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0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out nine 0 mile from needles.com. donate or text the word needles to 5355.

0:00:24 - (Joe G): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:00:44 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you, Joe, and welcome to yet another episode of 90 Miles from the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and folks, it has been a tough week. Not to get too much into personal stuff, but I lost a brother in law this weekend. My wife's sister's husband, Greg Oberg. It was very unexpected. He was younger than people ought to be dying. It's a serious blow to our family, and this episode's dedicated to his memory.

0:01:18 - (Chris Clarke): Gregory Oberg was an excellent brother in law. Thank you for everything, Greg. For that and a couple other reasons that are less tragic, I'm going to be taking a couple of weeks off from putting the podcast out. The next episode will be up on July 9. There are some other things I need to work on that just really eat up my screen time putting out an annual report, the first ever annual report for the Desert Advocacy Media Network.

0:01:43 - (Chris Clarke): And.

0:01:44 - (Chris Clarke): This is good news for people who like to read. We're also putting together an online bookstore on our website. It's not live yet, but the Desert Advocacy Media network website is thedamn.org We're hoping to have a really nice selection of books set up when we launch, which will probably be in about two weeks. Purchases will go through bookshop.org comma, which allows you to buy from independent bookstores near you. Or if there's an independent bookstore you like far away, you can order from them, too.

0:02:17 - (Chris Clarke): It's a nice alternative to the behemoth of online book and everything else sales. But right now I'm a little preoccupied by a comment by Judson Culter, a pr flak for rover critical minerals who basically had to eat a whole lot of crap. And justifiably at a town hall meeting in Amargosa Valley recently. There's not a single person in that usually pretty mining friendly community who is in favor of rover critical minerals, in part because Rover, in addition to providing an existential threat to ash meadows National Wildlife Refuge, which drives a lot of the tourist traffic to Amargosa Valley, Rover has also filed 400 plus mining claims within the community, right across the road from people's houses.

0:03:03 - (Chris Clarke): This is widely seen as an affront to the people there, if for no other reason, then people rely on their well water without well water, you can't live there. There is no city water system. This is widely seen as an affront to the people there. People rely on their well water. Without well water, you can't live in Amargosa Valley. There is no city water system. Nobody is going to truck water hundreds of miles from Lake Mead.

0:03:27 - (Chris Clarke): And rover critical minerals wants to mine for lithium in some or all of these claims, and that's going to affect the groundwater. And if there is major production of lithium that results, that groundwater is going to get badly depleted. Which means not only as we've covered really extensively in the last couple of years, the wealth of endemic and endangered species at ash meadows, with its groundwater dependent ecosystem, is under severe threat, but it also means the community's drinking water wells are likely to dry up. And I don't know if any of you have drilled a well recently or had one drilled, but it is incredibly expensive.

0:04:02 - (Chris Clarke): Just getting a rig out to your place costs thousands of bucks and then the drilling, and you're sinking this money, almost literally sinking money into the ground, and you have no guarantee that you're going to get water even if you drill really deep and really expensively. So people in Amargosa Valley are justifiably upset at Rover critical minerals. The company arranged a town hall meeting, and it did not work out the way they had hoped.

0:04:27 - (Chris Clarke): There was not a single person in attendance who had anything nice to say about the company. And then the corporate suit that showed up, Judson Culter, whose name kind of sounds like an Ayn Rand hero, certainly the kind of person that would have been cast as a hero in Atlas Shrugged, just trying to do his job, trying to make money. And these rural folks are getting in his way anyway, it didn't work out well for Rover in particular.

0:04:55 - (Chris Clarke): Alan Halaly of the Las Vegas Review Journal was there, and let's just read the first couple of sentences from his report. I'll have a link to the full article in the show notes. https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-nevada/youre-just-the-suit-residents-spar-with-mining-exec-at-tense-town-hall-3073095/ Amargosa Valley was out in full force. It had been a month since homeowners in a sleepy desert town of about 1300 woke up to about 400 wooden stakes hammered into the ground, representing canadian exploration company Rover critical Minerals, claims to the lithium that may lie beneath the dirt.

