S4E25: Episode 100 | Desert Protection Chronicles: The Amargosa Victory

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from the desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It’s time for 90 miles from needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:46 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe and welcome to this hundredth episode of 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I, as always, am your host, Chris Clarke and we recorded a lot of really wonderful things on the evening of Thursday, August 7th. So much great work from half a dozen wonderful activists, journalists and writers. And because we have so much good content, we are breaking this episode up into six pieces rather than have an hour and 45-minute episode. We're considering all of this the hundredth episode in our hearts, but we are numbering them as distinct episodes to make the podcast distributors happy.

0:01:21 - (Chris Clarke): So don't be too confused. Some of them will be a little shorter than usual, others will be a little bit longer. I am just pleased as hell with what people brought to the table last night. And we are going to start with some excellent news from the Amargosa Basin with Mason Voehl of the Amargosa Conservancy. It's hard to believe that we've gotten this far with so few resources, though some of the people here have been really, really generous in providing some of the resources that we've used.

0:01:51 - (Chris Clarke): It's been a really affirming and also soul-destroying process. Just all the bad news that's out there right now coming at us like a juggernaut. It can be really dispiriting. But we have such a good community of folks that have been working with us supporting the show. From El Paso to Southern Idaho to the Bay Area, some folks in New York, some folks outside of the U.S. it's just, it's been a wonderful process and I'm really looking forward to the next 100 episodes, although not all at once, I hope! We have good news coming out of Tucson, which David will talk about, but we also have some wonderful news coming out of the Amargosa Basin and Mason Voehl is here, and he is the campaign's director of the Amargosa Conservancy and he's going to share that good news with us.

0:02:47 - (Chris Clarke): Mason, thanks for being here.

0:02:49 - (Mason Voehl): Hi everybody. Hey Chris. It is, it's an honor to be part of this 100th episode and especially to give some good news during it. Chris, I don't know, we probably devoted at least two or three episodes of that hundred to this fight that I'm about to give some new good news about. Thank you for helping document the journey along the way. The good news for those who have been following this issue is the last two and a half, three years, we've really been fighting at least one or more than one reckless exploratory mining project near Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. The first one was really the Lightning bolt project in 2023.

0:03:24 - (Mason Voehl): Just a quick recap. It was a junior mining company out of Canada, Rover Critical Minerals. They had pitched this project to drill 30 boreholes down to 300 feet deep looking for lithium at the time as part of that kind of new gold rush. And this was on BLM lands just north of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. Literally within some of these boreholes were within 1500 feet of Fairbanks Spring, which is one of the largest springs in the northern part of the refuge.

0:03:51 - (Mason Voehl): The spring is home to two endemic, critically endangered species of fish. We have multiple listed plants. The whole project was just really, really scary from not just an exploration point of view, but you know, heaven forbid some kind of mine is ultimately made in this location would be absolutely devastating to the refuge. This was one that we frankly dropped everything we were doing at the time to engage in.

0:04:13 - (Mason Voehl): And it's been quite a journey in the last couple of years. A lot has come out of that fight, and we were able to pause that exploration through a combination of a lot of public pressure and legal action at the time. But this was always this kind of Daedalus hanging over the region of what happens when they come back. They submit a new EA, they do all the things that mining companies do to make the project just palatable enough to get through. And that was something we've literally lived with for the last couple of years of just waiting, checking e planning and just waiting for that to be announced.

0:04:44 - (Mason Voehl): Instead of that, we got some really good news. Last week. The mining company put out a press release that contained a lot of information. They actually completely rebranded. They are now Stockworks Gold instead of Rover Critical Minerals. They advertised a gold mine acquisition in Brazil, announced a change of leadership, and pretty much scrubbed their website of any mention of that project in the Amargosa.

0:05:05 - (Mason Voehl): So we take that to mean they have finally gotten the message that this was never going to go well for them. They were going to face a veritable hornet's nest from us and the communities and the tribes that have all been part of that fight. You know, it's one less thing to worry about. We don't always get that kind of clean ending to these fights. So it's worth celebrating and it just took a lot of people a lot of time to get there. So yeah, just happy to share some good news today.

0:05:34 - (Chris Clarke): And as somebody that had a peripheral role in all this, it was really impressive to me to see that just the broad spectrum of political beliefs and people that came together to fight against these really bad ideas that Rover was putting out. I mean we had dyed in the wool MAGA folks working together with the Center for Biological Diversity and it's just it was a lovely thing to see. It was really a privilege to be part of that actually.

0:06:04 - (Mason Voehl): It still feels like it wasn't real, but the proof is that that happened, and it continues to send a message that we hope is useful. And I wouldn't be doing my job as campaigns director without finishing this by saying this is a huge victory, we should enjoy it. But the work is so far from over. We have at least two potent mining threats that are taking steps through NEPA right now that we have to remain extremely engaged on. And thankfully the communities are like right there with us. So I like our odds of doing it again, but we got to take the wins everywhere we can get it and make sure we don't rush past them because they don't happen every day. So it's just really good to win this one.

0:06:39 - (Chris Clarke): Where can people find out more about this?

0:06:45 - (Mason Voehl): Follow us on Socials we're posting literally every day. We have a blog also that is quite prolific and the best place on see our newsletter. We send out a once monthly E blast that's got all the salient updates to all of these campaigns and action items, petitions, steps that like everyone in your networks can take and all of that makes a difference ultimately. Yeah. Subscribe to the Newsletter I can drop the link in the chat if that's okay Chris and just it's just our way of keeping the broader desert community up to date on these fights.

0:07:14 - (Chris Clarke): Wonderful. Mason, thanks so much for joining us.

0:07:19 - (Mason Voehl): Thanks Chris. And I better get back to my job of putting a three-month-old down to sleep, but this was really a treat, and I hope the rest of the night is joy. Great.

0:07:26 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you so much. And that's it for this chapter of our 100th episode. Thanks to everyone who's contributed to this, namely Mason Voehl, Morgan Sjogren, Cameron Mayer, David Morales, Ruben Martinez and Ruth Nolan. Thanks as well to our voiceover guy Joe Jeffrey and our podcast artist Martin Mancha. Our Nature Sounds recordist Fred Bell will be showing up in our 101st episode. I know I said that he would be showing up in our hundredth episode, and I was mistaken. I apologize to Fred and to you.

0:08:04 - (Chris Clarke): Don't forget we only made it to 100 episodes because people supported what we're doing. If you like what we're doing and you want us to keep doing it, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate if you'd like to get us to Tucson and El Paso at the end of September to spread the word. That's 90milesfromneedles.com/elpaso. thanks for listening, and here's to the next 100 episodes. Bye now.

0:08:31 - (Joe Geoffrey):  90 Miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.