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Conservationists sue U.S. to block a controversial lithium mine in Nevada

Conservationists sue U.S. to block a controversial lithium mine in Nevada

They say the lithium mine will drive an endangered desert wildflower to extinction, disrupt groundwater flows, and threaten cultural resources.

BY Associated Press

Conservationists and an advocacy group for Native Americans are suing the U.S. to try to block a Nevada lithium mine they say will drive an endangered desert wildflower to extinction, disrupt groundwater flows, and threaten cultural resources.

The Center for Biological Diversity promised the court battle a week ago when the U.S. Interior Department approved Ioneer Ltd.’s Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron mine at the only place Tiehm’s buckwheat is known to exist in the world, near the California line, halfway between Reno and Las Vegas.

It is the latest in a series of legal fights over projects President Joe Biden’s administration is pushing under his clean energy agenda intended to cut reliance on fossil fuels, in part by increasing the production of lithium to make electric vehicle batteries and solar panels.

The new lawsuit says the Interior Department’s approval of the mine marks a dramatic about-face by U.S wildlife experts who warned nearly two years ago that Tiehm’s buckwheat was “in danger of extinction now” when they listed it as an endangered species in December 2022.

“One cannot save the planet from climate change while simultaneously destroying biodiversity,” said Fermina Stevens, director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project, which joined the center in the lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Reno.

“The use of minerals, whether for EVs or solar panels, does not justify this disregard for Indigenous cultural areas and keystone environmental laws,” said John Hadder, director of the Great Basin Resource Watch, another coplaintiff.

Rita Henderson, spokeswoman for Interior’s Bureau of Land Management in Reno, said Friday the agency had no immediate comment.

Ioneer VP Chad Yeftich said the Australia-based mining company intends to intervene on behalf of the U.S. and “vigorously defend” approval of the project, “which was based on its careful and thorough permitting process.”

“We are confident that the BLM will prevail,” Yeftich said. He added that he doesn’t expect the lawsuit will postpone plans to begin construction next year.

The lawsuit says the mine will harm sites sacred to the Western Shoshone people. That includes Cave Spring, a natural spring less than a mile away described as “a site of intergenerational transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge.”

But it centers on alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act. It details the Fish and Wildlife Service’s departure from the dire picture it painted earlier of threats to the 6-inch-tall wildflower with cream or yellow blooms bordering the open-pit mine Ioneer plans to dig three times as deep as the length of a football field.

The mine’s permit anticipates up to one-fifth of the nearly 1.5 square miles the agency designated as critical habitat surrounding the plants—home to various pollinators important to their survival—would be lost for decades, some permanently.

When proposing protection of the 910 acres of critical habitat, the service said “this unit is essential to the conservation and recovery of Tiehm’s buckwheat.” The agency formalized the designation when it listed the plant in December 2022, dismissing the alternative of less-stringent threatened status.

“We find that a threatened species status is not appropriate because the threats are severe and imminent, and Tiehm’s buckwheat is in danger of extinction now, as opposed to likely to become endangered in the future,” the agency concluded.

The lawsuit also discloses for the first time that the plant’s population, numbering fewer than 30,000 in the government’s latest estimates, has suffered additional losses since August that were not considered in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s biological opinion.

The damage is similar to what the bureau concluded was caused by rodents eating the plants in a 2020 incident that reduced the population as much as 60%, the lawsuit says.

The Fish and Wildlife Service said in its August biological opinion that while the project “will result in the long-term disturbance (approximately 23 years) of 146 acres (59 hectares) of the plant community . . . and the permanent loss of 45 acres (18 hectares), we do not expect the adverse effects to appreciably diminish the value of critical habitat as a whole.”

—By Scott Sonner, Associated Press

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Environment

Conservationists are skeptical of a company growing endangered Tiehm’s buckwheat to help it survive mining effects

Conservationists are skeptical of a company growing endangered Tiehm’s buckwheat to help it survive mining effects

Conservationists contend that mining would eradicate the plant from its current habitat and that the efforts to transplant the greenhouse-grown specimens to reclaimed mined areas are unproven.

BY Associated Press

A botanist gently strokes the pollen of endangered wildflowers with a paintbrush as she tries to reenact nature inside a small greenhouse in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada.

