Name: America's wilderness is for sale
Uploaded: 2020-08-18T18:15:12.000Z
Duration: 10 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

This water is so clean, you can drink it.

Adverbs of manner

I've been drinking out of this river for probably fifty years.

That's because the water here comes from one of the most

We couldn't even fly our drone past this point.

These are the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota's Superior National Forest.

Thousands of pristine lakes like this one.

Hundreds of thousands of people come to see it every year.

The Boundary Waters is just outside one of the largest

the Trump administration has opened up more than 13 million acres

that's more than any previous administration,

including a part of Superior National Forest,

Copper, the mineral underneath the forest, is the

wiring in our phones, the pipes in our walls.

And we also need it for electric car batteries,

and there aren't that many places in the world to get it.

All this has renewed a really old and complicated question:

when is it worth risking the life above ground

The US has more than 600 million acres of national parks,

They are the brainchild of President Theodore Roosevelt.

He worried that the reckless speed logging, blast rock mining, and oil drilling that

fueled the Industrial Revolution could ruin the country's beauty and resources

So he created 150 national forests and parks, 18 national

I mean, get up on a high mountain somewhere and

remember that somebody saved that so that you could have that experience and

We call them drinking water lakes, because

you can dip your cup right out the side of your canoe and drink straight from

the lakes without even treating them or anything.

Jason owns a business that outfits visitors for canoe trips in the

They come here because what we have is so special and it's so

unique you just can't you can't have this sort of an experience anyplace else

in the world. To have, you know, a million acres totally undeveloped.

The recreation and tourism industry here is big.

The problem is, that's not enough to support the entire region.

Seasonal recreation workers typically make about twenty-five thousand dollars a year.

That's less than the state's average income.

You're not going to be able to raise a family on $25,000 a year.

You're not even going to be able to buy a house.

well over a hundred years, and so it has a big significance.

There are lot of second, third, fourth, generation miners that have always worked in the

mine or their family has worked in the mine.

mine near the Boundary Waters, Twin Metals, has said they'll pay about $90,000

a year, which is well over the state's average income.

But copper mining is also risky in ways that iron mining wasn't.

For the last two years, the Twin Metals company has been

little blocks that you're seeing in here really establish how deep we are below

The copper is locked inside this shiny part here.

To get it out, you have to crush up the rock to a powder-like consistency

copper only makes up about 1% of the sample, which means 99% of it is waste.

The crushed up rock is submerged in a solution that floats the copper to the top.

It's eventually what becomes wires, pipes, and everything else.

And the waste rock sinks. That's the risky part.

It contains toxic elements like arsenic, lead, and mercury,

which were previously trapped inside the rock.

And usually, when mining companies produce toxic waste,

It may be the worst environmental disaster

3 million gallon toxic stew of heavy metals poured downstream.

and the question that everyone here is just stunned by is how this could ever

And even when there isn't one of these huge,

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