Having my research on the Boundary Waters reversal featured in a front page New York Times story ought to have been the highlight of my year. But whatever satisfaction I might have felt when the story ran back in June of 2019, or when some of the documents I obtained were cited in Congressional hearings, has now given way to more deeply felt concerns about the direction things appear to be taking and the inadequacy of my efforts to do anything about it, except, perhaps, to point to more evidence of corruption, undue influence, and administrative malfeasance.

Over the past year, my plans for a documentary film about the mischief I’d begun to uncover were sidetracked, and — who knows — maybe even fatally derailed by a complex paper chase, which at this point involves about a half dozen Freedom of Information Act requests and a pro-se FOIA lawsuit I brought. The detour is now the road. It happens more often than not. Maybe the best I can do, at present, is to keep following the story where it leads and report on what I find along the way.

With the outcome of my records requests and the larger project of which they are a part uncertain, and with other projects also needing my attention, I’ve got plenty to keep me busy. Besides, the frustration of my own plans counts for very little when you consider the bigger picture.

Having obtained a favorable legal opinion from the Department of Interior and put the kibosh on a planned two-year scientific study, the mining company and its government touts are charging ahead. In just the past few weeks, we have seen Twin Metals submit a mine plan to the Bureau of Land Management and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and Republicans have worked together with Treasury, OMB, and the Executive Office of the President to strip language from the 2020 budget that would have funded a new study by the National Academy of Sciences. Representative Betty McCollum has asked the State Department to submit a report on how the US will meet its obligations under Article IV of the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 if sulfide mining in Superior National Forest should proceed; and Voyageur et al. v. US, the most serious legal challenge to the Twin Metals project, is ongoing. But right now the momentum appears to be with those who would refuse science, ignore history, and subvert the law.

In this regard, the momentum around Antofagasta’s Twin Metals project describes what is by now a familiar pattern. Many aspects of this story fit the new mold of our dysfunctional politics. Two of my pending FOIA requests — one to State, the other to Interior — seek documents on the use of the United States embassy in Santiago, Chile as a business backchannel. We don’t know why or to what extent the State Department was involved in advancing the business interests of a Chilean conglomerate. Questions persist about Trump’s first nominee for ambassador to Chile — Andrew Gellert, a longtime business associate of the Kushners — and about the nominee who replaced Gellert after his nomination was quietly withdrawn: Leora Levy, a republican fundraiser and Trump campaign surrogate from Connecticut who donated $25,000 to Trump’s inaugural. The quid pro quo shenanigans revealed by the Ukraine fiasco suggest these foreign policy questions might be worth pursuing. With the State Department telling me that I should not expect any response to my FOIA request until April 2022, we may have to resort to reading the tea leaves of whatever Boundary Waters report the State Department releases in response to Congresswoman McCollum’s request.

We head into the new year with a lot of issues in this case still unresolved, and it’s not clear that resolving them — finding out the truth, or discovering exactly how this particular deal went down — will necessarily have much bearing on how things actually turn out. The destructive forces set in motion are not likely to be stopped or even slowed by some new fact or revelation — though there’s always the chance they might. Power may not now be “immune to truth-tellers”, as Dahlia Lithwick recently wrote, but the people currently in power are certainly impervious to truth, contemptuous of knowledge, and dismissive of evidence. The answer to their epistemological nihilism is not despair, or the fond hope that one day history will vindicate the truth-tellers (and on this point I depart from Lithwick). The answer, instead, is to reclaim and reconstruct power. That is the essential work of the next decade.