In this excerpt from the original article, written by Bong S. Sarmiento and published in Mongabay on 30 August 2020, Gong describes how ‘authorities’ have yet to approve plans for a copper mine in the Tampakan are of the Philippines. The mines would affect ancestoral land and the lives of the mountain people.
Officials Quash Plan, For Now, To Develop Philippines’ Biggest Copper Mine
The Philippine municipality of Tampakan has canceled an agreement with Sagittarius Mines, Inc. to develop a $5.9 billion copper and gold mine on the island of Mindanao.
Municipal councilors criticized the “lopsided” nature of the deal that they said had not been periodically reviewed as required and had sold the community short.
The Tampakan project has faced opposition since mineral reserves were discovered there in the ’90s, with pushback coming from various levels of government, Indigenous communities, the Catholic church, environmentalists, and even communist rebels.
An Indigenous group that has taken up arms against the project has warned of more bloodshed should the project go ahead on their ancestral lands.
SOUTH COTABATO, Philippines
Officials in the southern Philippines have canceled a $5.9 billion project to exploit Southeast Asia’s largest known undeveloped copper and gold reserves, but have left open the possibility of the venture being revived.
The municipal council of Tampakan, home to 40,000 people in the province of South Cotabato, alleges that Sagittarius Mines, Inc. (SMI) failed to honor its side of the agreement governing the development of the mine. That deal, the municipal principal agreement (MPA), is supposed to be reviewed and updated every four years, but this hasn’t been done since 2009. There were attempts to review the MPA, but the mayor and other municipal representatives were excluded from the negotiations, the council said.
“After scrutiny, there are provisions in the MPA that are considered vague, disadvantageous to inhabitants of Tampakan and unduly tie the hands of the local government unit [LGU] of Tampakan,” the council said in a resolution dated August 10 but made public on August 14. “As such, the LGU cannot sit and fold its arms not to intervene in any action initiated by its people if, indeed, their rights have been violated contrary to some provisions of the agreement.”
The MPA was already a done deal rather than being negotiated with the government, the resolution said.
Municipal legislators say they’re no longer interested in reviewing or updating the 2009 MPA with the company but are open to creating or formulating a new agreement, which means SMI could still pursue the mammoth Tampakan project under a new municipal agreement.
The resolution has been sent to relevant government agencies but SMI has yet to issue a statement as of the time this article was published. Mongabay sought comment from SMI officials but did not receive a response from the mining firm.
‘Lopsided,’ ‘no justice’
If approved, the Tampakan project would be the largest copper mine in the Philippines and among the largest in the world. The site is predicted to yield an average of 375,000 tons of copper and 360,000 ounces of gold in concentrate per year over a 17-year period. In 1995, the Philippine government granted the Tampakan project the contract to explore and develop the area’s mineral deposits through a financial or technical assistance agreement (FTAA).
The MPA took effect in 1997, and since then SMI has paid Tampakan municipality at least 40 million pesos ($822,370 at current rates), or an average of 2.5 million pesos ($51,400) a year as part of its financial commitments, according to a 2013 state audit. But the terms of the deal are “lopsided,” the council noted in its recent decision.
Days before the council published its resolution, Tampakan Mayor Leonard Escobillo criticized the rental rate that SMI was set to pay for the ancestral lands of the Blaan, the ethnic tribal group whose mountain home will be affected by the project.
Featured image: Creative Commons
This article was originally published in Mongabay on the 30 AUGUST 2020, you can find the full and original article here:
In this article Julia Barnes describes the process of seabed mining and calls for organized resistance to this new ecocidal extraction industry. This article was originally published in Counterpunch
For some people, a best-case scenario for the future is that some bacteria will survive around volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean.