0:05:23 - (Chris Clarke): More than 100 people filled the fold up chairs laid out in the basketball court at the Amargosa Valley Community center on Thursday night after work. Let me skip down a little bit. In some cases, the five acre parcels in which Rover will search for lithium are situated a few hundred feet from people's homes and businesses in an area where some are already facing issues with the wells attached to their homes that pump water from the ground.

0:05:46 - (Chris Clarke): Not one person who spoke appeared convinced that allowing a search for lithium to proceed is to the town's long term benefit. Several residents and officials interviewed fear exploratory drilling could spell the end for Amargosa Valley. And it goes on like that. It's a really remarkable feat that rover critical minerals has accomplished, and their actions have united the Amargosa conservancy, which I'm on the board of, with local residents in Amargosa Valley and nearby communities whose politics span the spectrum from full on QAnon to full on Marxist.

0:06:22 - (Chris Clarke): It's united those groups with the tribes, especially the Timbisha Shoshone, and with the Nye county board of Commissioners, which is historically very mining friendly. It takes a special kind of talent to screw up so badly that you take people who normally not only don't have the time of day for each other, but actively mistrust each other, call each other eco terrorists or whatever, to unite them because of your inability to actually see what things are like on the ground, to actually talk to people one on one and not just have dog and pony shows that fail spectacularly.

0:06:58 - (Chris Clarke): In this article by Alan Halaly, Judson Culter was not in a mood to concede that his company may have misstepped or overstepped, or basically screwed the pooch and their approach to lithium mining on the Amargosa basin. And he told Halaly that Rover has taken note of what they perceive as hostility. And here's the quote that got under my skin. Culter said: "They don't want anybody here. Whether it's an oil and gas lobby that's behind that, who knows?

0:07:28 - (Chris Clarke): It's hard to say, but it doesn't make any sense." Oil and gas, Mister Culter, are you thinking of like the oil and gas companies that are doing hydraulic fracking in the Marcellus shale, despite the ardent wishes of locals living in New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio who have to deal with the toxic groundwater coming out of their taps as a result of the profit seeking activities of those companies?

0:07:52 - (Chris Clarke): Are you talking about oil and gas companies like Chevron drilling for oil in Ecuador, regardless of the sentiments of the locals who actively fighting court cases, even though they've killed people with their spills and their effluent? Judson, the people of Amargosa Valley are not the people that remind me of oil and gas companies in this particular interaction. Now all that said, accusing people of being in league with fossil fuel companies is not a new rhetorical trope. In the 15 or 16 years since I moved to the desert, and probably before that, I've seen people that raise concerns about placement of solar facilities or lithium mining or anything else that can be spun pr wise as a response to the climate crisis that we find ourselves in, which we absolutely have to address.

0:08:43 - (Chris Clarke): I've seen people like that accused of being shills for fossil fuels. And it's an easy, lazy, thoughtless rhetorical response to accuse people that are introducing principled objections based on a point of view that you have ignored or you don't happen to share or you haven't even thought of yet, and accusing them of being in cahoots with or paid off by multinationals who stand to benefit from the delay in climate mitigation, namely the oil and gas companies.

0:09:12 - (Chris Clarke): That's just astounding in its disingenuousness. I've come up against it myself now to take just my favorite example, around ten or twelve years ago, I was criticized by one person who was in the camp of we got to build renewable energy facilities at all costs, grew the environment that they're replacing. He read some of the reporting I was doing at KCET in those days on the downsides of some solar projects that were in process at the time.

0:09:38 - (Chris Clarke): I often reported on great ideas for renewable energy and projects that were in the right place. I was advocating for sensible zoning, was advocating for lots and lots of solar development in cities and near cities. I just had problems with some of the projects that actually seemed to default to intact desert habitat as a first choice. And because I talked about that issue, this person referred to me as a useful idiot. Which was only half correct.

