In another demonstration of its anti-nature agenda, the regime at the Very White House has reversed an Army Corps of Engineers' decision to protect jaguar habitat in Arizona's Santa Rita mountains. In 2016 the Corps rejected a permit for Rosemont copper mine out of concern for adverse impacts on endangered species like
El Jefe,
[photo] the resident male jaguar, pristine water supplies and native cultural sites.
{27.01.17} The agency did an about face under a regime that is so rapacious it is willing to risk planetary catastrophe in pursuit of profit by removing so-called 'regulatory burdens'. The fact that these environmental regulations and other like them have justification in important social values, such as public health and biodiversity, is considered irrelevant when money making is concerned.
Panthera onca's future in the US is tenuous. The species received legal protection in 1997, but they have not yet repopulated their southwestern range in numbers.
[map] Only six jaguars have been spotted north of the border, all of them males. Most jaguars live in Mexico, an estimated 4,000 concentrated in the southern states. International conservation efforts have recently been focused on re-establishing northern Mexico populations. If the US males are to breed they will have to cross over for mates. However, Sonoran females are also threatened. To give them some relief, an 86 square mile refuge was created in 2003, managed cooperatively by private American and Mexican preservation groups. Now, as many as 120 jaguars including mothers and cubs roam the North American Jaguar Reserve and surrounding
ranchos. Significantly, the reserve offers compensation to local ranchers who allow camera traps on their land to monitor jaguar activity; conflicts with livestock may be their greatest problem.
Heading north is risky for both female jaguars and humans. Besides a scarcity of food, water and mates, jaguars run a gantlet of border barriers, busy roads and well-armed humans. They may now face an absurd steel barrier thirty fee high. In fact the late feline advocate, Alan Ribinowitz, concluded that limited resources are better spent on protecting jaguars in Mexico because the US jaguar population is so tenuous. That ignores the obvious fact that some intrepid jaguars have returned to their former range in the USA. The US Fish & Wildlife lost three separate lawsuits forcing it to develop conservation plans and designate critical habitat.
The Sonoran success story may eventually be reproduced in the borderlands, but that may take decades or even a century. Female cubs in the refuge stay close to their mothers from one generation to the next. Territorial expansion is therefore very slow. According to the late ecologist Peter Warshall, who was the science coordinator for the reserve, “the fastest female inter-generational lineage might return to the U.S. sky islands (such as the Santa Rita Range) in 45 to 70 years, conservatively 60 to 85, and if many of our assumptions are too optimistic, from 100 to 250 years. Since that 2012 scholarly report, several more ranches have volunteered to serve as research sites and refuges. There is hope for the American jaguar, if over-exploitation of available natural resources in the region is stopped.
 |
| mine site, photo credits: High Country News |
The Rosemont copper mine was first proposed in 2007. The project's central feature is an open-pit copper mine on public forest land a mile wide and thousands of feet deep. The proposal would require the storage of billions of tons of mine waste which would eventually contaminate surrounding forests and water sources. It could use 5 million gallons of water a day, lowering the water table of the Cienega Creek basin. Clean Water Act permits from the Corps of Engineers were the last regulatory hurdle. Despite written objections from the EPA t regional office warning that the mine’s cutoff of storm water flows into neighboring streams and its groundwater pumping will significantly degrade federally regulated and rare water bodies, the permits were granted to a Canadian company on March 9th.
The impacts will be contrary to the goals of the federal Clean Water Act, the EPA said, strongly implying the act itself would be violated.
This time around the agency ignored the EPA warnings, finding that the company's mitigation arguments were sufficient to offset local damage and that the groundwater impacts were beyond its jurisdiction to address. Given the green light, the Canadian firm has forged ahead, buying out a South Korean interest in the mine, announcing it planned to begin work by the end of the year. The conservation fight is not over, however. Two lawsuits have been filed, one by environmentalists and another by a coalition of Indian tribes. The Indians are objecting to the desecration of burial sites among other damage to be inflicted on the natural resources by a mine site covering 5,431 acres.
