It was back in the 1970s that our outdoor columnist, the late George “Papa Hambone” Vukelich, authored a three-part series on renowned environmentalist and writer Sigurd Olson and his fight to protect the iconic Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness from commercial encroachment.

I was city editor back then, and Vukelich, who had long been drawn to the Boundary Waters’ pristine wilderness, convinced me to send him to interview Olson to chronicle his 50-year crusade to protect it.

He drove to Ely, Minnesota, the gateway to the Boundary Waters’ land and water, with his young daughter Martha in tow (she’s now the wife of Madison’s George Austin) and sat down with Olson, who had acted as a guide to the area for countless visitors. Then he wrote a series, describing Olson’s efforts and explaining why the Boundary Waters are so important.

The series described the incredible natural beauty, the glacial lakes, boreal forests and the environmental importance of the area. A year later, Sig’s efforts were rewarded when President Jimmy Carter declared the Boundary Waters a wilderness protection area, limiting canoeing, hiking and fishing and forbidding mining and other commercial ventures.

The Boundary Waters is located northeast of Duluth. It lies within shouting distance of Lake Superior in northeastern Minnesota and sprawls across the border into Canada. It comprises just over 1 million acres of pristine forests, glacial lakes and streams and is administered by the U.S. Forest Service. It’s now the most visited wilderness in the United States.

Vukelich’s first paragraph, datelined Ely, Minn., read:

“Here in the gateway to the million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area, the American portion of the world-famous Quetico-Superior country, a classic environmental battle is shaping up which will determine, perhaps forever, the future of this unique, wild country, the largest of its kind in all America.”

He went on to detail Sig Olson’s battle against powerful forces that wanted to do everything from build roads through the wilderness, develop it as a “playground” for tourists complete with dams and lodges, and, heaven forbid, mine the copper and nickel under the nearby land that mining corporations have eyed for decades. They believe that there are about 4 billion tons of copper and nickel ore buried there, one of the world’s largest undeveloped mineral deposits.

Alas, those mining and other commercial interests haven’t gone away nearly 50 years after Jimmy Carter’s declaration. The heat has always been on to allow mining in the Boundary Waters watershed, and now that Donald Trump is president with a compliant Congress, the mining interests have doubled down.

It’s not enough to declare climate change a hoax and repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding” — which declared greenhouse gases a threat to public health — and thereby dismanted regulations on vehicle and power plant emissions. Now the protection of national areas set aside for the benefit of future generations are in the crosshairs, too.

The Republican-controlled House has already passed a resolution to eventually open a long-disputed copper mine close to the Boundary Waters. The Senate is expected to go along, and if it does it will surely be signed by Trump, whose goal is to accelerate development of coal, oil, timber and minerals on public lands across the country. Opponents insist the resolution will hamper the government’s ability to protect America’s cleanest waters, forests and wilderness areas.

Ironically, no one is more disturbed by this attack on wilderness areas than the family of the president who is the country’s most celebrated creator and protector of public land: Republican Theodore Roosevelt.

Ted Roosevelt IV says he is pretty sure that his great-grandfather would have been “appalled” by the members of his own party voting to allow mining near the Boundary Waters. He and several relatives wrote to today’s Republican senators, urging them against allowing mining upstream from the Boundary Waters.

As New York Times reporter Maxine Joselow described the letter, it was a remarkable rebuke of the Republican Party’s apparent retreat from the environmental ethos of Theodore Roosevelt, who protected about 230 million acres of public lands during his presidency.

“It’s not just this administration, it’s the GOP collectively that is not as concerned about conservation as it should be,” the 83-year-old Roosevelt said in an interview.

Off the top of his head, according to Joselow, Roosevelt rattled off several conservation efforts by Republican presidents: Ulysses S. Grant established Yellowstone as the first national park; Abraham Lincoln protected Yosemite Valley by giving it to California as the first state park; and, most recently, George W. Bush created a marine national monument in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii.

“I don’t see any Republican leadership on that scale today,” Roosevelt said.

Famed historian Douglas Brinkley, author of the book “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America,” commented, “There’s never been a president with zero interest in protecting the natural world until Donald Trump.”

Even more ironically, it was Teddy Roosevelt, in one of his final acts as president, who established the Superior National Forest, which encompasses 3 million acres in Minnesota and includes the Boundary Waters.

In the last of George Vukelich’s series he quoted Sig Olson’s advice:

“You must understand that in saving the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, in saving any wilderness area, you are saving more than rocks and trees and mountains and lakes and rivers mountains and lakes and rivers.

“What you are really saving is the human spirit. What you are really saving is the human soul.”

The crew that is in charge of the U.S. government today wouldn’t understand that.