It’s part of a lithium mining company‘s grand experiment intended to help keep an extremely rare desert plant from going extinct in a yearslong battle that has set one green agenda against another: clean energy versus native biodiversity.

Australia-based Ioneer says the mine it wants to dig in the Nevada desert would more than quadruple U.S. production of lithium needed to speed production of electric vehicles and build the batteries needed for other clean electricity projects.

Conservationists proclaim their support for world leaders who are trying to tackle climate change by curbing global emissions. But they’re fiercely fighting the mine because it would dig deeper than the length of a football field near the world’s only known patches of land where endangered Tiehm’s buckwheat grows.

So far, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has endorsed the company’s latest strategy, which includes propagating and transplanting the buckwheat, as its preferred alternative in a draft environmental impact statement, one of the last steps toward final approval of the mine. The plan still must be reviewed by the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has raised concerns about earlier versions.

Conservationists contend that mining would eradicate the plant from its current habitat and that the efforts to transplant the greenhouse-grown specimens to reclaimed mined areas are unproven.

It could take centuries, they say, to know if researchers have successfully found the delicate balance of pollinators, climate, soil conditions and minerals to make propagated Tiehm’s buckwheat permanently viable in the wild.

“This latest plan for Rhyolite Ridge Mine is just greenwashing extinction,” said Patrick Donnelly, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Great Basin director, suggesting supporters are being deceptive about how environmentally friendly the plan is.

“The destruction of habitat is guaranteed whereas the success of the mitigation is dubious at best,” he said, pledging legal challenges if the mine is approved.

Ioneer has been exploring the mineral deposit on Rhyolite Ridge since 2016.

The scientist the plant is named after, Arnold Tiehm, first suggested in 1994 the site be declared a special botanical area and made off-limits to mining. But it wasn’t until 2022 that conservationists successfully secured its endangered status along with a designation of critical habitat for the plant.

The Biden administration has made clear with funding commitments and permit approvals for similar projects its intent to strengthen the nation’s battery supply chain, electrify the transportation sector and cut reliance on fossil fuels and foreign supplies of raw materials.

The mine would produce enough lithium carbonate annually over its 26-year life to make 370,000 electric vehicle batteries a year. While experts are working to perfect alternative batteries that don’t require lithium, demand for the material is expected to remain high for the foreseeable future.

“Ioneer is confident in our ability to quadruple the nation’s supply of lithium while protecting Tiehm’s buckwheat,” company Vice President Chad Yeftich said.

There are nearly 25,000 of the plants in the wild on federal land near the mine site along the Nevada border with California. They were discovered only in the mid-1980s and resemble a scrawny dandelion during the few weeks of the year when they bloom.

South of Carson City, Ioneer botanist Florencia Peredo Ovalle cares for about 350 specimens in pots at a greenhouse that lacks the bees, beetles and other creatures that normally pollinate the buckwheat in nature.

“Because this is an enclosed area, I use the brush in order to pollinate the flowers … to move the pollen from the male parts to the female parts,” Ovalle told The Associated Press during a recent tour of the greenhouse.

Delicate root systems make propagating the plants a challenge. A previous study produced disappointing results. But company officials say they’ve made progress, and that their efforts could represent the best way to ensure the buckwheat’s long-term survival, which they argue was tenuous even before the mine plans.

Unlike most mining operations, Ioneer plans to backfill sections of ground and restore habitat as the mining moves laterally along what it says is an unusually horizontal seam of lithium.

“As you’re digging up other areas, you can use the material or waste material that you’re digging up to backfill the pit,” creating spots to grow the buckwheat, Ioneer’s Managing Director Bernard Rowe said during a recent interview.

Rowe maintains that if not for the money they’re pumping into the propagation and mitigation plan, the plant won’t survive.

“Someone’s got to step up to the plate. It costs money to come up with the protection conservation plan,” Rowe said, noting that voluntary efforts by the company have cost about $2 million over the last few years.

The company plans to spend about $1 million a year to ensure the long-term viability of the species.

