Sage and Sand: Tooth and Nail
Back in action and fighting hard against the forces of the greed machine
Greetings and Happy New Year to all. I took a break for a few months, not just from this newsletter but from everything. And while it wasn’t all that I’d hoped, sometimes you’ve just got to roll with what life throws at you. And now I’m back in the saddle, mounted up with the posse and ready to defend biodiversity and precious water across these desert lands.
The greed machine didn’t take a break while I was out. Mining companies continue their advance on our beloved desert oases. Developers continue to slapdash parking lots and shopping malls onto undisturbed desert. The military continues its attempts to seize our public lands. And the world turns.
But as I started the New Year wandering through the backcountry of my Death Valley backyard, surrounded by unseasonable wildflowers, protected forever due to the foresight and hard work of a generation of conservationists before us, I’m heartened. We can’t know the ramifications of these fights, how they will echo over time. Our wins, our losses. All we can do is give it everything we’ve got and hope it’s good enough and that we can go to bed at night resting easy that we did everything we could. “Though much has been lost, much remains,” said Abbey; and I’m determined to fight tooth and nail for what remains in 2024. Onward.
I’ll Chain Myself to a Pupfish If Necessary
The saga of proposed lithium mining at Ash Meadows continues. You will recall last summer when a kerfuffle emerged as Canadian mining company Rover proposed a lithium mining exploration project on the border of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Nye County, Nevada. Predictably, we sued after BLM approved the project. And eventually, after we filed a preliminary injunction after it became crystal clear that we would win our lawsuit and the public was up in arms about the proposed project, BLM withdrew their authorization. It was a great victory, but a temporary one. BLM instructed Rover to come back with a Plan of Operations (POO) which would then be evaluated under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
We’d hoped Rover would go away, but they did not. Instead, they went ahead and submitted a POO in December which they announced in a press release. More on that in a minute.
Another thing happened in December. We had kept our lawsuit open even after BLM withdrew authorization for the project, because there were other pertinent legal issues that remained relevant that we didn’t want to back off from. However, in the end, it became clear that the priority had to be pushing back on Rover, not on esoteric legal points with BLM. So we decided to settle our lawsuit. In exchange for our settlement, BLM agreed to provide notice and copies of any Notice of Intent (NOI) for exploration, or any POOs that were filed, all within 5 miles of Ash Meadows and for the next year. This was a nice little win for us, as normally BLM’s process is extremely opaque and it can be months for us to get ahold of an NOI or POO. Maybe even a lawsuit. So this helps us in our campaign to safeguard Ash Meadows. And also gets that lawsuit off our docket so we can prepare for the inevitable litigation when and if BLM approves Rover’s Plan of Operations (POO).
Speaking of the POO, thanks to our lawsuit settlement, BLM provided us with a copy of the POO shortly after Rover filed it. You can see it here [PDF]. Rover has changed things up from their initial plan, in a flimsy attempt to avoid the criticism they had previously received. It won’t work. They’ve moved their boreholes slightly further away from Ash Meadows, like we’re talking a matter of feet, not miles. They’ve also added some monitoring wells. They claim they’ll stop drilling as soon as they hit groundwater, which of course does not address the possibility of perturbations to the aquifer simply by the act of punching through to groundwater. In short, it’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and we’re not buying it and nobody else is either.
As evidence of this, there was action on the local political front. In early January, the Nye County Commission sent a letter to BLM and Nevada’s Senators, asking them to oppose any lithium mining adjacent to Ash Meadows and to push for a mineral withdrawal of the area surrounding the Refuge, and any areas that contribute groundwater flow to the Refuge. You can read the letter here [PDF].
This is a truly remarkable development – the Nye County Commission is hardly known as a bastion of environmental conservation. The letter extols the virtues of Ash Meadows and the remarkable biodiversity there and then talks about defending groundwater resources against the abuses of mining. It’s mind boggling that this came from the Nye County Commission, but it’s a damn good start.
Notable too is what the Nye County Commission was asking for – not just a stop to the Rover project but a mineral withdrawal for the area surrounding Ash Meadows. An administrative mineral withdrawal removes an area from mineral entry for 20 years, meaning no new mining claims. It’s something the Secretary of Interior can do with a stroke of a pen. While it would not put an end to the Rover project – they already have valid existing mining claims – it would help prevent future Rovers, future catastrophes that we may have to fend off to defend Ash Meadows. And, in rendering a decision on the Rover project, BLM would certainly have to note the intent of the administration to prevent mining in such a sensitive place. In other words, this would be a damn good proactive action to defend Ash Meadows. We need more tools than just litigation.
