It’s not often that the world’s largest gold mining company doesn’t get what it wants, especially in the nation’s largest gold-producing state.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that Barrick Gold’s proposal to dig a 2,000-foot deep open pit at the Cortez Hill mine on Mount Tenabo lacks sufficient environmental review. The mountain, which is considered sacred among many of the area’s tribes (much like New Mexico’s Mount Taylor, featured in HCN’s recent cover story by Laura Paskus), is about 250 miles east of Reno, Nev.
The Associated Press reports:
In reversing an earlier ruling, the judges in San Francisco said the U.S. Bureau of Land Management failed to adequately analyze the mine’s potential to pollute the air with mercury emissions and dry up scarce water resources in Nevada’s high desert…
The appellate judges concluded BLM’s review was inadequate under the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires a thorough examination of large-scale projects on federal land. They said the agency didn’t fully consider the air quality impacts resulting from transporting ore to an off-site processing facility 70 miles away.
The judges also said the review didn’t do enough to examine the likelihood that pumping water out of the pit would cause the groundwater level to drop and potentially dry up more than a dozen streams and springs.
The court’s decision came six months after its hearing for the case, where plaintiffs included the South Fork Band Council of Western Shoshone, the Te-Moak tribe of Western Shoshone, the Timbisha Shoshone, the Western Shoshone Defense Project and the Great Basin Resource Watch, a nonprofit mining watchdog group in Reno.
The ruling essentially requires Barrick to halt the project, albeit temporarily. Once the BLM reevaluates its Environmental Impact Statement, presumably the project can move forward, says John Hadder, executive director of the Great Basin Resource Watch. Hadder and the other plaintiffs are preparing their case for further litigation.
“Barrick has done a lot of work, (and) damage, at the site already,” Hadder says. “There is still a long road ahead, but it does show that the courts can rule on the essentials of the law.”
One matter that the appellate court upheld, however, was a federal judge’s finding that the mine’s opponents failed to prove that the project would have significant scenic impacts on Mount Tenabo and create “a substantial burden on the tribes’ ability to exercise their religion,” reports the AP.
What that means for the various Shoshone tribes involved remains to be seen.
“Mount Tenabo should be left alone – no further disturbance,” says Carrie Dann, a Western Shoshone who has helped lead the fight to protect Mount Tenabo from mining for more than 15 years. “They will be sucking the water out of the mountain forever. The destruction of the water is like the destruction of the blood of the earth; you are destroying life of the earth and the people and wildlife that depend on it.”
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