Groups to US: Protect Nevada flower from mine or face court

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

By SCOTT SONNER

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Conservationists who won a court order against U.S. wildlife officials say they’ll sue them again for failing to protect a Nevada wildflower whose last remaining habitat could be destroyed by a lithium mine.

The Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal 60-day notice this week of its intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for missing this month’s deadline to finalize its year-old proposal to add Tiehm’s buckwheat to the list of endangered species.

The service concluded in its Oct. 7, 2021, proposal that the desert wildflower — which is only known to exist where the mine is planned halfway between Reno and Las Vegas — was in danger of going extinct.

Under federal law, the agency had one year to issue a final rule listing the 6-inch-tall (15-centimeter-tall) flower with yellow blooms, or explain why it had decided against taking such action.



FILE - In this 2020 photo provided by the Center for Biological Diversity is a Tiehm's buckwheat near the site of a proposed mine in Nevada. Conservationists who won a court order against U.S. wildlife officials in the same dispute two years ago say they intend to sue them again for failing to protect a Nevada wildflower, a Tiehm's buckwheat proposed for endangered species listing, where a lithium mine is planned. (Patrick Donnelly/Center for Biological Diversity via AP, File)


Read more: https://apnews.com/article/nevada-flowers-wildlife-reno-us-fish-and-service-50aece13ba8ab32ef94313dba1583e06

[Cracklin Charlie]

1. Save it.

Beautiful desert flower.

[Evolve Dammit]

2. You go, Center for Biological Diversity. Hold their feet to the proverbial fire. n/t

[madville]

3. Domestic lithium mining is crucial

To expanding domestic EV battery production. Many of the current federal rebates will only apply in the coming years if the batteries are produced in the US with US sourced materials.

[hunter]

5. Electric cars won't save the world.

"We had to destroy the environment in order to save it!" is not an ethical position.

With a human population of 8 billion the earth simply can't support an automobile for every adult, no matter how those vehicles might be powered.

What we ought to do is abandon car culture entirely. We need to rebuild our cities to make them attractive places where car ownership is unnecessary.

[jeffreyi]

6. Agree.

And, no, this species won't grow elsewhere. It's in a unique place, with unique soils. We don't yet recycle lithium batteries. We need to do this, in a major way, before we tear up new country. I hope we progress into a better, less destructive battery source, very soon.

[madville]

7. True

But that’s not happening for many decades or more. Most Americans don’t want to live stacked on top of each other in large cities using public transport.

[Doremus]

8. There will be a host of things that people don't want to do in the future

They'll still do them though, bc they want to live. Nearly every single convenience item we use is unnecessary and will be abandoned. Think of how life was shortly after the industrial revolution. We're headed back there and might as well get used to it now. In that world, humans are the endangered species.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

17. Life after the industrial revolution? You mean when every house was heated by coal?

Or when huge tracts of farmland were devoted to producing food for working animals: horses, mules, oxen, etc?

I'm not sure we can feed that many animals and still feed eight billion people.

My house still has a coal-chute door, in case deliveries are resumed.

[hunter]

9. If that is true why are housing costs in cities so high?

If "most Americans" didn't want to live in cities I could probably buy my great grandparent's home in San Francisco and move there. If I had that kind of money I would.

Last I looked the home was worth at least 2 million dollars. There are a few fully modernized homes in the same neighborhood that sell for over three million dollars. It was considered an ordinary middle class home when my great grandmother sold it, many years ago.

My wife and I live in a smaller city in a higher density neighborhood. Our neighborhood is diverse. 40% of the school children here don't speak English at home.

I grew up in a 99% white affluent suburban neighborhood. The religion of the place is prosperity gospel. There's no way in hell I'd ever go back to a place like that. I quit high school at sixteen knowing I'd never fit into that community and would have to find my way elsewhere.

My parents lived there for the work. They left as soon as my dad retired. All my siblings left as well.

Too many Americans try to convince themselves that their living situations are ideal when, in fact, they have little control over them. Where they live and their overall living standards are highly constrained by their work, by their communities, and by their fears.

