Save The Santa Ritas!

I found this story very disturbing. In 1982, as part of a field experiment, I spent many happy days at Thurber Ranch on the east side of the Santa Rita Mountains, which, from the map, looks like it will be annihilated, or nearly so. I had an exhausting duel with a pheasant at Thurber Ranch (which the bird-brained pheasant won). The movie "Oklahoma!" was filmed not far away. It is a unique and special landscape, and it will be completely-destroyed if this project goes forward:

An ongoing battle between local residents and environmentalists and a Canadian mining company eager to dig for copper in the spectacular Santa Rita Mountains in southern Arizona’s Coronado National Forest has become the poster child for the need to reform a 141-year-old law that governs hard rock mining on federal lands.

A state fish and game department report says the mine would render the northern parts of the Santa Rita Mountains “almost useless.”

Vancouver-based speculative mining company, Augusta Resource Corporation, and its Arizona subsidiary, Rosemont Copper Company, plan to blast a mile-wide, half-mile deep copper mine on 4,000 acres of the mountains, 50 miles southeast of Tucson. If its proposal goes through, Rosemont claims the mine could supply 5 percent of the country’s copper needs and will bring “thousands of jobs” and “$19 billion in economic stimulus” to southern Arizona.

But opponents of the mine — including the mayor of Tucson, local citizens’ groups, farmers and ranchers, and environmentalists — say these purported economic gains will be negated by the impact of mining activities on the environment and hurt the arid region’s water supply and tourism industry that relies heavily on preserving the mountains’ “sky island” ecosystem. (Tourism and outdoor recreation is Southern Arizona bring in about $2.95 billion a year in revenues, according to a 2007 study by the Sonoran Institute, a land-use advocacy group based in Tucson.)

“This is a high desert grassland area; it is an area where we still have ocelots and jaguars and all kinds of birds and endangered species, it is home to one of the last free running streams in Arizona… it attracts lots of tourists… we could lose all of that,” says Nan Walden, whose family owns a 7,000-acre partly-organic pecan farm to the west of the mountains. The mine, which would draw 5,000 to 6,000 acre-feet of water every year from local aquifers, would affect their farm’s water supply, Walden says.

...The Santa Rita Mountains are part of an important wildlife corridor that connects southern Arizona’s sky island mountain ranges — isolated mountains that rise up from surrounding lowlands resulting in cooler, alpine-like “habitat islands” with unique plant and animal species. The area is home to at least 10 endangered and at risk species and includes some precious wetlands that have been designated “Outstanding Arizona Waters” by the state. This means the wetlands qualify for special protection under the US Clean Water Act. In a 2008 report, the Arizona Fish and Game Department said the copper mine’s “effects would be devastating…” and that the “northern parts of the Santa Rita Mountains would be rendered almost useless.”