Lawsuit alleges BLM violated Endangered Species Act in approving lithium mine

A week after the Bureau of Land Management approved Nevada’s third lithium mine, environmentalists and a Western Shoshone group filed a lawsuit alleging that the agency rushed the environmental review process and violated federal laws.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court on Thursday, is the latest in a long line of challenges to a lithium-boron mine proposed in rural Esmeralda County by Ioneer, an Australian mining company. The company says its mine, located miles away from the country’s only lithium mine in the Silver Peak mountain range, would produce enough lithium to power 370,000 electric vehicles every year.

“The end use of minerals, whether for EV’s or solar panels, does not justify this disregard of Indigenous cultural areas and keystone environmental laws,” said John Hadder, director of Great Basin Resource Watch and one of the plaintiffs, in a statement. “Approval of this mine risks rolling back standards of protection and advancing an era of relaxed mine permitting that we and future generations will seriously regret.”

Much of the controversy surrounding the mine has come down to a single endangered wildflower species, Tiehm’s buckwheat, though the area is home to bighorn sheep, golden eagles and more. The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental watchdog organization, successfully petitioned for Endangered Species Act protections, causing Ioneer to reduce its disturbance of the flower’s habitat.

The agency that awarded those federal protections for Tiehm’s buckwheat, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is the same one that issued a formal biological opinion in the review process declaring that the mine’s nearly 1,000-foot open pit and sulfuric acid processing plant would not put the plant in jeopardy or threaten its habitat.

The BLM gave its full approval to the project last week, with officials and politicians praising the move, though the center obtained internal agency emails through the Freedom of Information Act that called the review process “a very aggressive schedule that deviates from other project schedules on similar projects.”

The BLM did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Chad Yeftich, Ioneer’s vice president of corporate development and external affairs, said in a statement that he does not anticipate that a lawsuit would delay construction, which is set to begin in 2025.

“We intend to intervene and vigorously defend the BLM’s decision, which was based on its careful and thorough permitting process,” Yeftich said. “We are confident that the BLM will prevail against this lawsuit.”

Lithium production — at a cost

Other considerations at the forefront of the lawsuit are water and its cultural importance to the Western Shoshone, a group of several Shoshone tribes with ancestral lands across Idaho, Nevada, Utah and California.

About 3,000 Western Shoshone people lived in the Fish Lake Valley area before outside contact, according to oral histories cited in the lawsuit.

The process of mine de-watering could affect springs in the area, according to the lawsuit and an independent hydrologist. That includes Cave Spring, a heritage site that would be less than a mile from the open pit.

“Cave Spring is an irreplaceable Western Shoshone sacred site which is essential to the continued intergenerational transmission of local Shoshone identity,” the legal complaint reads. “It is where Western Shoshone families go to educate young people about Shoshone identity and share sacred teachings through story.”

The lawsuit claims the approval violates the Endangered Species Act, the Federal Policy Land Management Act, the Tonopah Resource Management Plan that governs how to protect resources in the area, and the National Environmental Policy Act that details how the federal government should conduct environmental reviews of projects on public land.

Fermina Stevens, director of tribal organization and plaintiff Western Shoshone Defense Project, said in a statement that the approval of the Ioneer mine is an example of how the federal government has failed to safeguard Western Shoshone ancestral land over 200 years.

The mine’s goal of establishing a domestic supply of lithium in the name of a green energy transition is not a worthy tradeoff, Stevens said.

“The United States and corporations claim to be saving the planet as they destroy land and pollute water in an accelerated manner by bending and breaking the rules they wrote,” Stevens said. “One cannot save the planet from climate change while simultaneously destroying biodiversity.”