0:10:06 - (Chris Clarke): That said, in the main, it's not usually environmentalists who raise these kinds of really simple minded tropes anymore. There are exceptions. I mean, there are people that call themselves environmentalists or climate activists who basically want to terraform the planet. They take maps of the southwest and draw a square 100 miles on a side on them and say, "all we need to do is fill this with solar and we can meet all our energy demand without any fossil fuels." And, you know, never mind what might actually be in that hundred mile square, what habitats, what cultural sites, what beautiful canyons and rivers, what places that people have lived for generations, sometimes hundreds of generations.

0:10:47 - (Chris Clarke): You know, some technocratic dude in a coastal city says, "this hundred mile square that I've never been to is an appropriate sacrifice area." There are people that want to build environmental projects like high speed rail in California being one particular example, who absolutely hate any kind of environmental regulation that they have to deal with. They are special and they should not have to deal with the kinds of regulations that the rest of us regular commoners have to deal with.

0:11:12 - (Chris Clarke): It's just ego. Just ego is all it is. And it's ego fueled by the conviction that what this person is doing is crucially important for the world. And the fact that it may well be extremely important doesn't mean the person isn't acting like a megalomaniac. Alexander Hochschild, a wonderful author, wrote a book called the Unquiet Ghost. Russians remember Stalin. And in the beginning of the book, he described a conversation with Alexander Vologodsky, who's a russian physicist.

0:11:42 - (Chris Clarke): Vologodsky had noticed an abandoned settlement when he was a young person in the extreme north of Siberia, and found out that the settlement was the remains of a prison labor construction project. Stalin was looking at a map one day, noticed a blank spot on the Arctic coast between the mouths of the Yenisei and the Ob rivers, and decided he wanted a railroad built connecting those two rivers across 800 miles of tundra. And as Hochschild wrote, as far as Vologodsky could figure out, there was no logical reason to build this long and expensive railroad, particularly in the famine ridden, ravaged, exhausted USSR of 1948. Now, the Soviet Union was famous for grand public works projects that turned out not to work.

0:12:25 - (Chris Clarke): But this Arctic railway, said Vologodsky, was the acme of the absurd. In the frantic haste to satisfy Stalin's orders to build this rail line, Vologodsky said, when construction began in 1948, crews laid tracks at the same time as they were surveying. The train was a builder's nightmare. Below ground was rock hard permafrost. On top of that lay 6ft of snow in the winter, and in the summer, there were vast bogs that swallowed up ties, tracks and equipment.

0:12:58 - (Chris Clarke): In five years, they succeeded in laying tracks only a little more than half the distance of the proposed route. That passage has stayed with me since I read the book the Arctic Railway, which stopped being built pretty much right when Stalin died. It's a useful absurdum to which you can reductio a whole lot of development proposals, especially those that are decreed by someone, whether or not they have the power to make them actually work, who is far away and has never been on site.

0:13:29 - (Chris Clarke): And if you're looking for an example of this, it's really hard to find a better one than the example of Glen Canyon and David Brower. Now, I had the good fortune to get to know David a bit in the last five or six years of his life. And we talked about this some. In the early 1960s, he bargained away Glen Canyon in a meeting room somewhere, and in return, he kept a dam out of Echo park in Dinosaur National Monument. He kept a dam off the Yampa river, which is still free flowing, and it's still beautiful.

0:13:58 - (Chris Clarke): It was a wonderful victory. But Brouwer agreed to the wrong terms, because Brower, after he sealed the deal, went to see Glen Canyon, and he realized that he had sold one of the most beautiful places on earth, and you will pardon the expression, down the river. So the thing about David Brower that I admire was that he was able to admit he'd made a mistake. Not everybody is. 15 years ago, it was really unusual to find any environmental activists outside the desert who understood why people were looking askance at some of the incredibly large projects that were proposed cheek by jowl with other incredibly large projects across the desert.

