The exchange threatens rare plants and animals like bighorn sheepThe US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco has issued its ruling striking down the federal government’s approval of a land exchange with mining giant Asarco Inc. The court ruled that the federal Bureau of Land Management had violated various federal laws in agreeing to trade public land with Asarco, which Asarco wanted as part of its expansion of its massive Ray Copper Mine in Arizona. The court also held that the agency’s actions were “arbitrary and capricious.”
According to the court, the agency had not taken the required “hard look” at the exchange’s environmental impacts, including comparing impacts to the land and resources with, vs. without, the exchange.
The Center for Biological Diversity, Western Lands Project, and Sierra Club had challenged the land exchange in order to protect the important wildlife habitat in the area and in nearby wilderness. The lands subject to the exchange provide important habitat for rare plants and animals including desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, and many species of birds. If this proposed land exchange had been allowed to proceed, it would have essentially gutted the White Canyon Resource Conservation Area by allowing mining in a largely pristine place.
“At stake in this decision were habitats for desert bighorn sheep, endangered desert tortoise habitat, and other threatened and endangered species,” said Taylor McKinnon, public lands campaigns director with the Center for Biological Diversity. “This is a victory for them, a victory that will save lives.”
The proposed exchange would have given Asarco 10,976 acres of public lands in exchange for 7,300 acres of the company’s private holdings, and would have facilitated the expansion of Asarco’s Ray Mine, an open-pit copper mine located 65 miles east of Phoenix and 50 miles north of Tucson. By gaining private ownership of the land, Asarco would no longer be subject to federal planning, reclamation, and bonding requirements designed to minimise and mitigate the environmental impacts of hard-rock mining operations.
“This is a great win for the public’s lands and the public interest,” said Don Steuter, conservation chair for the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon (Arizona) Chapter. “Federal land trades are supposed to serve the public interest, but the projects are often driven by private interests seeking access to federal land and resources. In this case, the public land slated for trade contains rare perennial waters and a priority reintroduction site for bighorn sheep.”
Located on Mineral Creek, a tributary of the Gila River, the Ray Mine has been an open-pit operation since 1948. Environmental contamination at Ray has been so severe that Asarco has been cited for repeated violations of the Clean Water Act.
“The court upheld a longstanding principle of the National Environmental Policy Act: The public has a right to an unvarnished evaluation of the impacts of a proposal,” said Chris Krupp, Western Lands Project staff attorney. “Here, the record shows that the Bureau’s analysis was so biased that a sister agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, chastised the BLM for its one-sided review.”
“The court correctly found that BLM violated numerous federal laws, including the requirement the BLM fully review the environmental impacts from future mining and that the land exchange be ‘in the public interest’,” said Roger Flynn, an attorney with Western Mining Action Project who represented the groups. “The company would use the land mostly for dumping waste and running equipment. It’s about the worst purpose you can think of for trading away public lands.”
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