thousands of people go to the Boundary Waters to camp, fish, paddle, dogsled, hunt, and hike. This Wilderness supports 4,500 jobs and a $16 billion economy. The Boundary Waters is also within the 1854 Treaty Area where the Bois Forte, Fond du Lac, and Grand Portage Bands of Chippewa maintain hunting, fishing, and gathering rights. The region is critical habitat for Canada Lynx, Loons, wolves, moose, and a variety of bats, fish, and birds. However, the Boundary Waters has faced persistent threats with proposals for sulfide-ore copper mining on neighboring land, which would cause irreversible harm to water quality, wildlife, public health, and the sustainable outdoor recreation-based economy.
Recognizing the crucial environmental and economic importance of a protected Boundary Waters and surrounding region, the Biden Administration announced it had canceled the two mining leases for a proposed sulfide-ore copper mine next to the Boundary Waters in 2022. In January 2023, the Biden Administration went further and issued a Public Land Order protecting the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Voyageurs National Park, and nearby treaty areas from sulfide-ore copper mining for 20 years. This mineral withdrawal banned toxic mining on 225,504 acres of Superior National Forest land in the watershed of the BWCAW and upstream of the Wilderness.
With new leadership in 2025 in Washington, D.C., the Boundary Waters are once again in the spotlight. The region has been repeatedly named as a landscape where proponents for mining hope to remove the mineral withdrawal. In addition, there are legislative efforts to end the mining ban in the watershed, force an issuance of leases to the multinational mining company targeting the Boundary Waters, and remove environmental review processes.
Should the area on the edge of the Boundary Waters be open to mining, there will be irreversible changes to the area, it will devastate the Wilderness ecosystems, pristine waters, and wildlife, and have a sizable impact on the economies nearby that rely on recreation and tourism. Minnesota’s $13.5 billion outdoor recreation economy will undoubtedly be impacted should the ban be removed.
What’s the solution?
The coalition to Save The Boundary Waters has decades of experience under their belt working to safeguard this iconic landscape, protect the 20-year mineral withdrawal, oppose damaging legislation, and support congressional efforts to permanently protect the area. TCA and its members will join the campaign by galvanizing the national business community to demonstrate support for permanent protections and communicate the sizable economic value of retaining clean waters in the Boundary Waters. TCA will support efforts to protect the mineral withdrawal, oppose legislative efforts to open the region to mining, and support common sense legislation that provides permanent protection to this important landscape.