The last jaguar
and the copper mine in the Sky Islands
To some in Arizona, “El Jefe” is another transient from
Mexico. To others, he’s a symbol of his spectacular habitat. But what is the
value of a lone jaguar against plans for a multibillion-dollar
copper mine?
El Jefe the jaguar video from Conservation CATalyst.VER MAS : VER MAS : https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/05/22/the-last-jaguar-and-the-copper-mine-in-the-sky-islands.html
By KATE ALLENScience
and Technology reporter
TUCSON, ARIZ.—It’s hard to imagine Mayke, a sweet-tempered
Belgian shepherd, in the vocation for which she was bred. Driving by a border
patrol checkpoint on a highway connecting Tucson to Mexico, she betrayed no
reaction.
If the drug-and-bomb-sniffing flunkout was a loss for
Homeland Security, she has been a major gain for Arizona conservation biology.
Mayke appears to be highly motivated by her new role: detecting jaguar scat.
Earlier in the day, as Chris Bugbee, Mayke’s handler, turned onto a rutted road
that rose into the foothills of the Santa Rita Mountains, Mayke began to pant.
“When she starts breathing like that, it’s because she
recognizes where we’re going,” Bugbee said.
Soon they were scrambling down into a canyon studded with
agaves, prickly pear cacti and death-white sycamores. The pebbled creek bed was
bone dry. Bugbee and Mayke bolted ahead as Aletris Neils, Bugbee’s partner in
wildcat conservation and in life, scanned the ground for animal tracks. She had
already spotted a live bobcat perched on the hill above the road, and she
quickly identified prints from a mountain lion and a coati, a hot-climate
cousin of the raccoon.
At a boulder sheltered by a low tree, Bugbee stopped pick up
a motion-triggered infrared remote camera. “It’s like Christmas morning,” Neils
said, watching him click through the video.
The camera revealed footage of a fox, a coyote and a
mountain lion. Several cows and some hunters wandered into its view.
Researchers Aletris Neils and Chris Bugbee are studying “El
Jefe,” the only known wild jaguar in the United States in the Arizona
borderlands. Toronto-based HudBay Minerals Inc. has plans to open a massive
copper mine in the mountains here. (KATE ALLEN / TORONTO
STAR) | ORDER THIS
PHOTO
But there was no sign of Bugbee and Neils’ primary research
subject: America’s only known wild jaguar, El Jefe.
Neils was not surprised. “He’s a prime reproductive male,”
she said. “He should start venturing out and trying to find females.”
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Bugbee and Neils have collected footage of the jaguar at a
dozen sites throughout the Santa Rita Mountains, a fringe of peaks south of
Tucson that belong to a biodiversity hot spot known as the Sky Islands.
Mayke has also identified 13 jaguar scats that have been
genetically verified in a lab.
But this creek bed, where El Jefe has been sighted several
times, is of particular interest to conservationists. It sits on the doorstep
of a proposed Canadian-owned open-pit copper mine. If approved, the Rosemont
mine would be among the largest of its kind in the U.S. Environmental and
citizen groups have been fighting the project for a decade. The final cascade
of decisions to permit or deny it could arrive this month.
Rosemont would carve an 884-metre-deep pit on the eastern
side of the Santa Ritas, and would produce more than 68,000 tonnes of ore and
225,000 tonnes of waste rock every day for 20 to 25 years. The mine’s
2,198-hectare project area would overlap with the jaguar’s federally designated
“critical habitat,” and impact 11 other threatened or endangered species.
Questions about the Canadian extractive sector’s actions in distant
and vulnerable jurisdictionshave surfaced anew recently. A Toronto-based
company is being sued in Canada — a legal first — for the rapes and shootings,
in one case fatal, of indigenous people living near a Guatemalan nickel mine,
actions allegedly perpetrated by mine security officials.
That company, HudBay Minerals Inc., also owns Rosemont.
Arizona’s economy is larger than Finland’s, yet to Rosemont’s opponents,
Toronto-based Hudbay is another foreign corporation exploiting weak regulations
to extract resources in someone else’s backyard.
Hudbay categorically denies the claims in the Guatemalan
civil suits and says it believes the allegations will be resolved in the
company’s favour. In Arizona, the company has sought to project itself as a
modern-day miner leveraging the latest science and technology to support the
environmentally responsible extraction of an important resource.