Deep sea mining is about to make that an unlikely possibility. It’s being touted as history’s largest mining operation. They have plans to extract metals from deposits concentrated around hydrothermal vents and nodules – potato sized rocks – which are scattered across the sea floor. Sediment will be vacuumed up from the deep sea, processed onboard mining vessels, then the remaining slurry will be dumped back into the ocean. Estimates of the amount of slurry that will be processed by a single mining vessel range from 2 to 6 million cubic feet per day. I’ve seen water go from clear to opaque when an inexperienced diver gives a few kicks to the sea floor.
Now imagine 6 million cubic feet of sediment being dumped into the ocean. To put that in perspective, that’s about 22,000 dump trucks full of sediment – and that’s just one mining vessel operating for one day. Imagine what happens when there are hundreds of them. Thousands of them.
Plumes at the mining site are expected to smother and bury organisms on the sea floor. Light pollution from the mining equipment would disrupt species that depend on bio-luminescence. Sediment plumes released at the surface or in the water column would increase turbidity and reduce light, disrupting the photosynthesis of plankton.
A few environmental groups are calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining.
Meanwhile, exploratory mining is already underway. An obscure organization known as the International Seabed Authority has been given the responsibility of drafting an underwater mining code, selecting locations for extraction, and issuing licenses to mining companies. Some companies claim that the damage from deep sea mining could be mitigated with proper regulations. For example, instead of dumping slurry at the surface, they would pump it back down and release it somewhere deeper.
Obviously, regulations will not stop the direct harm to the area being mined. But even if the most stringent regulations were put in place, there still exists the near-certainty of human error, pipe breakage, sediment spills, and outright disregard for the rules.
As we’ve seen with fisheries, regulations are essentially meaningless when there is no enforcement. 40% of the total catch comes from illegal fishing. Quotas are routinely ignored and vastly exceeded. On land, we know that corporations will gladly pay a fine when it is cheaper to do so than it is to follow the rules. But all this misses the point which is that some activities are so immoral, they should not be permitted under any circumstances.
Permits and regulations only serve to legalize and legitimize the act of deep sea mining, when a moratorium is the only acceptable response.
Canadian legislation effectively prohibits deep sea mining in Canada’s territorial waters. Ironically, Canadian corporations are leading the effort to mine the oceans elsewhere. A spokesperson from the Vancouver-based company Deep Green Metals attempted to defend deep sea mining from an environmental perspective,
“Mining on land now takes place in some of the most biodiverse places on the planet. The ocean floor, on the other hand, is a food-poor environment with no plant life and an order of magnitude less biomass living in a larger area. We can’t avoid disturbing wildlife, to be clear, but we will be putting fewer organisms at risk than land-based operations mining the same metals.” (as cited in Mining Watch).
This argument centers on a false choice.
It presumes that mining must occur, which is absurd. Then, it paints a picture that the only area affected will be the area that is mined. In reality, the toxic slurry from deep sea mining will poison the surrounding ocean for hundreds of miles, with heavy metals like mercury and lead expected to bio-accumulate in everyone from plankton, to tuna, to sharks, to cetaceans.
A study from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated that “A very large area will be blanketed by sediment to such an extent that many animals will not be able to cope with the impact and whole communities will be severely affected by the loss of individuals and species.”
The idea that fewer organisms are at risk from deep sea mining is an egregious lie.
Scientists have known since 1977 that photosynthesis is not the basis of every natural community. There are entire food webs that begin with organic chemicals floating from hydrothermal vents. These communities include giant clams, octopuses, crabs, and 10-foot tube worms, to name a few. Conducting mining in these habitats is bad enough, but the effects go far beyond the mined area.
Deep sea mining literally threatens every level of the ocean from surface to seabed. In doing so, it puts all life on the planet at risk. From smothering the deep sea, to toxifying the food web, to disrupting plankton, the tiny organisms who produce two thirds of the earth’s oxygen, it’s just one environmental disaster after another.
The most common justification for deep sea mining is that it will be necessary to create a bright green future.
