This story is co-published with Arizona Luminaria, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to community-centered reporting.
MAMMOTH, Ariz.—Overlooking a ridge in the Galiuro Mountains, one of Arizona’s famed Sky Islands that provide refuges for wildlife in the hot Sonoran Desert, Melissa Crytzer Fry and her husband, Steve, stand above what could one day become an underground mine.
Steve pulls up a map showing Faraday Copper’s proposed mine site on a tablet and points to surrounding locations that would become mining pits, waste piles or facilities for the project. A creek that feeds into the river below them, at the mountains’ base, would become six open pits.
Under the peaks here lies copper, a long-standing pillar of Arizona’s economy and a critical mineral for the renewable energy transition because of its ability to transmit electricity. Its significance is not lost on the Frys; Steve works in the tech industry that depends on it.
But mining’s legacy is all around them in the desert northeast of Tucson. Facing their overlook, a tailings pile from a 1970s copper mine scars the earth.
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For more than a century, Copper Creek, running deep into the foothills, has drawn the interest of mining companies, but none have ever dug in along it.
People come to southern Arizona and the Western U.S. to live near landscapes owned largely by the federal government and open to the public, as is the case in the San Pedro Valley that the Frys call home. But those lands are also open to mining companies that have free rein to claim the land and water.
If Faraday’s mine is built, the Frys worry the creek that feeds into the local river could disappear. Miners could dig open pits atop it and deplete the aquifer below, as the mine would likely require water to be pumped out once the digging punctures the underground reservoir, a process known as dewatering. Under Arizona law, anyone is free to pump as much water as they please in rural places like these, and even where the water is regulated, mines are largely exempt.
“A project like this,” Steve said as he looked over the mine’s proposed site, “has something for everyone to hate.”
Concerns …
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