“We import a third of the copper — 30 per cent of what we
need — here in the nation. That means that some other country has the burden of
our consumption on their environment,” said Kathy Arnold, Rosemont’s director
of environment. “I’d like to think you’d rather have me standing there
protecting the environment than somebody, maybe in China, maybe in Africa, with
less environmental controls.”
Arnold described El Jefe as a transient, a wanderer from
Mexico. Some biologists agree. Jaguars are a reliable source of controversy in
Arizona, and within Tucson’s vigorous conservation community and beyond it, El
Jefe’s significance is debated. Wherever he is, El Jefe is certainly unaware of
the fight to calibrate the value of his life: as an individual of no
consequence, as an unfortunate sacrifice to progress, as a proxy for
incalculable environmental riches, as a sentry for the return of his kind.
“People need to decide whether they think this jaguar is
worth saving,” said Neils.
His refuge in an ocean of desert
Arizona's "Sky Islands" rise out of an ocean of
desert. These mountains are recogized as a biodiversity hot spot, and are part
of El Jefe's habitat. (KATE ALLEN/TORONTO STAR)
The mountains of southern Arizona irrupt haphazardly into
the desert. Stranded like tumbled molars between two great mountain ranges that
jaw to the north and south — the Rockies and the Sierra Madres — these peaks
are known as the Madrean “Sky Islands” because the flora and fauna adapted to
their inclines are isolated between oceans of desert or grassland. Standing
amidst cacti at the bottom of these mountains, it is not uncommon to see snow
dusting the conifers on their peaks. Ecozones are stacked like Lego: desert to
grassland to chaparral to oak-pine woodland to spruce-fir forest.
“If you start at bottom of one of these mountains and hike
to the top, you will be hitting all the habitats that you would if you drove
from Mexico to Canada,” said Jessica Moreno, conservation, outreach and
development manager for the Sky
Island Alliance, an organization dedicated to preserving the region.
The Sky Islands’ biological richness is compounded by their
location at the hub of several major wildlife corridors. The Sierra Madres
bring subtropical species such as jaguars, ocelots and parrots. The Rockies
draw northern, temperate ones: grizzlies are now extinct here, but black bears
are still common. Southern Arizona also sits at the confluence of two different
desert zones: the flowering Sonoran desert, with its distinctive saguaro
cactus, and the scrubbier, yucca- and agave-filled Chihuahuan desert. The Great
Plains also contribute grassland species.
At least a third of North America’s birds can be found in
the region. When Moreno compared tallies of native vertebrate species in the
Sky Islands to those in Yellowstone National Park, she found more in a single
Arizonan-Sonoran river, the San Pedro.
The wildlife in this southern corner of Arizona includes
several species, like this ocelot at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, more
commonly found in subtropical habitats to the south. (KATE
ALLEN/TORONTO STAR)
All five confirmed jaguars sighted in the U.S. in the past
two decades were found in the Sky Islands, but they weren’t always confined to
this corner of Arizona.
Ten days before Christmas 1900, the El Paso Herald published
a thrilling bulletin from New Mexico under the headline “An immense jaguar
killed near Engle and another one encountered.” The newspaper recounted that an
assessor “was walking over the hills, near the camp, when he discovered an
immense jaguar or American tiger coming straight toward him. He opened fire on
him with a 30-30 rifle, and after firing 11 shots, the monster lay dead, with
three mortal wounds in his head and body.”
The historical distribution of jaguars in America is pocked
with uncertainty, but hunters’ trophies, newspaper accounts and government
registers suggest that jaguars once roamed from coastal California to Texas’s
eastern border with Louisiana to the Grand Canyon in the north. Breeding
colonies existed, and as recently as 1963, an Arizonan hunter shot an adult
female.
Big cats are especially vulnerable to human impacts. Jaguars
have been eliminated from more than half of their historic range, which spans
Central and South America, and are listed as
“near-
threatened” on the IUCN Red List.
Jaguars were explicitly targeted for extinction in the
American Southwest. As David Brown and Carlos Lopez Gonzalez write in their
book Borderland Jaguars, the U.S. government’s Predatory Animal and
Rodent Control branch set out in the years after 1915 to poison, shoot, trap,
or otherwise be rid of all wolves, mountain lions and other carnivores. Bounty
hunters and state predator agents were paid for eliminating them.