A report by the World Bank found that production of minerals such as graphite, lithium, and cobalt would need to increase by nearly 500% by 2050 to meet the growing demand for so-called renewable energy. There is an article from the BBC titled “Electric Car future May Depend on Deep Sea Mining”. What if we switched the variables, and instead said “the future of the ocean depends on stopping car culture” or “the future of the ocean depends on opposing so-called renewable energy”. If we take into account all of the industries that are eviscerating the ocean, it must also be said that “the future of the ocean depends on stopping industrial civilization”.
Evidently this culture does not care whether the ocean has a future. It’s more interested in justifying continued exploitation under the banner of green consumerism. I do not detail the horrors of deep sea mining to make a moral appeal to those who are destroying the ocean. They will not stop voluntarily. Instead, I am appealing to you, the reader, to do whatever is necessary to make it so this industry cannot destroy the ocean.
Julia Barnes is a filmmaker, director of Sea of Life and of the forthcoming film Bright Green Lies.
Featured image: deep-sea coral, Paragorgiaarborea, on the edge of Hendrickson Canyon roughly 1,775 meters or nearly 6000 feet underwater in the Toms Canyon complex in the western Atlantic. NOAA photo.
Editor’s note: As industrial civilization devours the natural resources of the Planet, it leaves destruction in its wake. Since this system always depletes the land rather than operating on sustainable yield, it necessitates imperialism of new lands. This piece examines a new frontier in the war being waged against the planet: deep sea mining.
A previous Climate & Capitalism article, Capitalism’s growing assault on the oceans, argued that the world is entering “a new phase in humanity’s relationship with the biosphere, where the ocean is not only crucial but is being fundamentally changed.” It cited research that described and graphed capital’s growing drive to industrialize the oceans and sea beds — a process that some scientists have dubbed the Blue Acceleration.
A paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences adds more urgency, showing that deep-ocean mining poses significant risks to the vast mid-water ecosystems that lie far above the sea bed sites where mining is planned. The following summary is based on materials provided by the University of Hawaiʻi.
Interest in deep-sea mining for copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese and other valuable metals has grown substantially in the last decade and mining activities are anticipated to begin soon. Deep-sea mining poses significant risks, not only to the area immediately surrounding mining operations but also to the water hundreds to thousands of feet above the seafloor, threatening vast midwater ecosystems.
Currently 30 exploration licenses cover about 580,000 square miles of the seafloor on the high seas and some countries are exploring exploitation in their own water as well. Thus far, most research assessing the impacts of mining and environmental baseline survey work has focused on the seafloor.
However, large amounts of mud and dissolved chemicals are released during mining and large equipment produces extraordinary noise—all of which travel high and wide. Unfortunately, there has been almost no study of the potential effects of mining beyond the habitat immediately adjacent to extraction activities.
“This is a call to all stakeholders and managers,” said oceanography professor Jeffrey Drazen, lead author of the article. “Mining is poised to move forward yet we lack scientific evidence to understand and manage the impacts on deep pelagic ecosystems, which constitute most of the biosphere. More research is needed very quickly.”
The deep mid-waters of the world’s ocean represent more than 90 percent of the biosphere, contain 100 times more fish than the annual global catch, connect surface and seafloor ecosystems, and play key roles in climate regulation and nutrient cycles. These ecosystem services, as well as untold biodiversity, could be negatively affected by mining. The paper provides a first look at potential threats to this system.
“Hawai” is situated in the middle of some of the most likely locations for deep-sea mining,” said Drazen. “The current study shows that mining and its environmental impacts may not be confined to the seafloor thousands of feet below the surface but could threaten the waters above the seafloor, too. Harm to midwater ecosystems could affect fisheries, release metals into food webs that could then enter our seafood supply, alter carbon sequestration to the deep ocean, and reduce biodiversity which is key to the healthy function of our surrounding oceans.”
Our guest for this show is Esther Figueroa. Esther is a Jamaican filmmaker, writer and advocate who in 2006 returned home to live in Jamaica after being based in Hawa’ii for 25 years. She has a long history of filmmaking, art, and community engagement to protect traditional cultures and the land. Dr. Figueroa has a PhD in linguistics and a masters degree in east asian langauges and literature. We talk about modernity, colonization, and aluminum mining in Jamaica.