0:14:39 - (Chris Clarke): We were salmon swimming upstream against the flow of sudden interest in climate. And for me personally, this is less than constructive of me, but it was galling. It was upsetting. I had been talking about climate change, no shit, since the early 1970s, and having people, including some of the people that later gave us problems for wanting to protect the desert, having people just not care at all until suddenly they did care.

0:15:05 - (Chris Clarke): And those of us who'd been working in the environmental field as activists or as scientists for decades sometimes, and who pointed out that there were things that we were actually losing in this rush to build solar in the desert that we needed to at least talk about. We needed to at least account for them. We needed to at least know what we were losing. We were accused of being chills for big oil or big coal 15 years later. Most people in the environmental movement do not do that.

0:15:33 - (Chris Clarke): They do not use that rhetorical trope. We have made a sea change in advocating for the desert in that there are some people who had that what good is the desert viewpoint in the early two thousands? And they don't have that anymore. They recognize the value of the desert, or at least that they got to pay lip service to it. And for people who would always recognize the value of the desert and just weren't saying anything, now they're saying something. There's some of each of those kinds of people who are working to advocate for desert protection these days, and that's wonderful.

0:16:04 - (Chris Clarke): And nowadays, among the more environmentally concerned and climate aware who support desert solar, their argument is more, yeah, it's a shame that desert habitat is being destroyed in order for us to build solar. But we don't have any other choice. We got to do all the different development things that wants to meet our energy needs without ruining the climate. I don't usually notice too many of the people making that argument, digging into what our energy needs actually are, whether they're really needs, or whether they're just wants, or whether they're just things that we're used to and don't think about. Or they're just things that some company says they need to do and we just go along with it.

0:16:43 - (Chris Clarke): You know that one large language model, artificial intelligence plagiarism device on a server uses enough energy to warrant its own power plant thousands of megawatt hours per day, just so people can cheat on their homework. Or as one of my friends on social media said, so that they can generate photo realistic images of women with five breasts. Cryptocurrency mining uses an incredible amount of processing power, which uses an incredible amount of electrical power.

0:17:11 - (Chris Clarke): But there's household stuff too. How about having your important documents in your will, and indeed to your house and your birth certificate and all that kind of stuff stored in the cloud instead of a safe deposit box or something like that. How about ebooks? How about electric picture frames? Do we need those? I mean, you can make a use case argument for a lot of different things, including ebooks, but we're not talking about it. How about utility companies who actively discourage conservation, who actively fight against rooftop solar so that they can maintain their business plans, which were essentially crafted in the 19th century, and who have extremely limited interest in encouraging sensible, common sense energy consumption policy?

0:17:52 - (Chris Clarke): They pay lip service to conservation, but energy conservation means less profit. Not building transmission lines across wilderness areas and cultural sites means less profitable. Yes, this is a climate emergency. We have to pull out all the stops to fix it. But if it's an emergency, shouldn't we be looking at, I don't know, actually changing the way we do things? Shouldn't we be looking at the way we actually use this power, calling it as precious as it actually is because of the costs that we run up on the planet for generating it, whether it's fossil fueled or not? Shouldn't we be making leaving your lights on when you're not home as anathema, as smoking next to kids or driving after eight beers have become?

0:18:37 - (Chris Clarke): Shouldn't we be looking at preserving the habitat that's left? Because the organisms in that habitat are going to need every fighting chance that they can get to deal with climate change. There's a writer on substack that I like a lot. Rebecca Wisent. Rebecca, I'm sorry if I screwed up the pronunciation of your last name. I'm happy to correct it in the next episode. Her newsletter is called Fearless Green.

0:18:59 - (Chris Clarke): Shes an environmental activist and a bunch of other things. A fantastic writer. In a recent issue of her email newsletter, she wrote this passage that I just had to excerpt and reshare on social media. She writes, environmentalism as a whole has, I fear, been irretrievably hijacked by voices that seem unable to appeal to our innate human love for this gorgeous planet and our magnificently splendid wild cousins.