For decades, jaguars were thought to be extinct in the U.S.
It was only in 1997, a year after hunters’ dogs treed two individuals, that the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed jaguars as an endangered species.
Usually, that listing is accompanied by an official recovery plan and the
designation of “critical habitat.” But the service declared these protections
were not necessary, because the species qualified as foreign.
The Tucson-based Center
for Biological Diversity sued the Fish and Wildlife Service. A judge
agreed the agency’s decision was based on bad science, and in 2014, the service
finally designated 309,264 hectares of land in Arizona and New Mexico as jaguar
critical habitat. (The Center for Biological Diversity also held the naming
contest that gave El Jefe his boss-man moniker.)
Connectivity is key for jaguars, and in Arizona, habitat
fragmentation is the species greatest barrier to recovery.
When Donald Trump vowed to build a “great, great wall on our
southern border, and make Mexico pay for it,” he inadvertently staked himself
as the anti-jaguar candidate. The fences Homeland Security has built along the
Arizona border, 5.5 metres high and solid metal, can claim dubious success at
stemming the flow of migrants and illegal drugs. But they have dammed the
natural migration of animals — especially
in the Sky Islands.
Other threats to habitat are baked into Arizona’s
infrastructure. The state’s economy was founded on the “5 Cs.” The first three
Cs — citrus, cotton and cattle — carved up the land for farms. Climate, the
fourth, spurred a sprawl of housing developments. The fifth C has also
remodelled Arizona’s landscape: copper.
The copper heart of Arizona
Toronto-based HudBay Minerals Inc. wants to dig a massive
open-pit copper mine in these mountains south of Tucson, Arizona. To many in
the region the jaguar El Jefe is just another transient from Mexico. (KATE
ALLEN/TORONTO STAR)
HudBay Minerals Inc. acquired Rosemont along with its
previous owner, Vancouver-based Augusta Resource Corp., in a
hostile-turned-friendly takeover. And like Augusta, which ran an aggressive
marketing campaign with the slogan “Rosemont Copper: Redefining Mining,” the
company has sought to project an image of a science-based mine invested in the
community and mindful of the environment.
Arizona’s business community has been the loudest backer of
Rosemont. The company has said the project will create 400 jobs and thousands
more indirectly, and commissioned studies that peg the economic benefits of the
mine over its lifetime in the tens of billions.
“Mining has always been sort of a foothold here,” says Rick
Grinnell, vice-president of the Southern Arizona Business Coalition, a group
created to support responsible mining. Grinnell was previously contracted by
Rosemont to drum up local business support.
Mineral riches were critical to Arizona’s modern history,
from the Spanish conquistadors who sought cities of gold to labourers lured by
the 1872 General Mining Law. The law, meant to encourage settlers to come west,
declared that citizens who struck a deposit on federal lands — including
national forests — had a right to mine it, with little recompense to the public
purse. By the early 20th century, one in four Arizonans was a miner.
Last year, Arizona produced 70 per cent of all the copper
mined in America. Rosemont would be the third-largest copper mine in the
country. Yet if mining is a foothold, it has become a narrower one. Mining
accounts for less than 2 per cent of Arizona’s economy and employment, and
Rosemont’s 400 jobs would add a fraction of a per cent to the state’s current
civilian labour force.
An environmental group opposed to the mine commissioned its
own study that said even a small decrease in regional tourism would outweigh
the benefits of the mine. The Tucson Audubon Society commissioned another study
that concluded birders and other wildlife watchers contribute $1.4 billion
(U.S.) to Arizona annually.
Grinnell says he has no idea where the environmentalists’
numbers come from. “People don’t come to southern Arizona to go climb in the
Santa Rita Mountains,” he said, arguing that if anything, Rosemont’s open pit
would draw tourists. “People want to see something like this.”
As for the environment, “mining is impactful, by its own
nature,” acknowledges Kathy Arnold, Rosemont’s director of environment. “My
goal has always been to make sure we understand what we need to do to make the
least impact that we can.”
At the project site, Arnold pointed out test plots where
staff were monitoring an experiment with soils and seeds to determine how best
to re-establish the natural grasses. She emphasized that the company would
begin reclaiming land within the first year of operations. She pointed out
equipment used to measure rainwater and better understand the hydrology of the
site, and cited the dry-stack tailings system that would use up to 60 per cent
less water.