Check out Esther’s video work on her YouTube channel, and two of her documentary films on The Paiute Salt Song Trail and the Reclamation of Polynesian Sailing Traditions.
Max: Your latest film is called “Fly Me to the Moon” and as you said it’s an exploration of modernity through the lens of aluminum and bauxite mining specifically bauxite mining. Bauxite is the ore that is being refined into aluminum. So could you talk a little bit about what are the problems of bauxite mining and what is aluminum used for? Just sort of a general overview of aluminum and then we can go from there into Jamaica and Cockpit Country specifically and some of the history of how that looked. I think in one of your emails that you sent me before the interview that the global aluminum industry uses more electricity than the entire continent of Africa.
Esther: Aluminum basically is the material that allowed for 20th century modernity. If people imagined what it means to be modern, it means mobility, it means electricity, it means tall buildings, it means fast-paced life. Think of fast food, think of the cans that you drink, you know, back in the 50s the TV dinners, chewing gum wrappers, it is what made this way of life from kitchen-ware to fast-food franchises, automobiles, airplanes. Now in the 21st century, you know, the things that we depend on all are devices and then, of course, the satellites that make all of this communication possible, but what it is that aluminum is the most abundant metal in the Earth. The most widely used non-first metal meaning non-iron. It’s lightweight, durable, malleable, non-corrosive and chemically reactive. The thing is though it’s the most abundant metal, it never is in the Earth singularly, in other words, it is always combined chemically with other types of metals, other types of chemical combinations and so, what happens is it that has to be separated out, so there are basically 3 processes.
The first is bauxite, what bauxite is it’s a type of soil, it’s the metal in the soil, and it’s different in different places but it is usually kind of reddish or yellowish, In Jamaica it’s reddish and in Jamaica it is over 25% of the island is bauxite. What makes it attractive is that it is very close to the surface so that it can be easily extracted so what it is this soil. The first stage is the extractive process and that’s basically strip-mining. So huge bauxite haul roads because the trucks are big, the machinery is big, are just basically gouged out of mountains, hill-sides, wherever the bauxite is, so that means huge deforestation and destruction of whatever flora is there.
And then the soil is dug out, put in trucks, which then drive to a place where each truck is weight and then they dump it, it’s kept in piles, and then it’s moved unto trains which then take it to the coast where it’s shipped out or it is put into to tramways that are aerial tramways that go straight down to the port and then shipped out or it is taken to Alumina refineries and that’s the second stage, that is all of this soil, and remember it takes hundreds of years to produce a centimeter of soil. This is the most basic thing apart from air and water that we need. And billions of tons of this soil is being dug up and sent away either on boat to North America or we have a few Alumina refineries in Jamaica.
About The Green Flame
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A series of headlines from around the world, compiled by Max Wilbert and Mark Behrend. Featured image by Max Wilbert.
2019 Was the 2nd Hottest Year on Record
Global average temperature reached the 2nd highest annual level ever recorded, according to preliminary data for 2019. While the data is not yet finalized, it’s almost certain 2019 will go down as the 2nd hottest ever. The hottest five years on record have been the last five years, and we are in the final days of the hottest decade in the record.
70,000 Children Have Been Detained at the U.S. Border in 2019
As climate crisis and ecological collapse drives ever more migration, abuse at the southern border of the U.S. is escalating. One recent report finds that nearly 70,000 children have been detained in 2019:
The story lays out in excrutiating detail the emotional pain of victims of President Donald Trump’s child separation policy, focusing on, among others, a Honduran father whose three-year-old daughter can no longer look at him or connect with him after being separated at the U.S. border and abused in foster care.
“I think about this trauma staying with her too, because the trauma has remained with me and still hasn’t faded,” the father told AP.