It seems to me that many of the people who celebrate car dependent suburban living have little experience with anything else. I feel sorry for some of my high school classmates who were "successful" enough to stay on in affluent white suburbia, their only experiences of living in other environments being four years of college dorms and some apartment life. There's much more to life than the security of a nice house in the suburbs and a new car every three years. And sadly, most work that supports such a lifestyle does not make the world a better place.

But that's all my anecdotal baggage. Statistically, people living in dense urban environments, who don't own cars, and have mostly vegetarian or vegan diets, have much smaller environmental footprints than residents of car dependent suburban U.S.A..

[madville]

10. 3/4 of US population is suburban or rural

About 1/4 is considered urban. So yes, most don’t live in densely populated cities by choice.

When I lived in the SF Bay Area up until 2019, it was real estate investors and gentrification driving up already ridiculous prices, especially over around Oakland where I was. Lots of Chinese cash was flowing into the real estate market then, properties could barely get listed before they had cash offers from foreign investors. A couple of my coworkers gave up trying to buy anything at that time, couldn’t even get offers in before the property was under contract.

[hunter]

12. So you and your coworkers would have stayed, if not for money issues?

That doesn't sound like much of a "choice" to me.

My wife and I chose to move back to California from the Midwest because we didn't have any family there. Fortunately my wife has the kind of work where we could afford to do that.

Our children, nieces, and nephews choose to live in cities and they have the income to afford it. I'm not sure all of them like their work, but that seems to be the normal state of affairs here in the U.S.A., wherever people live.

When I say "rebuild our cities" I assume this will include housing that's affordable by everyone who lives and works there, and I'm not talking about Manhattan or Tokyo style micro-apartments.

An urban home might be shoulder-to-shoulder with its neighbors, but it can still have a private backyard garden, no intrusive landlords and condo associations, etc. My great grandfather's home in San Francisco was like that. (Now its divided up into apartments.)

Our city home in the Midwest was a small house on a small lot. I walked to the grocery store, the video rental store, the bookstore, and before we bought a washing machine and dryer, I walked to the laundromat. That's the kind of urban environment I'm talking about. the kinds of places that existed before car dependent suburbia, and will continue to exist after its largely gone.

[madville]

14. No, no one planned on being there long term

We were on 3-4 year contracts but our employer was giving us $3800 a month for housing. Typically in any given area some people would buy (finance) a house and then sell it when it was time to move on or keep it and rent it out. Back at that time it was extremely hard to get something there with financing because cash buyers were buying it all up within days, sometimes hours of it being listed.

I was always a renter, like when I was there I was getting the $3800 for housing but my rent on my old small apartment was only $1920, so I could pocket the difference.

No one on the team I worked with out there wanted to remain in the SF Bay Area though, two of us are now in FL, one in TX, one in PA, one retired to Maine, one retired to rural NV, etc.

[James48]

4. If it exists now in the wild-

Then can’t they be grown elsewhere intentionally?

Let’s get some biodiversity going and spread the seeds elsewhere.

[NickB79]

11. That's actually not a bad idea

We've locked in a few degrees of climate change already, and it will likely go extinct in a hotter, drier future, even if this mine isn't dug up.

There's a concept called assisted migration, where plant species are planted further north to speed up adaptation. I'm doing it in Minnesota right now with good success, using species native to parts of the central US and Appalachia.

[hunter]

13. I've seen these change here in California.

The Southern California of my childhood looks more like Baja California did then.

Central California looks more like Southern California. Etc.

It's horrifying to watch the pine forests burn, knowing that many won't grow back.

The environment I knew as a child won't be back. If it hasn't been bulldozed and covered with McMansions and Big Box stores, it's slowly turning into dry scrub.

Sure, maybe we should be assisting this inevitable migration, but it doesn't give us any excuse to make things worse today.

Hopefully we'll discover another sort of battery soon that uses common minerals having a smaller environmental footprint than lithium mining.

[XorXor]

15. That was my first thought. The mine issue aside, is there a reason why it can be grown elsewhere?

[JCMach1]

16. There are certain plants that are just ideally adapted to very small islands of land

My hometown back in Florida has the Etoniah Rosemary (conradina etoniah)

https://www.floridastateparks.org/parks-and-trails/dunns-creek-state-park/rare-and-endangered-etoniah-rosemary

Sometimes it's not so easy. I grew tame ones, but I lived in the area and got plants from a native plant nursery.