Nye County’s not the first ones to say that significant industrial development which could affect groundwater is inappropriate in close relation to Ash Meadows. While I was out, BLM released a set of prioritizations for solar projects in the Amargosa Desert area. Several of the projects closest to Ash Meadows received a low priority designation, meaning the applications are unlikely to move forward. There were numerous reasons these applications were given low priority, but one was due to proximity to Ash Meadows. “Nearly all of the project area is within a drainage basin that includes Ash Meadows, and development of a project in the drainage basin is likely to have direct and indirect impacts on resources values within Ash Meadows.” Remarkable how far we’ve come when now, BLM is proactively taking steps to exclude these projects when they might impact the Amargosa River. You can read one of these low priority determinations here [PDF].
While this newsletter may often chronicle doom and gloom, there’s reason for hope here in the Amargosa. We still can push back and save our beloved River and Ash Meadows, with unlikely allies, with attorneys at the ready, with a potential political solution on the horizon. And if not, then there’s a whole slew of people ready to join me in chaining ourselves to pupfish to stop the bulldozers. 2024 will be a year like no other on the Amargosa. Let’s get it.
Read more: Nevada Current on lawsuit settlement; Nevada Current on Nye County Commission action; Amargosa Conservancy blog on Nye County; Amargosa Conservancy blog on the Fight to Save Ash Meadows.
Another Day, Another Endangered Flower
We started off the New Year right with an Endangered Species Act petition for the Carson Valley monkeyflower (Erythranthe carsonensis), a rare plant that grows in Washoe, Eagle, and Carson Valleys spanning Washoe County, Carson City, Douglas County, and a small sliver of Alpine County, California.
The Carson Valley monkeyflower is a small, annual herb that grows just an inch or two tall, with beautiful five lobed yellow flowers with a distinctive red dot on the tongue. It grows is sandy sagebrush flats and gentle slopes on the benches and hills surrounding Carson City and Douglas County. It has 16 populations each with a number of occurrences.
But it has lost habitat rapidly in recent years. The explosive growth of Carson City and northern Douglas County has eaten up important habitat for the plant. You know the Target and Trader Joe’s on 395 in south Carson City? That was monkeyflower habitat. Ditto the new Highway 580 and the new tribal lumber mill. A 2018 report by the Nevada Division of Natural Heritage [PDF] estimates that 42% of its suitable habitat has already been lost – and that was 6 years ago. The habitat loss has continued unabated since then.
The Carson Valley monkeyflower faces a variety of other threats. It lives on the wildland-urban interface (WUI) and so many of the threats are characteristic of those zones: off-highway vehicle (OHV) use, trash dumping, dispersed camping, recreational trails. Invasive species are a real problem, especially grasses; both for crowding out the actual monkeyflowers but also for how they alter the fire regime and potentially increase the frequency and severity of wildfires in these habitats. Trampling by feral horses and cattle is a problem. And finally, climate change hangs over this plant like all species, since it is adapted to cold and snowy winters leading to warm and moist springs. Things are changing – can the Carson Valley monkeyflower adapt?
Nobody has taken any specific measures to conserve the Carson Valley monkeyflower. Hell, the Forest Service just sold off a tract of occupied monkeyflower habitat on public lands so it could be turned into parking lots and access roads. Carson City built a damn frisbee golf course on monkeyflower habitat. There was a large vegetation treatment project that trashed monkeyflower habitat near the state line. In short, nobody seems to give a damn about the Carson Valley monkeyflower.
And that’s where the Endangered Species Act comes in. When nobody gives a damn, when a species is spiraling toward endangerment or extinction due to utter neglect by regulation or regulators, when the fate of an organism to die from a thousand cuts seems inevitable – the Endangered Species Act is our last, best chance to stop extinction.
So we had no choice but to do an Endangered Species Act petition. You can read it here [PDF]. This kicks off a multi-year bureaucratic process. There will probably be lawsuits to move it along. Average time to listing is roughly 11 years after a petition, so we are in it for the long haul with this pretty little flower. That’s fine by me. I’m in it for the long haul too. Hang in there, little monkeyflower. Help is on the way.
Read more: The Nevada Independent, Nevada Appeal, E&E News.
If Only Threats Were the Only Thing the Military Was Emitting
One of the great environmental campaigns of the last decade in Nevada was the fight against the US Air Force’s attempt to take over a large part of Desert National Wildlife Refuge, a successful fight which, after a multiyear struggle, saw the Air Force walk away from the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with a big heap of nothing.
