WIRED is proud to congratulate GregoryJBarber on winning the SPJ_NorCal Excellence in Journalism Award for chronicling the fight to save an endangered Nevada wildflower from extinction at the hands of a lithium mine. Read the award-winning piece here:
, with versions that depend on other resources, such as sodium or manganese. In the interim, though, the world needs a lot more lithium.
And besides, the mine would produce an element necessary to mitigate climate change—a misfortune that will eventually wreak havoc on all plants, on this ridge and everywhere else. “We can’t just close our eyes and ears to the fact that we need lithium,” Rowe said. Then, two years ago, Tiehm found himself driving down to Rhyolite Ridge with Elizabeth Leger, a fellow botanist and his boss at the university. She was conducting a study, with money from Ioneer, to see whether the buckwheat could be safely moved from the mining pit. She needed to gather the native soil to grow seedlings in the greenhouses on campus. Leger had taken on the research knowing that transplanting might not work.
To Fraga, the value of a plant is not rooted in beauty or usefulness or even wonder, but because a species exists uniquely on this earth.The discovery kicked off an investigation by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. A preliminary report by UNR concluded that the damage was caused by rodents, not people. But Fraga and Donnelly remained skeptical. The evidence was circumstantial and could have happened after the fact.
Fraga often calls her time with buckwheat an “experiment.” She is a scientist, not an activist, and finds it strange to have stepped over this invisible barrier, putting herself at odds with government scientists she knows from botanical listservs and desert plant conferences. Where Fraga is measured with her words, Donnelly is prone to blurt out sharp opinions.
We stopped to catch our breath halfway up the white hill, which is tremendously steep, on our way to the best spot to view the buckwheat’s universe. Fraga believed the extinction of any species was a tragedy, whether or not anyone had studied it or even laid eyes upon it, but she knew that wouldn’t satisfy most people.
It is impossible to make every cost go away. As Grant sees it, there is no alternative to digging up lithium. The status quo of fossil-burning cars is not an option. What did opponents of lithium mining expect? A return to the horse and buggy? “We don’t need every project,” he says. “Some of them might have impacts that we should not accept. But we’re going to need a large fraction of them, that’s for sure.
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