Ioneer cites the transplanting of a member of the rose family, Robbins’ Cinquefoil, in New Hampshire that helped lead to its removal from the endangered species list in 2002. But critics say not enough time has passed to know if that recovery effort will work.

Conservationists say they support lithium mining — just not in fragile places. Dozens of university scientists from across the U.S. said in a recent letter to federal land managers that they oppose the Ioneer project in its current form, and that it would destroy more than one-fifth of the designated critical habitat.

They said the 960-foot-deep (290-meter-deep) open pit mine — along with 1,200 acres (485 hectares) of waste rock dumps, a sulfuric acid processing plant and ancillary facilities — would come within a few dozen to a few hundred feet (less than 100 meters) of most of the wild population.

Though transplanting species has been used sparingly to help those that are no longer viable in the wild, the Center for Biological Diversity insists that doing so with a species that otherwise would be self-sustaining would be illegal under the Endangered Species Act.

Naomi Fraga, director of conservation for the California Botanic Garden in Claremont, California, is a chief opponent of the mine who co-signed the petition to list the buckwheat as endangered. At her botanical garden’s nursey, they’ve often succeeded in growing different kinds of plants in non-native soils, she said.

“However, that is a far cry from transplanting those plants back into the wild. It would be absurd to think that we could take those potted plants and translocate them wherever we wished,” she said.

Fraga believes that in order for the flowers and the mine to truly coexist, there needs to be a buffer three times larger than what already has been designated as critical habitat. She said moving the mine far enough away from the critical habitat would resolve the greatest threat to Tiehm’s buckwheat.

“You cannot research and engineer your way out of that magnitude of impact,” she said.

Rowe said the mine’s footprint already has been adjusted to remove roads, storage areas and related infrastructure from critical habitat areas.

“The only thing that we left was the one thing that we can’t move, and that’s the deposit itself,” he said.

Eds: This story clarifies that the open pit itself would be near the patches of land where the flower grows.

—Scott Sonner, Associated Press

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Wildlife

Bioacoustics is helping conservationists monitor wildlife, but the tech needs improvement

By Abhishyant Kidangoor

August 18, 2022

Think Sonoma County, and the picturesque valley and vineyards come to mind. But the locale is also home to rich and incredible biodiversity. And Soundscapes to Landscapes, the name of a biodiversity-monitoring initiative in the county, aims to document just that.

Over the past five years, from mid-spring to late summer here in California wine country, the initiative collected a massive amount of sound data by placing acoustic recorders in 1,300 locations around the county. The project, run by Sonoma State University, conservation NGO Point Blue Conservation Science, and several other partners, armed citizen volunteers with recorders, and collaborated with private landowners to amass audio, which was then processed and classified with the help of artificial intelligence technology.

“The idea is either to detect individual species, or to find information that tells you something new about the types of sounds there,” Leonardo Salas, a quantitative ecologist at Point Blue Conservation Science, tells Mongabay in a video interview. “We can characterize entire environments based on that.”

The methodology has been effective in monitoring changes in ecosystems and studying wildlife patterns. Before the 2017 wildfires in California, Soundscapes to Landscapes had placed audio recorders in a park. Upon surveying the data after the fires, the team detected a “preponderance” of lazuli buntings (Passerina amoena), a species of songbird that had never been seen or heard in the park before the fires. Initially, the citizen scientist monitoring the park thought it was an error in the AI models. But later, he deduced that the songbirds preferred burned areas and might have flown in after the fires, helping the team understand how the fires changed the park’s ecosystem.

Audio data have been used for decades to monitor, study, and conserve wildlife. In recent years, bioacoustics has gained prominence as a noninvasive way to study wild animals. It can be used to study entire landscapes and detect species, like Salas’s team does, but also to understand the behavioral and communication patterns of animals.

The ability of audio recorders to gather large amounts of data can make them more efficient than traditional camera-trapping and remote-tracking methodologies. A study, published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution in 2020 found passive acoustic monitoring to be “a powerful tool for species monitoring” that detected wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in Tanzania five times faster than visual techniques. Another study, published in the journal Ecological Indicators in 2019, compared acoustic recorders to camera traps, finding the former’s advantage to be its “superior detection areas, which were 100 to 7,000 times wider than those of camera traps.”

