The Trump administration’s Bureau of Land Management announced in mid-September it plans to again permit oil and gas drilling in federal wilderness areas that the Biden administration put off limits. It’s a change consistent with the White House “drill, baby, drill” mantra — and one that’s not illogical in a world reliant on Vladimir Putin’s fossil fuels. The Biden White House may well have overreached in its elusive quest for a carbon-free future.

But let’s hope that the Bureau of Land Management takes a close look at specific areas before greenlighting development. The economics of wilderness preservation can prove more complex, on close inspection, than one just based on suspicion of environmentalism as a code word for obstruction.

That’s this writer’s conclusion after three days on the lakes and rivers of the nation’s largest single wilderness area, the Boundary Waters on the Minnesota-Ontario border. Not that this late-summer trip was planned with public policy analysis in mind.

The plan was to put politics and policy behind. There would seem to be no better way than a canoe trip in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness area, 1.1 million acres of 1,100 lakes, 200 campsites and rivers teeming with wild rice — off grid. No checking one’s phone. Primitive camping........

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