In a land of wild cats and scarce water, a battle over mining heats up
Tucson, ArizonaI’m perched on a ridge in the northern Santa Rita mountains, nearly 30 miles southeast of downtown Tucson. Rounded grassy hills speckled with mesquite rise to oak woodlands and rugged limestone peaks, and I can see for many miles in all directions.
The landscape is beautiful, but what’s most special doesn’t immediately announce itself. I am, for example, walking in the footsteps of the country's rarest wild cats. In the gulch just to my southwest, a jaguar roamed during his three-year stay in the range, and an ocelot was recently spotted bounding through this spot.
To the east, miles in the distance, lays a broad valley, and within it a streak of dark green—the willows and cottonwoods of Cienega Creek, which flows all year. This network of waters, at Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, provides a home to scarce animals including the Gila topminnow, a sparkly-silver, inch-long fish, and Gila chub, which are larger and more rotund. Yellow-billed cuckoos also roost here. These species, all endangered or threatened, thrive in this precious bit of desert water.
Above the valley loom the distant Whetstone mountains—where, until as recently as the 1870s, Apache warriors hid out between raids on ranches in the Cienega Valley; that era of bloodshed ended only when Geronimo and his renegades finally surrendered in 1886, forced onto reservations.
Skirmishes over the land, and way of life, persist. In this landscape, competing factions wage an escalating war over the proposed Rosemont copper mine. About a mile to the northeast, a Canadian mining company called Hudbay Minerals plans to dig a large open pit for extracting copper. Like some other big mines, this project has picked up momentum since Donald Trump was elected president. In March, the Army Corps of Engineers approved Rosemont’s crucial Clean Water Act permit, after initially denying it more than two years prior. The project is “shovel-ready,” Hudbay says—but several ongoing lawsuits may stand in the way, with a cadre of environmentalists, local leaders, and indigenous people in opposition.
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/rosemont-copper-mine-arizona-environmental-impact/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=Science_20190501::rid=594148660
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