On a warm morning in late April 2023, a group of restless discontents, few under 40, meet at Florida Station, a small University of Arizona experimental ranch tucked into the lush foothills of the Santa Rita Mountains. Some wear dusty cowboy hats. Turquoise shines against wizened, tanned arms. A few have brought their dogs. All of us are united against Hudbay, a Canadian mining company with a dismal track record of environmental degradation and cultural abuse. Save The Scenic Santa Ritas has become a powerful coalition over the past several years. Momentum has gathered, and we are heartened that Hudbay’s Rosemont Mine/ Copper World has now accumulated several losses in court, but Hudbay’s deep pockets and machiavellian political tactics are never ending. They pivot around legal obstacles as handily as Messi driving towards the goal.
An elderly woman next to me is happy to be here, although she and her husband are returning to Wisconsin soon. They have finally had enough of the dust and noise from the mining trucks and heavy equipment. They held out for years, she says, but gave up in the end. She seems embarrassed as she confides that they recently sold their 10-acre property to Hudbay and Rosemont. “Kathy is still holding out up there in her house,” she says. “She’s the last one, God bless her.” I imagine Kathy as a stubborn, steely-eyed woman with long silver hair, a champion for the cause, doomed in her little ranch house as the tailings piles threaten to swallow her whole. She will not sell out.
A couple behind me, the picture of healthy retirement living in crisp white linen with hair to match, express anger and frustration at each pause between speakers. They staked their claim in a new housing development on Santa Rita Road – a development which will be sucked dry if Rosemont’s deep straw is allowed to drill the deepest well in the State of Arizona to support the third biggest open pit mine in the U.S. All surrounding wells will rapidly run dry as a result of Hudbay’s deeper wells. Longtime residents will be forced out. After all, you can have copper or you can have water. In Arizona at least, you can’t have both. The man who has made what he now sees as a poor decision to purchase a home here seems incredulous that the state, represented by Arizona Senators Mark Kelly (who refuses to take a stance on the issue) and Kirsten Sinema (who supports Hudbay), would choose copper over water when the Colorado River is running dry and water cuts are being implemented in Tucson. Yet this couple cannot interest other homeowners in the same doomed development to even explore the issue of protesting Hudbay and safeguarding their water supply. No one wants to hear about it.
A professor of Geology at the University of Arizona, Dr. Stanley Evans, takes the podium next in his dapper bola tie to discuss the toxic process of milling and the release of lead sulfide and other harmful pollutants as a result. He speaks knowledgeably about how tailings come to be stacked as gigantic mountains of dead toxins. I am briefly heartened to know that Rosemont has been denied a permit to dump toxic tailings onto state lands. When locked into bedrock, Evans explains, lead and other harmful substances cause no problems. It is not until millions of tons of rock are pulverized by steel balls that the toxins are released into the groundwater and the air. I remembered driving past the towering tailings mountains outside of Green Valley on a windy day and noticing what looked like smoke rising lazily into the air, soon to settle to earth as dust on retiree coffee tables everywhere. The dust grimes the towns of Green Valley and Sahuarita as a ghostly pall, coating cars and roofs like a mild Michigan snow flurry. Many suspect that Hudbay and other mining companies intentionally encourage retirement communities to spring up near the toxic tailings – those folks will probably die off anyway before lead poisoning cripples their bones and stunts their children. Hudbay will face fewer lawsuits to pay for damage: retarded children, plummeting property values, infertility.
A young couple speaks about their homestead next. You can picture them 150 years ago – the blonde wife in her sun bonnet and the rugged husband in chaps as he rides the property mending fences. “The trucks never stop,” he decries, offense visible in ever fiber of his being. Even with a cease and desist order from the Army Corps of Engineers, their homestead has become a thoroughfare for heavy equipment, klieg lights, and endless industrial noise. The rural life they carved out for themselves has become a nightmare. “Who can we contact?” he asks. “They all drive white trucks with no identifying marks. Short of taking license plate numbers, what can we do?” No one answers.