We visited Rosemont’s mitigation lands, 1,950 hectares that
the company had pledged to restore as conservation areas to offset the impacts
of the mine. The company has committed to paying $4.25 million for an invasive
species removal program and a habitat improvement program for two imperilled
bird species, funding for a staff biologist to oversee conservation measures, and
millions
more for other community and environmental projects.
As with the mine’s economic impact, it is possible to array
an alternate set of facts about its environmental impact. In a 2013 letter, the
Environmental Protection Agency called Rosemont’s mitigation plans “grossly
inadequate,” describing the methods used to assess the sites as “scientifically
flawed.” The EPA has not publicly commented on a recent update to the plans.
While land reclamation would begin on day one, the mine’s
283-hectare pit would never be reclaimed, and EPA officials wrote that the pit
will convert the site from a water source to a water sink, lowering the
regional aquifer and causing a permanent reduction to streams that support
endangered wildlife. In 2014 an environmental group, Save the Scenic Santa
Ritas, sued to rescind Rosemont’s air quality permit and won — a decision that
is being appealed.
Rosemont occupies a small fraction of the total jaguar
critical habitat, but the site blocks off part of a major corridor. When I asked
Arnold about this, she said El Jefe “might have to time his trips,” but also
that there’s no reason the jaguar has to use that corridor, calling its
boundaries “arbitrary.”
In response to a question about whether Rosemont would
damage a sensitive biodiversity hot spot, Arnold responded that “I’m not sure
why someone would say that’s a biodiversity hot spot,” compared with other
locales elsewhere in the Santa Ritas or nearby.
The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, a program
administered by a consortium that includes the World Bank, the European Union
and Conservation International, lists the Madrean Pine-Oak Woodlands — a region
that includes the Santa Rita Mountains — as one of 36 global biodiversity hot
spots.
Rosemont has facts to counter these facts, and
conservationists have facts to counter those, like a never-ending game of
tennis that no one wants to watch.
Even the litany of federal and state agencies tasked with
assessing Rosemont do not agree. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released
its updated “biological opinion” this month. It concluded that Rosemont would
adversely affect but not jeopardize the existence of endangered species,
including the jaguar, and that it would lower the water table but not destroy
important streams. The EPA, which can veto a crucial water permit or refer the
case for higher review in Washington, previously wrote that the mine would
unacceptably degrade the ecosystem and should not be permitted as proposed, but
has been mum of late. The Forest Service says that because of the 1872 Mining
Law, which still stands, it cannot deny the project; it has not said when it
will issue its final decision.
“The permitting process is a piecemeal process where we look
at slices. What companies and regulators want you to think is once done we have
the whole pie,” said David Chambers, an environmental consultant.
Chambers conducted an assessment of Rosemont for a county
opposed to the project. But he was quick to say there is no definitive answer
to whether the mine is good or bad.
“Ultimately, one is looking at whether the economic benefits
of a project outweigh the environmental and social costs. And there, beauty is
in the eye of the beholder,” he said. Everyone has to bake their own pie: the
decision is a value judgment. And for Rosemont, that judgment will be partly
based on how you value the life of a wildcat.
How much is one cat worth?
El Jefe, caught on one of Conservation CATalyst's remote
cameras in 2015. The cat is only known wild jaguar in the U.S. Years ago, the
big cats ranged from California to Texas to the Grand Canyon in the north. (CONSERVATION
CATALYST AND CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY/AP)
For the Mayans, jaguars were a symbol of war and a jaguar
pelt decorated the seat of ultimate power. For the Aztecs, jaguars were a totem
of authority and jaguar gods were associated with the Earth.
The jaguar means different things to different people in
Tucson’s conservation community.
“If you have a jaguar, that’s an indication of a really
healthy habitat,” says the Sky Island Alliance’s Jessica Moreno. “The jaguar is
telling us, by his presence in the Santa Ritas, that the Santa Ritas are a very
critical, very important, very valuable place.”
Moreno, like other Tucson conservationists I spoke to, said
that water is the critical issue with Rosemont. In Arizona, everyone cares
about water, and the long-awaited water permits may be the best way to stop the
mine. Not everyone cares about El Jefe.
