#mining industry

Excerpt from this story from Earthjustice:

The Washington Post reported today that the Trump administration is considering an attack on at least six national monuments across the American West to hand over to industry some of America’s most important public lands. The report indicates that the Interior Department is considering illegal boundary reductions and stripped federal protections for Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon, Ironwood Forest, Chuckwalla, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, which comprise over 5 million acres of public land in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Utah.

A rollback of monument protections would be illegal and would likely trigger litigation. The Antiquities Act of 1906 authorizes presidents to designate national monuments, but it does not give them the power to shrink monuments created by their predecessors or to undercut monument protections. Congress’s intent was clear: the Antiquities Act must only be used to protect the nation’s archaeological, cultural, and scientific wonders.

“An attack on any of these national monuments would be illegal,” said Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife, and oceans at Earthjustice. “For the Trump administration to consider handing over our beloved national monuments to industry is both shortsighted and completely unnecessary. There’s a reason Tribes, local communities, and small businesses have fought for decades to protect these places: their cultural and historic significance, combined with their astounding natural beauty and biological value, make them among our most important public lands.”

The first Trump administration tried to strip monument protections from half of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and nearly 90% of Bears Ears National Monument. Earthjustice swiftly filed suit on behalf of conservation groups challenging the administration’s illegal actions. Those lawsuits are currently stayed in district court, as President Biden restored both monuments in 2021.

Cobalt mines in the Congo are characterized by exploitation, where thousands are enslaved to harvest the mineral. This benefits large capitalist multinationals, fueling the "green capitalism" transition through the production of batteries.

The system relies on the forced labor of over 40,000 children in these mines, allowing Western nations to project an image of environmental concern and civilization. However, this is fundamentally a business for capitalists whose primary motivation is profit, indifferent to environmental consequences as long as their wealth is preserved.

Imagine you own a coal mine in British Columbia. (Yes, governments in Canada are still approving new coal mines.)

Over the last three decades, you’ve made a bucket-load of money stripping the top off a mountain, and now you’re sitting on a pile of environmental liabilities that threaten to eat into your profits.

You have two choices. You could spend millions of dollars on a process known as reclamation, stabilizing hazardous waste and restoring the site to some semblance of its former ecological value, which is what you committed to when you opened the mine. 

Or, you could declare the mine to be in “care and maintenance,” a status that is accepted as standard by most jurisdictions, despite the fact that it lacks a formal legal definition.

The status has very little to do with actual care or maintenance. It might more accurately be described as “abandonment and neglect,” but that wouldn’t sound nearly as elegant. [...]

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Hundreds of new mining claims have been staked within the community of Amargosa Valley, Nevada, on thousands of acres directly adjacent to Death Valley National Park.

These new mining claims, documented here for the first time, are staked above groundwater aquifers that feed the springs at Furnace Creek in Death Valley National Park and provide drinking water to the Timbisha Shoshone Reservation. Furnace Creek hosts the park’s visitor center, hotels and other tourist amenities.

“We are extremely concerned about this dramatic rise in mining activity directly adjacent to Death Valley National Park,” said Mason Voehl, executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy. “These claims were filed right next to people’s homes and businesses, and mining there would threaten the groundwater that communities and the environment rely on for survival.”

The new claims were filed by Canadian-based Rover Critical Minerals and follow a year of controversy over claims filed near Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge just a few miles away. The company's proposed mining project in that area sparked a lawsuit that led to the withdrawal of project approval and prompted efforts to secure a mineral withdrawal within the Amargosa Valley area.

Local governments, including the towns of Beatty and Amargosa Valley, have expressed support for pausing new mining claims in the area so that a mineral withdrawal planning process can be undertaken. The Timbisha Shoshone Tribe has also supported that proposal.

“Our national parks were set aside for future generations to experience abundant wildlife and iconic landscapes and learn from our rich cultural stories. These new mining claims are encroaching on our ability to tell that shared story across the California desert,” said Luke Basulto, California Desert program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association. “We have a fleeting opportunity to protect this place — Congress and the administration can act now to save Death Valley National Park, Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and the rare waters that sustain them.”

The claims have not yet been registered in the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Minerals and Land Record System. But in recent field reconnaissance, local residents encountered hundreds of claim markers staked in the ground, with numbers indicated on the claim notices as high as 387. These claims appear to be blanketing an area of approximately 8,000 acres on the border of Nevada and California, just 1 mile away from the park.

Drilling and mining in the area could harm springs and groundwater wells in Death Valley and impair Timbisha Shoshone Tribal water rights. While new mine claims do not guarantee full-scale mining operations, lax regulation means that exploratory drilling alone, with limited regulatory requirements, can have an impact on scarce groundwater sources and natural resources.

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