A young indigenous woman with her son can contain herself no longer and yells in broken English. “Who wants this? No one wants this! In Alaska we come together and we stop this! Why not here? Who can stop this??” she shouts as young son looks on sheepishly, quietly ashamed of her passion. A few dogs growl in consternation. Her words might’ve been voiced 200 years ago. Her outrage quietly shames all of us.
Save the Scenic Santa Ritas Director Tom Purdon informs us that embattled Arizona Senator Kirsten Sinema recently co-authored a cleverly-disguised bill which she aims to push through as a “Green Energy” measure. This ominous bill will allow mining companies to dump an unlimited amount of toxic mine tailings onto federal and state lands, effectively negating the recent ruling against Hudbay. We all know who her handlers are, and the gall and scope of the giveaway to mining companies at the expense Arizona’s most fragile resource, water, is stupefying. “We need that copper for electric vehicle batteries” she claims. Never mind that only 7% of cars sold in the U.S. were electric last year. Never mind that most of the copper from Rosemont would be shipped to China if this bill is passed. Mining company profits aren’t a consideration for Sinema of course, regardless of their contributions to her campaign.
Rosemont/Copper World will consume the same amount of water that 41,000 new homes would use annually. The water will not be replenished due to climate change, and the national forest will dry and deaden. Not even the worst developers would target the area for residential zoning with such a precarious water supply. Showing the effects of long term drought, the area is environmentally as fragile as they come. If Hudbay is approved, the aquifer will be contaminated during the milling process as toxic chemicals leech into the Santa Cruz River, eventually flowing north into Tucson. No amount of cleanup or tradeoff can rectify poisoning the already-fragile water supply relied upon by more than a million Tucsonans.
Filmmaker John Dougherty’s 2017 documentary film “Flin Flon Flim Flam” details Hudbay’s dismal environmental record. I saw this film at the Loft in Tucson and the audience was inflamed with anger at Hudbay’s reckless destruction in Manitoba, Canada. Hopefully the link below works and you can view the 51-minute film yourself. The excerpt below is from an Investigative Media reports story about the arrest of the filmmaker after a screening of the film in Peru:
“Hudbay is seeking permits to construct the third largest open-pit copper mine in the United States in the Santa Rita Mountains on the Coronado National Forest southeast of Tucson. The project has been stopped pending the outcome litigation in U.S. District Court.
Dougherty and Moore were surrounded by police and ordered into a vehicle after screening Dougherty’s documentary film “Flin Flon Flim Flam” at a downtown Cusco cultural center on April 17, 2017. The film detailed Hudbay’s history of environmental degradation and human rights abuses in Arizona, Canada, Guatemala and Peru.”
Hudbay has no obligation to Tucson, Arizona, or even the United States. Not one cent of profit would be returned to taxpayers for their loss as Hudbay is a Canadian company. The CEOs and engineers are Canadian, and while the company may provide a few unskilled trucking jobs, its long-term impact on the Arizona economy is overwhelmingly negative. While mining might be embedded in Arizona’s DNA, its tragic aftermath is visible in the forbidding, ramshackle mining towns such as Kearney, Hayden, Winkleman, and Globe, their once-vibrant main streets now dilapidated and crumbling. Ghost towns may be scenic, but I wouldn’t want to live in one after the mine pulls out. Under the draconian 1872 mining law which rules mining practices in Arizona, Hudbay has no incentive to even begin to clean up their environmental mess. The company already face dozens of environmental lawsuits in Canada, Peru and Guatemala as residents were left with contaminated water and air. Families in these places now pick their way around apocalyptic open pits and sludge ponds as the mines have played out but the environmental disaster remains. Do we really want this for the next 44 years in one of the most beautiful mountain ranges in Arizona? Are we really willing to sacrifice the fragile ecosystem that supports rare birds and even jaguars to appease the greed of foreign billionaires? I feel dumb even asking such questions when I already know the answer.
We wrote letters by hand in the still heat of the meeting room at Florida Station. The new director for Save the Scenic Santa Ritas even brought stamps as his own expense. It seems futile, but giving up isn’t an option. We can’t drink copper.
Contact http://www.scenicsantaritas.org for more information
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