However, larger coverage areas mean larger amounts of data to parse through, making the analysis of sound data labor-intensive. Technological innovations, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, have helped make the process easier. But conservationists say there’s still a long way for the technology to go to make the processing of audio data faster and easier.

 

Salas says the AI models often used by Soundscapes to Landscapes expose these technological gaps. In the past, for example, the models have mistaken the sound of a motorcycle engine for the cooing of a species of dove, and confused the chatter of little girls with the sounds of quails. “There is immense capacity to monitor wildlife using sound data, but the technology is not there yet,” he says. “My concern is [whether] it can happen fast enough so that we can start keeping a record of how the planet is changing.”

Darren Proppe, who has been using audio data for years to study songbirds in Texas, says he’s “skeptical of AI without any human ground truthing.” Human intervention, he says, is necessary not only to spot errors, but also to raise larger questions that automated analysis can’t deduce.

“If I am just looking for the presence or absence of a bird or a mountain lion or an insect, then vocalizations can confirm that,” Proppe, the director of the Wild Basin Creative Research Center at St. Edward’s University in Texas, tells Mongabay in a video interview. “But the bigger question would be, what are you missing? And humans will have to really do some checking to make sure they are not being misguided.”

 

Accessibility to inexpensive real-time monitoring and data transfer is another concern when it comes to handling bioacoustics data.

It’s a problem Daniela Hedwig knows too well. As the director of Cornell University’s Elephant Listening Project, she and her team have for years been listening to and recording the African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) that roam the rain forests of Central Africa. As a keystone species, the elephants play a vital role in maintaining and shaping the structure of the forest. The data collected by the project are passed on to governments, which can use them to identify locations for conservation activities. The project also collects data that help track poaching activities by detecting gunshots in the audio. But the inability to conduct real-time monitoring, combined with inefficiencies in automated detectors, makes the process slow and laborious.

The data are collected from the recorders every four months, following which Hedwig’s team takes almost three weeks to go through and analyze the audio, which can often amount to 8 terabytes—about 1,100 hours of 4K-quality video streamed over Netflix. “The reason is that the detectors are not perfect, and we have to go through each detection, look at it, and decide whether it was actually a gunshot or not,” Hedwig tells Mongabay in a video interview.

 

Conquering these challenges along with the incorporation of real-time monitoring, Hedwig says, will push bioacoustics technology further ahead. Given the immense interest the field has garnered in recent times, she says she’s optimistic.

“Just imagine anti-poaching units sitting in their control room, and they can get information on a poacher in real time and say, ‘Hey, we need to send out people and catch them,’” Hedwig says. “That’s going to be the big game changer.”

This article is republished from Mongabay under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 
 
 
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Animals

Can flora and fauna-friendly beef lend a hand Ranchers And Conservationists Get along?

The American Prairie Reserve is an ambitious and controversial effort to build “america’s Serengeti” in Montana. it is now turning to an not likely spin-off business to get ranchers on board.

June 9, 2015

Fifth-technology Montana rancher Michelle Fox remembers as soon as reading a passage from the journals of Lewis and Clark. The explorers have been describing a spot located close to where her tribal reservation is as of late—the view, back then, was once “black with buffalo,” Fox, a member of the Gros Ventre Tribe, remembers. “I was standing there, and it’s laborious for me to check how it was once,” she says.

in fact, hunters long ago displaced the tens of hundreds of thousands of buffalo that after roamed the great Plains. Now, by means of making a couple of essential modifications to property, Fox feels she is doing her part in an unparalleled effort to carry the buffalo (also referred to as the American bison) again.

Fox’s ranch is near lands owned by means of the American Prairie Reserve (APR), a nonprofit with an formidable imaginative and prescient to construct “the usa’s Serengeti” in north-valuable Montana. The privately financed effort aims to attach and protect 3.5 million acres of grassland where native flora and fauna, together with purebred bison, coyotes, elk, and antelope, can roam—and vacationers can talk over with. When completed, it might be bigger than any national park in the decrease forty eight U.S. states, about roughly the scale of Connecticut.

