Botanist Florencia Peredo Ovalle works in her greenhouse in Gardnerville, Nevada, Tuesday, May 21, 2024. Ovalle, who works for mining company Ioneer, cares for specimens of Tiehm's buckwheat as part of an experiment aimed at helping to keep the extremely rare desert plant from going extinct while still allowing the company to dig for lithium on land where it grows. GARDNERVILLE, Nev.
So far, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has endorsed the company’s latest strategy, which includes propagating and transplanting the buckwheat, as its preferred alternative in a draft environmental impact statement, one of the last steps toward final approval of the mine. The plan still must be reviewed by the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has raised concerns about earlier versions.
“The destruction of habitat is guaranteed whereas the success of the mitigation is dubious at best,” he said, pledging legal challenges if the mine is approved.The scientist the plant is named after, Arnold Tiehm, first suggested in 1994 the site be declared a special botanical area and made off-limits to mining. But it wasn’t until 2022 that conservationists successfully secured its endangered status along with a designation of critical habitat for the plant.
There are nearly 25,000 of the plants in the wild on federal land near the mine site along the Nevada border with California. They were discovered only in the mid-1980s and resemble a scrawny dandelion during the few weeks of the year when they bloom. Unlike most mining operations, Ioneer plans to backfill sections of ground and restore habitat as the mining moves laterally along what it says is an unusually horizontal seam of lithium.
Conservationists say they support lithium mining — just not in fragile places. Dozens of university scientists from across the U.S. said in a recent letter to federal land managers that they oppose the Ioneer project in its current form, and that it would destroy more than one-fifth of the designated critical habitat.