“Depending on your perspective and how much you care about
wildlife, depends on how you weigh that single jaguar,” Moreno said.
Even those who have spent their lives saving wildcats don’t
agree on the worth of a single jaguar. When the Fish and Wildlife Service
finally declared it would designate critical habitat for the species, Alan
Rabinowitz, the CEO of Panthera, an organization devoted to wildcat conservation,
called that decision “a slap in the face to good science.” With just a few
individual jaguars spotted over decades and no known breeding populations, he
wrote, money and effort was being diverted from the jaguar populations that
were critical to the survival of the species. Panthera’sjaguar
corridor initiative, which knits together habitat in 14 countries, ends in
Mexico.
Rabinowitz has not changed his mind. “Look, I think there
are lots of reasons for saving that beautiful landscape in the Southwest,” he
said. “Find other reasons to save it. But don’t ask me as a jaguar biologist,
who has spent my entire career studying jaguars, to use the animal when I don’t
think the data calls for it — and so much of its other habitat where it does
exist in the tens of thousands needs work.”
Neils and Bugbee, who have also devoted their conservation
careers exclusively to wildcats, bridle at such thinking. “I get very
frustrated with some of the scientists who say this jaguar is not important.
Because every individual jaguar is important,” said Neils.
Peripheral populations — animal at the fringes of their
natural range — often have unique adaptations, genetic diversity that can be
vital to long-term conservation of a species. Biologists have argued that the
American Southwest may become more important for jaguars as climate change
shifts habitats northward. And, Neils wondered, how can America possibly
pressure other countries to protect their jaguars when it can’t even save one?
Still: “We shouldn’t be focused on the single jaguar that’s
here now. We should be focused on ways we’re going to recover the jaguar to its
former territory,” says Bugbee. “We know the Santa Ritas had female jaguars.
And every mountain range to the south, north, east, west, they all had jaguars.
They were here.”
We can bring them back; we eliminated them in the first
place, after all.
In February, under the banner of their non-profit, Conservation CATalyst, and in
partnership with the Center for Biological Diversity, Neils and Bugbee released
remote camera video of El Jefe prowling the rugged wilds of the sky islands.
The video made news across the country for days.
“That was our main goal, just to get people to talk,” Neils
says. “We’re really at a turning point here, where if this mine goes in, we’re
saying for the rest of time that jaguars are not an important endangered
species for the United States. That we don’t care about jaguars, period. So the
public needs to weigh in on this decision.”
The risk, of course, is that the public will weigh in, and
decide that the economic benefits of Rosemont are worth the loss of a single
jaguar, or the chance to restore jaguars in America, or even the physical
beauty and biological richness of the Santa Rita Mountains.
A small car contains 20 kilograms of copper. A luxury SUV
contains 44 kilograms. “I see a watch. I see a recorder. I see your cellphone,”
Arnold responded when asked why the mine’s environmental impacts were worth it.
She pressed a button and rolled down a reporter’s car window. “Every time we
build a little motor just to roll down your window, there’s copper wire.”
That copper does not have to come from Rosemont. But if
demand for copper continues to grow, it will come from somewhere. Rosemont’s
opponents have been granted a reprieve not because of their protests but
because of the current slump in the commodities market: Hudbay once hoped to
begin construction this year, but recently stated that Rosemont will be built
when copper prices improve.
In its economic impact report, the Arizona Mining
Association says that when it measures the contribution of the industry to the
state’s economy, “we exclude the capital income of the mining companies
themselves since that income accrues largely to shareholders worldwide rather
than to residents of Arizona.” In the case of Hudbay, those are shareholders in
a company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and headquartered at 25 York St.
In Tucson, I kept asking Arizonans what they would want Canadians to know about
Rosemont.
“Ask them if them if they’re willing to give up their
cellphones. Ask them if they’re willing to give up their electronics, give up
their solar,” Rick Grinnell said.
Jessica Moreno, meanwhile, wrote in an email that lack of
awareness enables environmental destruction. “What I hope Canadians can take
from this, and Americans too, is that we have a responsibility to be informed,
even when the activity is happening in someone else’s backyard or in another
country. These companies should be held accountable at home.”
In earlier conversation in Tucson, she tendered an
invitation. “I would hope that Canadians would love to come out here and visit,
and hike the Arizona Trail, and think about being in a place where jaguars
live.”
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