RENO, Nev. — Conservationists and a Native American tribe have sued the U.S. for trying to block a lithium mine in Nevada that they say will drive an endangered wild desert flower to extinction, disrupt groundwater flows and threaten cultural resources.
The Center for Biological Diversity promised the lawsuit a week ago when the The US Department of the Interior has approved it Ioneer Ltd.’s Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron mine. in the only place in the world where Tiehm’s buckwheat is known to occur, near the California line halfway between Reno and Las Vegas.
It’s the latest in a series of legal battles over projects President Joe Biden’s administration is pushing clean energy agenda intended to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, in part by increasing lithium production for the production of batteries for electric vehicles and solar panels.
The new lawsuit says the Approval of the mine by the Ministry of the Interior marks a dramatic turnaround American wildlife experts who warned almost two years ago that Tiehm’s buckwheat was “now in danger of extinction” when they declared it an endangered species in December 2022.
“You can’t save the planet from climate change and destroy biodiversity at the same time,” 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 electric vehicles or solar panels, does not justify this disregard for indigenous cultural areas and important environmental laws,” said John Hadder, director of the Great Basin Resource Watch, another co-plaintiff.
Rita Henderson, spokeswoman for the Interior Bureau of Land Management in Reno, said Friday that the agency had no immediate comment.
Ioneer Vice President Chad Yeftich said the Australia-based mining company plans to intervene on behalf of the U.S. and “vigorously defend” the approval of the project, “which was based on the careful and thorough permitting process.”
“We are confident that the BLM will prevail,” Yeftich said. He added that he does not expect the lawsuit to delay plans to start construction next year.
According to the lawsuit, the mine will damage sites sacred to the Western Shoshone people. That includes Cave Spring, a natural spring less than a mile away that’s described as “a place of intergenerational transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge.”
But it centers on alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act. It describes the Fish and Wildlife Service’s departure from the bleak picture it previously painted of threats to the 6-inch-tall wildflower with cream-colored 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 permit projects that a fifth of the nearly 3.6 square kilometers the agency has designated as critical habitat around the plants — home to several pollinators important to their survival — would be lost for decades, some of which are permanent.
In proposing protection of the 910 acres. critical habitatAccording to the agency, 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, rejecting the alternative of a less stringent endangered status.
“We believe that endangered species status is inappropriate because the threats are serious and imminent, and Tiehm’s buckwheat is now threatened with extinction, rather than likely to be threatened with extinction in the future,” the agency concluded.
The lawsuit also reveals for the first time that the plant’s population, which is less than 30,000 according to the latest government estimates, has suffered additional losses since August that were not accounted for in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s biological opinion held.
The damage is comparable to the damage caused by the agency rodents that eat the plants in a 2020 incident that saw the population drop by as much as 60%, the lawsuit said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service said in its August biological advisory 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 impacts to appreciably reduce the value of the critical habitat as a whole.”