The 3-year-old Honduran girl was taken from her father when immigration officials caught them near the border in Texas in March 2019 and sent her to government-funded foster care. The father had no idea where his daughter was for three panicked weeks. It was another month before a caregiver put her on the phone but the girl, who turned four in government custody, refused to speak, screaming in anger.
“She said that I had left her alone and she was crying,” said her father during an interview with the AP and Frontline at their home in Honduras. “‘I don’t love you Daddy, you left me alone,'” she told him.
Light Pollution is Key ‘Bringer of Insect Apocalypse’
Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date.
Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects’ lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies.
“We strongly believe artificial light at night – in combination with habitat loss, chemical pollution, invasive species, and climate change – is driving insect declines,” the scientists concluded after assessing more than 150 studies. “We posit here that artificial light at night is another important – but often overlooked – bringer of the insect apocalypse.”
Arctic sea ice extent for November 2019 ended up at second lowest in the 41-year satellite record. Regionally, extent remains well below average in the Chukchi Sea, Hudson Bay, and Davis Strait.
October daily sea ice extent went from third lowest in the satellite record at the beginning of the month to lowest on record starting on October 13 through October 30. Daily extent finished second lowest, just above 2016, at month’s end. Average sea ice extent for the month was the lowest on record. While freeze-up has been rapid along the coastal seas of Siberia, extensive open water remains in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, resulting in unusually high air temperatures in the region. Extent also remains low in Baffin Bay.
Gemeni Solar Project Threatens Important Habitat in Nevada
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) recently released a document identifying the severe impacts that would be inflicted on the Mojave desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) from the Gemini Solar Project, located in southern Nevada. The agency, tasked with recovering rare species headed for extinction, wrote a Biological Opinion for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency in charge of permitting the 7,100 acre Gemini Solar Project which will be located on public lands near Valley of Fire State Park, as part of its consultation process. BLM is reviewing an Environmental Impact Statement for the project.
Although the document claims that mitigation measures will make up for the impacts, the FWS claims that the Gemini Solar Project could kill or injure as many as 1,825 federally threatened desert tortoises in its 30-year operational lifespan. While the Biological Opinion assures us that the project would be heavily mitigated, it still raises dire concerns about these impacts.
The Mojave desert tortoise had declined so drastically decades ago that in 1990 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the species as federally threatened. In the year 2000 the FWS began systematically surveying desert tortoise population numbers across its range using the latest scientific methods. What they saw was continuing declines of tortoise numbers, and even population crashes. Based on these surveys the Desert Tortoise Council has recently recommended up-listing the status of the Mojave desert tortoise from a threatened status to a higher endangered status–which means an emergency to stave off extinction.
The vegetation would be mowed using 23,000 pound Heavy Duty mulchers. Because not all individual tortoises will be detected by biologists or project staff, the agency is concerned that death and injury of desert tortoises could result from excavation activities such as clearing of vegetation, and entrapment in trenches and pipes during construction. Tortoises could be crushed by heavy vehicles. The FWS claims tortoise burrows would be avoided during all this constriction and maintenance activity with equipment and vehicles over years, but we have seen tortoise home burrows crushed and caved in by such activities on other development projects.
After solar project construction is complete and hundreds of tortoises are dug up and raided out of their burrows, the agencies are proposing to then release them back on to this disturbed habitat. The presence of re-occupied desert tortoises on the solar site, with vehicle traffic, may result in injuries or death during routine maintenance of facilities such as vegetation trimming. Tortoises outside of the fenced solar site may also be injured or killed due to truck traffic along the transmission lines and associated access roads.
Capture and translocation (moving) of desert tortoises may result in death and injury from stress or disease transmission associated with handling tortoises, stress associated with moving individuals outside of their established home range, stress associated with artificially increasing the density of tortoises in an area and thereby increasing competition for resources, and disease transmission between and among translocated and resident desert tortoises.