0:19:25 - (Chris Clarke): Instead, the conversation now is almost entirely about ways to handle climate change without changing how we live. There's an overwhelming current of utilitarianism that demands we, for example, set aside our love for a place should it require paving with solar panels in order to power x number of homes. End quote. That's not environmentalism. That's human supremacy. I couldn't agree more. I mean, I've often said terraforming or some other intentionally insulting phrase, but human supremacy is a really, really good way of classifying this approach to the natural world. The degree to which we as a species, disregard the importance of any other species we share this planet with. If we treated other humans the way that we treat the rest of the planet, we would be rightly suspected of having a cluster b personality disorder of some kind, extreme narcissism or something along those lines. And that holds true for when you see how people respond to pleas that we pay attention to the local, that we pay attention to what's actually living in a place.

0:20:26 - (Chris Clarke): What and who is actually living in a place, when we take offense at the frank and unapologetic colonialism with which the desert is treated. Sorry, we need to come in and completely remake the place where you live in order for our lifestyle somewhere distant to benefit. That is the definition of colonialism, and that's what the desert is facing. It may be odd to think of a canadian company as being a colonialist company, but thanks to the ridiculously archaic mining law that governs public lands in the US, that is what is going on.

0:21:01 - (Chris Clarke): Rover critical minerals is attempting to colonize the Amargosa valley, whether the people there want it or not. And as this society starts ever so slowly to rethink colonialism, rethink its impact, its effects, its legacy, lets not leave the desert out of that consideration. The deserts were the last pieces of North America to be truly settled by people of european descent. The indigenous people that those settlers found there are still here.

0:21:31 - (Chris Clarke): Theyre still attempting to survive in a colonialist society, still attempting to preserve their culture and their lifeways to protect their families. And when a representative of a mineral extraction company tries to say that, oh, no, it's not us that are acting like the oil and gas companies just because we want to come in here, sink wells into the ground, suck out valuable stuff and not give you any of the money we make, commit ecological destruction for profit, and sleep really, really well at night on a pile of money.

0:21:59 - (Chris Clarke): That doesn't mean that we are just the same as Exxon, but it does. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about wind power or solar or geothermal or mining for lithium or mining for other critical minerals that will be important in our transition to a non carbon society. There is no renewable energy industry. There is just the energy industry. It's the same people. It's the same tactics. It is the same business plans.

0:22:26 - (Chris Clarke): It's the same disregard for environment, whether it's renewable or not. And so, Judson Coulter of Rover critical minerals, you are not going to get anywhere with that line of argument. You didn't think of it. Thousands of people have tried it before you did. They aren't being taken seriously by anybody that matters, and neither will you be. You and your company and your plans to destroy the Amargosa basin are going to fail.

0:22:53 - (Chris Clarke): You're going to lose this fight, and it's not even going to be close. And that wraps up yet another episode of 90 miles from needles. I'd like to thank our new donors, Martha Lowe and Mitch Miller. Our voiceover guy is Joe Jeffrey. Our podcast artwork guy is Martin Mancha. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. We are looking for volunteers to help us with entering stuff into the new bookstores database.

0:23:49 - (Chris Clarke): Get in touch with me at chris@90milesfromneedles.com if you think you might be up to that. This data entry doesn't take a whole lot of desert knowledge or expertise, just takes an Internet connection and a keyboard. You could really be helping us out. We'd come up with some way to make it worth your while. And as I mentioned, our next episode will be on July 9. And as always, we will see you at the next watering hole.

0:24:14 - (Chris Clarke): Bye now.

0:26:22 - (Joe G): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert advocacy media network.

environmental consequences of lithium mining near ash meadows

S3E20: Desert Protection versus Climate Capitalism: Can we have both?