We all knew they’d be back, but this time instead of taking another bite at the apple, they tried for just a little nibble. One of the desired training capabilities they’d used to justify their proposed expansion was that they needed to deploy threat simulation signal emitters, which are basically radio towers which emit signals that training pilots will receive as threats which will aid in the realism of their training. These signal emitters, or radio towers, are about the size of a semi truck and require about half an acre for a pad. They are an intrusion into remote and undisturbed country, but a relatively minor one.
Rep. Mark Amodei (NV-02) introduced legislation earlier this year to allow the Air Force to construct 15 signal emitters in the area of Desert National Wildlife Refuge that has shared jurisdiction between the Air Force and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. This area, around three quarters of a million acres, is not open to the public but provides wild and untrammeled habitat for a large suite of desert species including the iconic bighorn sheep. Just because the area isn’t open to the public doesn’t make it any less important for desert wildlife.
However, the ask was relatively modest. And advocates for protecting the Refuge saw an opportunity. Could the Air Force get what they wanted, while we could protect the public part of the Refuge forever as Wilderness? Senator Cortez Masto thought so, and introduced legislation to that effect, designating almost 700,000 acres of the Refuge as Wilderness in exchange for the military’s signal emitters. I wrote an op-ed in The Indy supporting this proposal. Look at me, saying nice things about Nevada’s senior Senator!
Alas, the good guys did not win the day. Perhaps due to the relatively minor nature of the ask; perhaps due to Amodei’s being on the ball and getting his bill introduced early while the Senator’s retort came very late in the NDAA game; perhaps because it just wasn’t a priority for the Dems; perhaps because that radical Center for Biological Diversity supported it (hah!); the Wilderness proposal failed and the NDAA moved forward with only Amodei’s bill included.
The military gets its signal emitters, permanently altering the character of the wild and undisturbed shared management area of the Desert Refuge. These radio towers will be along the existing road system, so that is comfort we can take. But meanwhile, the public part of the Refuge remains open, exposed, has no protection from future attempted incursions by the US Air Force. We beat them back in 2020. We’ll do it again when they return. While we may have had a setback on the signal emitters, we will never back down from protecting the Desert Refuge.
Read more: The Nevada Independent on CCM’s bill; NV Indy op-ed from yours truly; The Indy’s DC Download with a report on the final NDAA.
“And We Don’t Want Your Stinkin’ Solar Panels, Neither”
The Nye County Commissioners didn’t just ask for a mineral withdrawal for the Ash Meadows area in their early January meeting. They also sent a letter to Clark County asking them to deny or re-site proposed solar projects in Pahrump Valley due to concerns about water. Pahrump Valley, which is about four times the size of the actual town of Pahrump, is mostly within Clark County – and that’s where the focus of the solar developers has been. One project, Yellow Pine Solar, has already gone in, and there are a half dozen more proposed projects. Each of them, of course, requiring water for construction and a lesser amount of water for operations.
Pahrump Valley is in a critical overappropriation situation, with 3 times more water rights on the books than the perennial yield of the basin, in addition to over 11,000 domestic wells, each entitled to two acre-feet per year, unmetered. Water isn’t just a topic of interest in Pahrump, it’s THE issue, as wells are falling across the valley at times 1-2 feet per year. So solar developers coming in and using thousands of acre-feet of water so they can put solar projects in Clark County doesn’t sit well with the Nye County Commission. You can read their letter here [PDF].
This is most interesting because it’s the first time that I’m aware of that concerns have been raised in an official manner about the water consumption of utility-scale solar. A good size solar project requires about a thousand acre-feet for dust suppression and other purposes during construction. And while a thousand acre-feet doesn’t seem like much, when you start looking at a half dozen or a dozen projects going in at once, then we really have to ask the question: where’s all that water going to come from?
I’m sure this will be dismissed by the cognoscenti as those backwards Nye County hayseeds trying to stop the inevitable march of progress. But in fact, they raise really important and nuanced points in the concerns they’re bringing forward. And ultimately, if big city folks want to plop down hundreds of thousands of acres of mirrors in the middle of the desert, they’re going to have to get some level of acceptance from the people who live there. There are some places that are just too sensitive for renewable energy—lots of places, it turns out. Pahrump Valley is probably one of those place. Good on the Nye County Commission for standing their ground.
Read more: Nevada Current, Pahrump Valley Times.
The Center In the News
A bunch of articles came out over the past few months featuring the Center’s Great Basin program work or commentary that I’ll direct your attention toward.
Henry Carnell of Mother Jones wrote a big article about the Dixie Valley toad and Dixie Meadows geothermal project and its implications for the tension between renewable energy and biodiversity preservation. This issue remains at a standstill but there’s some interesting quotes from Ormat about the bigger implications of this tiny toad.