Translocation has the potential to increase the prevalence of diseases, such as Upper Respiratory Tract Disease (URTD), a major mortality factor for desert tortoises. Stresses associated with handling and movement could exacerbate this risk in translocated individuals that carry diseases. Equally, desert tortoises in quarantine pens could increase their exposure and vulnerability to stress, dehydration, and inadequate food resources.
The Gemini Solar Project represents an unacceptably large threat to tortoise populations, connectivity, and high-quality habitat in the northeastern Mojave Desert. FWS appears to us to be minimizing the threat of this project and recommending mitigation measures that will fail to halt tortoise mortality and further cumulative habitat degradation.
3900 square miles of Australia (an area more than 3 times the size of Yosemite National Park) were burned during a single week of November. – New York Post, 11/26/2019
Rice Farming is Major Source of Methane Emissions
Rice farming, long believed responsible for 2.5% of carbon emissions, is now believed to emit up to twice as much — due to new farming methods that only burn the fields intermittently, rather than annually. Leaving the fields in standing water has been found to stimulate bacterial growth that adds the equivalent of 1200 coal-fired power plants in carbon emissions. – Independent (online news magazine), 09/10/2018
The Plastic Pollution Explosion
A deer found dead in rural Thailand recently had 18 pounds of plastic in its stomach. – CNN, 11/26/2019
Consumer Culture Metastasizing Across the Globe
France says that Black Friday is the worst ever American import, topping Halloween and McDonald’s. The one-day shopping frenzy is said to produce the equivalent of a truckload of textiles being dumped every second, across France. – France 24, 11/30/2019
E-Waste is Growing Fast
Electronic waste worldwide is expected to exceed 50 million tons annually by 2020. Before it becomes e-waste, producing a single computer and monitor requires 1.5 tons of water, 48 lbs. of chemicals, and 530 lbs. of fossil fuels. – “The Balance SMB (balancesmb.com), 10/15/2019
Amazon Deforestation Accelerating Under Bolsonaro
Amazon deforestation in 2019 (so far) is estimated at more than 1130 square miles, an area equal to 97% of Yosemite. – CNN, 11/14/2019
Another estimate puts Amazon deforestation at 3700 square miles thus far this year.
Sea of Okhotsk Warming Rapidly
Parts of the Sea of Okhotsk, between Siberia and Japan, are now 3° C. warmer than in pre-industrial times. Oxygen levels in the sea are down, and the Okhotsk salmon population has declined 70%, just since 2004. With colder areas of the planet reacting fastest to climate change, scientists fear that what is happening around Okhotsk is a warning for seas and sea life globally. – Washington Post, 11/12/2019
Air Pollution in India
Forty percent of school children in four of India’s largest cities have lung capacity described as “poor” or “bad,” following breathing tests. Air quality in Indian cities is consistently rated among the worst in the world. – India Times.com, 05/05/2015
Niger is Desertifying Rapidly
In Niger, an area of grasslands equal to 110,000 football fields is lost every year to desertification and erosion. Nomadic herdsmen, who have followed this lifestyle for centuries, blame climate change. Some report losing half of their herds in recent years, and say they are now being driven into cities to look for work. – France 24, 12/05/2019
30-40% of Food is Wasted for “Cosmetic Reasons”
Thirty to forty percent of American farm produce never makes it to market, due to inefficient distribution, and to discarding for cosmetic reasons. – France 24, 11/30/2019
Alaska Temperatures Caused Salmon to Have Heart Attacks
Record high temperatures across portions of Alaska caused thousands of salmon to have heart attacks and die last summer.
On a warm late-summer day, an old friend and I drove down some 50 miles of gravel road through a remote part of Nevada’s Tule Desert. We spotted a flock of golden eagles, and one even landed on a nearby Joshua Tree. The moment was magical. Yet the moment was fleeting as we looked at the overlay map of parcels the BLM would be selling to oil companies for pennies on the dollar, right where we stood.
