2020 is Cursed? Here’s Some Good News to Turn That Stigma Around.

Did you know there are wild jaguars in the United States?

No? Don’t worry, not many people do.

Rising above the Arizona desert, the Santa Rita Mountains cradle 10,000 years of Indigenous history, as well as act as the home for a species of native jaguar, the Coleman’s coral root, which is a desert orchid endemic to southern Arizona & southwestern New Mexico (only a few hundred flowers are known to exist) and many more rare and endangered species.

Well, this unique and incredibly precious landscape was under threat just under a year ago.

Toronto-based Hudbay Minerals Inc., which had attempted to build a large-scale mine directly in the area these endangered species are located after they received everything they needed to start mining with the greenlight from The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The service claimed the mine would not jeopardize threatened and endangered species in the area, even though many models and many protestors begged differently.

Because of this, back in September 2017, the Center for Biological Diversity sued to challenge the Fish and Wildlife Service’s opinion under the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to determine the mine would not jeopardize threatened and endangered species in the area.

Fast-forward to February 10, 2020.

A federal court ruling found that the mine had enough potential to disrupt the ecosystem that it would need to be stopped from beginning.

“A federal judge today overturned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s approval of a controversial open-pit copper mine in southern Arizona’s Santa Rita Mountains because of threats to jaguars and other endangered species,” the ruling stated.

In the ruling, Judge Soto determined that the biological opinion the agency relied on to approve the mine failed to ensure protections for endangered species in the area, including jaguars, northern Mexican garter snakes, Chiricahua leopard frogs, fish and birds.

He threw out the opinion and ordered the agency to start over.

For the endangered jaguar, Soto ruled that the Fish and Wildlife Service violated the law’s requirement of “institutionalized caution” by using an improper heightened standard to determine whether the mine would destroy the animal’s critical habitat.

This implies that the Fish and Wildlife Service lied as to the potential dangers placed on inserting a mine directly into this environment, and the effect that that action would have on the fragile ecosystem they live in.

“The heightened standard impermissibly constrains the effectiveness of the ESA’s protections, which comes at a high, and potentially detrimental, cost to listed species and their habitat,” Soto said.

The agency also failed to identify the “tipping point” for the endangered northern Mexican gartersnake before determining whether the severe impact caused by the proposed mine would jeopardize the species’ survival or recovery.

“This is a wonderful win for the Santa Rita’s rare and beautiful animals, including the endangered jaguar,” Marc Fink, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said. “The judge put the focus right where it belongs, on the protections demanded by the Endangered Species Act, and on sound scientific analysis of what these imperiled species need to survive and recover.”

Fink said that the ruling helped protect these animals, and rightly so, as they are important members of the history and future of the area.

“The jaguars and endangered frogs, snakes and fish that call this place home are too important and vulnerable to be sacrificed for mining company profits,” Fink said.

The animals are also not the only winners in the decision either.

The Tohono O’odham Nation, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and Hopi Tribe, among numerous other ancestral tribes, have worshipped, foraged, hunted, and laid their ancestors to rest in the mountains for generations and the proposed dig would have buried dozens of sites, sacred to the Tribes, under 1.8 billion tons of toxic waste.

The mine’s construction would raze ancestral Hohokam burial grounds, a historic Hohokam village, and vital mountain springs as well as disrupt numerous other tribal importances.

“Our relationship to the land is first and foremost,” Austin G. Nuñez, chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s San Xavier District in Tucson, said. “When our Hohokam ancestors’ laid their loved ones in their final resting place, they never envisioned having them disturbed and we make every effort to not disturb them; we still feel their spirits today.”

However, there is still work yet to be done.

The almost certain result of Soto’s ruling is that the wildlife service, as well as Hudbay Minerals, will look to revise the three sections Judge Soto mainly found issue with, and return to courts with a revised plan to continue mining.

The only part of Soto’s ruling being appealed currently is a section upholding an earlier wildlife service decision to put the mine site and surrounding lands into jaguar critical habitat.

Hudbay is expecting that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco will go along with a recent opinion by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver overturning a service decision designating 103,000 acres in southwest New Mexico as jaguar critical habitat.

What this means is that, for now, rare species of animals and a beautiful landscape in Southern Arizona are safe.

But in the long term, anything is possible.

To learn more about the issue and others like it: https://biologicaldiversity.org/