GARDNERVILLE, Nevada — A botanist carefully runs a brush over the pollen of endangered wildflowers as she attempts to mimic nature in a small greenhouse in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada.
It’s part of a large-scale experiment by a lithium mining company to protect an extremely rare desert plant from extinction. It’s a years-long battle that pits two green agendas against each other: clean energy versus native biodiversity.
Australia’s Ioneer says the mine it wants to dig in the Nevada desert would more than quadruple the US output of lithium needed to accelerate production production of electric vehicles and build the batteries needed for other clean electricity projects.
Conservationists voice their support for world leaders who are trying to tackle climate change by limiting global emissions. But they fiercely oppose the mine because it would dig deep into the only known piece of land in the world where the endangered Tiehm’s buckwheat grows.
So far, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has endorsed the company’s latest strategy, which includes growing and transplanting buckwheat, as a preferred alternative in a draft environmental impact statement, one of the final 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 argue that mining would drive the plant out of its current range and that attempts to relocate greenhouse-grown specimens to reclaimed mining areas are unproven.
They say it could take centuries to determine whether researchers have succeeded in finding the right balance of pollinators, climate, soil conditions and minerals to make propagated Tiehm’s buckwheat permanently viable in the wild.
“This latest plan for the Rhyolite Ridge Mine is simply a form of extinction greenwashing,” said Patrick Donnelly, director of the Great Basin for the Center for Biological Diversity. He suggested that proponents are being misleading about how environmentally friendly the plan is.
“Habitat destruction is guaranteed, but mitigation success is questionable at best,” he said, promising legal action if the mine is approved.
Ioneer has been exploring the mineral deposit at Rhyolite Ridge since 2016.
The scientist after whom the plant is named, Arnold Tiehm, first proposed in 1994 the site was declared a special botanical area and made off-limits to mining. But it took until 2022 for conservationists to successfully its endangered status along of a designation of critical habitat for the plant.
The Biden administration has made it clear with financing commitments and approve permits for similar projects it plans strengthen the country’s battery supply chainelectrify the transportation sector and reduce dependence on fossil fuels and foreign raw materials.
The mine is expected to produce enough lithium carbonate annually over its 26-year lifespan to make 370,000 electric vehicle batteries per year. While experts work to perfect alternative batteries that do not require lithiumdemand for the material is expected to remain high in the near future.
“Ioneer is confident we can quadruple the country’s lithium supply while protecting Tiehm’s buckwheat,” said Chad Yeftich, the company’s vice chairman.
There are nearly 25,000 of these plants growing wild on federal land near the mine site along the Nevada-California border. They were only discovered 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 tends about 350 potted specimens in a greenhouse free of bees, beetles and other creatures that normally pollinate buckwheat in the wild.
“Because this is an enclosed space, I use the brush 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.
The delicate root systems make propagating the plants a challenge, and an earlier study yielded disappointing results. But company officials say they have made progress and that their efforts may be the best way to ensure the long-term survival of the buckwheat, which they say was already shaky even before the mining plans.
Unlike most mining operations, Ioneer plans to backfill portions of the ground and restore the habitat as the mine extends laterally along what it calls an unusually horizontal lithium seam.
“As you dig up other areas, you can use the material or waste material that you dig up to backfill the pit,” creating places to grow buckwheat, Bernard Rowe, CEO of Ioneer, said in a recent interview.
Rowe argues that the plant will not survive unless so much money is put into the propagation and mitigation plan.
“Somebody has to take the lead. It costs money to come up with a protection plan,” said Rowe, who noted that voluntary efforts by the company have cost about $2 million in recent years.
The company plans to invest approximately $1 million per year to ensure the long-term viability of the species.
Ioneer cites the transplant of a member of the rose family, Robbins’ Cinquefoil, in New Hampshire, which led to the plant being removed from the endangered species list in 2002. But critics say not enough time has passed to know whether that recovery effort will succeed.
Conservationists say they support lithium mining — but not in sensitive places. Dozens of U.S. university scientists 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 a fifth of designated critical habitat.
They said the 290-metre-deep open-pit mine – along with 485 hectares of waste rock dumps, a sulphuric acid processing plant and associated facilities – would be within tens to hundreds of metres (less than 100 metres) of the bulk of the wild population.
Although transplanting of species has been used sparingly to help those species that are no longer viable in the wildThe Center for Biological Diversity points out that doing this to an otherwise self-sustaining species would be illegal under the Endangered Species Act.
Naomi Fraga, director of the conservation department at the California Botanic Garden in Claremont, California, is one of the mine’s leading opponents and a co-signer of the bill. the petition to put buckwheat on the list as endangered. In her botanical garden’s nursery, she has often been able to grow different types of plants in non-native soil, she said.
“But that’s a long way from replanting those plants in the wild. It would be absurd to think that we can take those potted plants and move them wherever we want,” she said.
Fraga believes that for the flowers and the mine to truly coexist, there needs to be a buffer three times larger than what is already designated as critical habitat. She said moving the mine far enough away from the critical habitat would solve the biggest threat to Tiehm’s buckwheat.
“You can’t solve such an impact through research and technology,” she said.
Rowe said the mine has already been scaled to remove roads, storage areas and related infrastructure from key habitats.
“The only thing we have left is the one thing we can’t move, and that’s the down payment itself,” he said.