In the coming weeks, my friend from the Sierra Club would take me much further into Nevada’s Great Basin where in total an area the size of Delaware is up for sale by the BLM. We took pictures to document what was at stake. One year earlier, on a three-day journey through the Great Basin and beyond, down a small watershed that drains into Lake Mead, I had been through the same places with a group of native people from Nevada. These places we perceive as “empty” deserts are not at all empty. They are teeming with all sorts of value beyond some corporation’s profit margins. They are full of life, plants, animals, life-giving water as well as human culture.
My wife and I were there to film a three-day run with indigenous people who were opposed to the construction of a water pumping system and 300-mile pipeline that would take water from Eastern Nevada and deliver it to the Las Vegas Valley. This run they called a sacred run. For these spirited and determined runners, it was more of a prayer than a protest. It was a prayer for the water, animals, plants and their own way-of-life threatened by neverending development by the colonizer culture still occupying their ancestral lands.
On the second day of the run, my wife and I stood on a hilltop with Western Shoshone Elder Johnnie Bobb. He wanted to show us a special place that was along the route of the run. He said it was a sacred place where his people and neighboring tribes would meet and pray. There was evidence that ceremony had taken place at the site previously, with red ribbons tied to tree limbs. Johnnie Bobb offered prayers and burned sage while we were there. He told us how important these lands were to his people. The bones of their ancestors were buried there since time immemorial. The very land itself was tied to his people. To have them taken away was like having a part of one’s self taken.
We looked out over the valleys and mountains, pondering the moment. These places are shrinking by the minute. In fact, natural habitats are disappearing in the American West at a rate of one football field in size every 2.5 minutes. That’s an area the size of Los Angeles every year.
Our species has lived in mostly wild spaces for the better part of 200,000 years. If the time period of our species is a football field, we’ve only lived with agriculture for the last half yard, and industrial civilization for an inch or two. Undeveloped natural lands are in our DNA. The lack of connection with nature for western culture particularly is an obvious explanation for so many of our societal ills. This Great Basin is among the few precious natural spaces left. We must take a stand now and say enough is enough. We can’t continue to exponentially build and grow until all of these places are consumed and gone forever. We can’t stand by any longer hoping someone else will put a stop to this. If not now, then when? If not us, then who? As the great photographer Ansel Adams once said, “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own Government to save the environment.” Yet this is exactly what we must do. We must not tolerate any longer the destruction of these ancestral homelands, the homes of plant and animal species, and the land we need for the Earth to heal. We must fight.
Overview
90 percent of our public lands are available to oil and gas drillers while only 10 percent are available for a focus on conservation and other values including recreation and wilderness (https://www.wilderness.org/articles/article/open-business-and-not-much-else-analysis-shows-oil-and-gas-leasing-out-whack-blm-lands). So it’s no surprise that over the next 5 months, the BLM Ely district is offering up an area the size of Delaware to oil and gas companies. Their stated mission “to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of America’s public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations” is just a platitude. It’s mostly there to preserve potential profits for corporations.
Opening up these areas to fracking seems particularly ill-conceived, considering its a desert, water is already scarce, and they will be threatening the ground water, aquifers and water ways that feed our drinking supplies and feed plant and wildlife. Many of these parcels have watersheds that feed into Lake Mead, the primary drinking water for Las Vegas.
This is all part of taken lands that many indigenous people who still live on or near, and hold sacred. One of the areas we went to with Johnnie Bobb, the Wester Shoshone elder, where he did a blessing, was on a parcel up for sale.
Should these lands be explored for oil, there will be roads and other development necessary that will disrupt that natural habitat of flora and fauna of the Great Basin and Mojave, areas where the Joshua Tree and the desert tortoise are endangered.
Total Acres
The acreage for the March and February lease sale is 355,195 acres. The November lease sale is a total of 273 parcels encompassing 574,075 acres. The December lease sale is a total of 451 parcels encompassing 777,197.
Total in the Ely District: 1,706,467 by March of 2020.
This page has an overview of the issues. They tend to focus on the outdoor recreation economy and the attractive parks. But there is mention of the habitat threatened as well.
