Southern Arizona mine's quick approval worries jaguar advocates

The $3 billion South 32 Hermosa project will unearth deposits of zinc, manganese, lead and silver — all deemed critical minerals and buried in the Patagonia Mountains near the U.S.- Mexico border.

The underground mine will sit mostly on private land but stretch into the Coronado National Forest, where a waste tailings pile and other infrastructure will be built on federally designated endangered jaguar habitat.

South 32 is one of the first projects to work its way through an expedited approvals process expanded by both the Biden and Trump administrations. Under former President Joe Biden, the mine was listed under the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act of 2015. Dubbed FAST-41, it’s meant to accelerate the permitting process and improve transparency for projects that could benefit the country.

Both Zinc and manganese are considered critical minerals needed for batteries, defense and construction.

"President Trump has launched an all of government mandate to strengthen and secure America’s critical minerals supply chains,” said U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins in a July 7 press release praising the Hermosa project.

It’s among 56 mining projects in the FAST-41 program, which has garnered criticism from conservationists. Community members in Santa Cruz County say the rush to approve the mine has left fundamental questions about long-term environmental impacts unanswered and will put one of the most biodiverse regions of the state in peril.

Already, discharged water from the mine has been flagged by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality for exceeding allowable levels of heavy metals.

“This sets a troubling precedent that weakens longstanding environmental protections for public lands,” said Anna Darian, the executive director of Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, in an email to The Arizona Republic.

Mine could disrupt habitat for jaguars, other wildlife

The South 32 Hermosa mine is located in the Patagonia Mountains, a 15-mile range in the Madrean Sky Islands, which connect the Sierra Madres in Mexico to the Rocky Mountains. The sky islands are isolated high-elevation mountain ranges with unique ecosystems separated by the arid desert below them.

They are also one of the most biodiverse regions in the world and an important wildlife corridor. Conservationists say the Forest Service’s approval is putting the Patagonias in jeopardy.

“The Forest Service failed to adequately analyze the project's impacts on wildlife and habitat connectivity in one of the Southwest's most ecologically significant landscapes,” Darian said.

With new roads, a tailings pile, transmission lines and other infrastructure, the mine could fragment portions of critical habitat for threatened species like jaguars and Mexican spotted owls.

The Forest Service amended the Coronado National Forest Plan, granting 31 exceptions to previously enshrined stipulations in order to accommodate the mine. Those exceptions and the expedited approval mean that the agency approved the project prematurely and without addressing all potential impacts to wildlife and water, conservationists say.

“Bulldozing new roads and building a tailings dumpsite on federally protected habitat for jaguars and Mexican spotted owls will push these endangered animals closer to extinction,” said Russ McSpadden, a Southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity in a press release.

As approved, the mine will have a 70-year lifespan. Each year, it’s expected to remove 2,790 acre-feet of water from the aquifer, amounting to 195,000 acre-feet over the course of its operations. Though some water will be recharged, the final environmental impact statement notes that net water loss from the aquifer will be 34,000 acre-feet, equivalent to over 1 billion gallons.

Nearby residents in the project's 50-mile cone of depression worry that groundwater pumping could cause their wells to run dry and that the overall dewatering could affect the surrounding ecosystem — both possibilities listed in the environmental impact statement.

“Groundwater management wells and dewatering practices could affect groundwater dependent special status species and habitat that occurs in the Project’s groundwater drawdown cone,” the statement reads. “Groundwater levels would decline to varied extents in private wells within the dewatering radius of influence.”

Instead of evaluating the impacts collectively, the agency reviewed them in isolation, Darian said. “As a result, the environmental review understated or deferred analysis of groundwater depletion, wastewater discharges, air quality, wildlife habitat, public health, and cumulative impacts.”

Fast-track process is being exploited, critics say

A decade ago, President Barack Obama created the FAST-41 program to streamline permitting for infrastructure projects. Under Biden, it was expanded to include critical minerals.

South 32 was the first mining project covered by FAST-41, said Emily Domenech, the executive director of the federal government's permitting council, in a statement. It helped lay the groundwork for the additional mining projects that have followed during the Trump administration, she said.

Since taking office again, President Donald Trump has added 54 more mining projects (and a host of minerals to the critical minerals list), an expansion that’s raised alarms among environmentalists and lawmakers who worry that FAST-41 is being exploited to quickly approve projects with potentially large and lasting environmental footprints.

In an April letter to Forest Service Chief Tom Shultz, Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat, wrote that the “Hermosa project’s designation as the first critical minerals project under the FAST-41 permitting framework makes it especially consequential.”

She stressed that while FAST-41 is meant to improve efficiency in permitting, mining is one of the most environmentally impactful industries and, as a result, expedited permitting shouldn’t come at the expense of public participation.

In a statement, South 32 said Hermosa’s advancement under FAST-41 “did not reduce the robustness of environmental review or limit public input."

But Darian and 14 other Arizona environmental organizations say that none of their concerns were meaningfully addressed in the Forest Service’s final decision.