The project is controversial in the community. It rubs immediately in opposition to the long historical past of pressure between ranchers and conservationists over america’s frontier. in the long-time period, APR plans to raise $500 million and hopes to slowly purchase ranchers’ property in its challenge area to help cobble together the reserve through a mix of private and public lands. no one is compelled to sell, but many in the area consider it at worst a “land grab” by way of outsiders and at perfect but another risk to the way their way of life, according to a Bloomberg piece.

but Fox, whose land adjoins the APR space, isn’t an opponent, and neither are all ranchers. In 2013, APR launched an unlikely spin-off industry, referred to as Wild Sky, geared toward easing tensions: It started promoting beef below a brand known as Wild Sky.

“the frenzy behind Wild Sky was to be proactive about setting up a route for each ranchers and conservationists to get alongside,” says Laura Huggins, Wild Sky’s supervisor of commercial initiatives. “We notion one of the best ways to do this was once thru a monetary reward.”

Wild Sky is working to recruit ranchers, like Fox, to put into effect measures on their ranch so wildlife within the space can cross thru. In change, the ranchers obtain additional funds raised from the sale of wild Sky’s red meat—which can be grass-fed and drug- and hormone-free—in shops across the us of a. because the label expands, the goal is that other profits will help fund the greater American Prairie Reserve initiative, which is at the moment about $seventy one million against its $500 million fundraising goal.

It’s no longer the first attempt at a flora and fauna-friendly beef label that has been tried. greater than ten years ago, the character Conservancy and other environmental groups tried a similar exercise, known as Conservation pork, that did not capture on. Partly, says Huggins, it was once ahead of its time—shoppers didn’t in reality care as so much about where their steak came from again then. however, importantly, they didn’t have the proper partners.

“They have been a bunch of conservationists trying to sell beef, and from what we could inform, they didn’t relatively understand how sophisticated it was,” she says. “The trade didn’t really work.”

Wild Sky is finding out from this situation, hiring “meat heads” from the trade and expanding slowly in keeping with demand. thus far, it’s signed on 4 ranchers to the program, including Fox, and is selling about $70,000 every week in red meat at about 65 meals shops, massive and small, around the nation. the company is now in talks with higher grocery store chains, Huggins says.

In could, Wild Sky struck a deal in an effort to allow it to expand more speedy. Working with Jensen Meat company, a large meat processor based in California, it’s going to provide a new line of pure ground beef that Jensen produces. The package deal will characteristic the American Prairie Reserve logo and doubtlessly the face of wild Sky ranchers like Fox. though the beef usually won’t come from these ranchers, a element of the sale proceeds will go to funding wildlife-pleasant improvements on the ranchers’ lands (at the moment, Wild Sky red meat is sourced from the broader nice Plains area.)

At Fox’s ranch, these enhancements seem quite easy to this point. She’s replaced barbed wire fence with wildlife-friendly fencing, which is easy at the backside so elk, deer, and different animals can slip beneath. She’s gotten her children to prevent capturing at prairie dogs, a typical observe because many ranchers believes the holes they leave are bad for the cows and pastures (although there is a little analysis that shows otherwise). in the end, her goal is to restore the pure hydrology to her lands as smartly, quite than the usage of irrigation.

Fox’s lengthy heritage on the land has made her feel a private stake in APR’s conservation mission, but she was once still at first nervous about becoming a member of Wild Sky. finally, she says, it was a industry choice for her and her family. With the additional money she’s gotten within the final yr, she’s additionally been in a position to beef up her barn, build a greenhouse, and typically assist her domestic live extra self-sufficiently from the land. After she and her husband made a few tweaks to her operation to fulfill Wild Sky beef requirements, their first calf in order to eventually be sold as Wild Sky meat was once born in March.

however will everyone in point of fact feel the same as she? possible now not.

“There’s a lot of misconceptions about APR here in the local region. they think that they come in, and they purchase up these ranchers land, it’s the same as they’re pushing them out. That couldn’t be farther from the truth,” she says. “i attempt to educate individuals about what APR is set…There might be 10 people standing there, but when i can get thru to two of them, that’s two more informed individuals.”

this text used to be up to date to more safely replicate the relationship between APR and Jensen Meat company.

[All Photos: courtesy of American Prairie Reserve]

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