Desert Companion ran a lengthy piece assessing the current conservation status of the Mojave desert tortoise. I was able to provide brief commentary and worked with the author quite a bit on this one. This is worth your time to read for a real up to the minute assessment of the tortoise, without the agency hype. As you can see, things are dire.
Chris Flavelle of the New York Times wrote a sprawling piece about dwindling groundwater resources in an era of mass extraction and climate change, which features a section on gold mining in Nevada and a discussion about AB387, our legislation to reform groundwater management from last year.
Inside Climate News journalist Wyatt Miskow took what is perhaps the most thorough look we’ve seen yet at the White Pine Pumped Storage project and the many conflicts the project presents to communities and the environment. I’m so glad to be working to defend this special landscape from energy sprawl. Check out the new campaign website: Step Up For Steptoe Valley.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has an article examining the length of time and difficulty of obtaining protections for endangered species in an era of runaway climate change, in which I provide commentary on the effectiveness and limitations of the Endangered Species Act.
Sierra Magazine has an article on assisted migration in which I provide a cautionary tale about trying to move species out of the way of development. My colleague Elise Bennett also is quoted discussing places where assisted migration might be more appropriate.
Chris Ketcham wrote a New York Times op-ed about Cliven Bundy, in which I offer to take readers out there “tomorrow” to see Bundy’s cows wandering around Gold Butte National Monument.
Other Things That Caught My Eye Recently
The Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial page hasn’t lost its gusto for the Clark County lands bill.
Strangely enough while 2023 was the hottest year globally in recorded history, the northern Mojave Desert actually was below average for mean temperature (69.3 observed vs. average 70.1), maximum high temperature (79.4 observed vs. average 80.5), and minimum low temperature (59.1 observed vs. 59.6 average). This doesn’t mean climate change has skipped us, not by a long shot. Doesn’t anyone remember that insane heat wave last July?? But climate change is not linear and does not equally affect everywhere all the time. Interesting tidbits via the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The Land Desk’s Jonathan Thompson wrote a detailed piece for the Durango Telegraph on the lithium situation in the four corners region, specifically mining company Anson’s push to extract lithium brines from beneath the Colorado River among other places. This article really sets the scene and is useful for folks following lithium elsewhere to see how things are faring in southeast Utah.
1.5°C is a fairy tale and we all know it; now scientists are saying we’re likely to blow past it this year. If you haven’t checked out the latest IPCC report, just know that 1.5°C is catastrophic while 2°C is likely civilization-ending. Gulp.
Another day, another lithium miner claiming to be sitting on one of the world’s largest lithium deposits. This time it’s American Battery Technology Company with their Tonopah Flats project. And of course the news dutifully reports this as if it’s news and not hype. It’s hard to tell whether the current lithium industry is more like a guy trying to sell you real estate in Florida or a guy on the street opening up his trench coat to show you what’s for sale inside. Either way, the chaff outweighs the wheat by a factor of 100:1.
Lithium is coming to southeast Arizona, in the form of a potential lithium brine project at Wilcox Playa in Sulphur Springs Valley in Cochise County. MAX Power Mining Corp is developing a brine project in a basin that is already severely overappropriated with dramatically declining groundwater levels which are supporting extensive agricultural operations. How will the two get along? Given that it’s Arizona, which might as well be the Wild Wild West for groundwater, outside of the Active Management Areas (AMAs), we can expect sparks to fly.
Ash Meadows has gotten a lot of hype lately over our fight to save it from lithium mining, but what about the other conservation issues there? Sierra Magazine has an article about efforts to eradicate non-native fish from the springs at our beloved Refuge.
This is a very compelling read in the Arizona Republic by Joan Meiners looking at the intersection of climate and affordable housing for farmworkers in Yuma. Our insatiable need for leafy green vegetables in winter, combined with our country’s shameful treatment of immigrants, has led to a crisis in the salad bowl of southern Arizona.
Writer Meg Bernhard has wrapped up her residency with Desert Companion with a lovely piece about how Las Vegas will weather the climate future it faces. I have really enjoyed reading Meg’s work the past year in DC, and I look forward to seeing what’s next with her.
Keep on down that long and dusty trail,
-Patrick
I so admire what you and your friends are doing down there in the Amargosa country. Up here, similar battles with BLM, DoD, lithium mining. etc. etc. The same old economics vs. preservation battles going on throughout the public land western drylands. Keep the faith!
It's great to see you posting again Patrick. You are an excellent writer and I love your mix of passion and pragmatism on environmental issues. The community needs more folks like yourself.