Green agendas clash in Nevada as company grows rare plant to help it survive effects of a mine
A grand experiment is underway in Nevada where an endangered desert wildflower stands in the way of a mining company's plans to dig for lithium to help speed production of batteries for electric cars and other green energy projects
GARDNERVILLE, Nev. — A botanist gently strokes the pollen of endangered wildflowers with a paintbrush as she tries to reenact nature inside a small greenhouse in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada.
It's part of a lithium mining company's grand experiment intended to help keep an extremely rare desert plant from going extinct in a yearslong battle that has set one green agenda against another: clean energy versus native biodiversity.
Australia-based Ioneer says the mine it wants to dig in the Nevada desert would more than quadruple U.S. production of lithium needed to speed production of electric vehicles and build the batteries needed for other clean electricity projects.
Conservationists proclaim their support for world leaders who are trying to tackle climate change by curbing global emissions. But they're fiercely fighting the mine because it would dig deep into the world’s only known patch of land where the endangered Tiehm’s buckwheat grows.
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.
Conservationists contend that mining would eradicate the plant from its current habitat and that the efforts to transplant the greenhouse-grown specimens to
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