Tonto National Forest
One executive action most conservatives hate is the establishment of a national monument, which the president can do without congressional approval. He/She marks out some land on a map, declares it ecologically or culturally significant, gives it a name, and signs a piece of paper prohibiting most development on the site. Predictably, the heads of exploiters and their political cronies explode.
The action dates to the 1906 Antiquities Act, which was established primarily to protect relatively small, sensitive archeological sites, the first being Devils Tower in Wyoming. When President Theodore Roosevelt used the tool in 1908 to set aside 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, he took it to a new level, famously declaring, "Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it." Of course the territory's governor, many elected officials, and the land devourers (mining and forest companies) went berserk. TR would use the Act 18 times to establish national monuments, some eventually becoming national parks.
In our day, President Obama has exercised his power to establish or enlarge 16 National Monuments, the most recent being Browns Canyon in Colorado, a former internment camp in Hawaii, and Chicago's Pullman neighborhood. Now protesters occupying the environmentally and spiritually significant area called Oak Flat, which is part of Tonto National Forest about 60 miles northeast of Phoenix, have called on President Obama to use his pen once again, in order to protect thousands of acres that are about to be desecrated by a copper mining company.
Find out why below the fold.
Many love Oak Flat because of the hiking, camping, and rock climbing the area offers. It really is in one of the most beautiful parts of Arizona, that high desert between Phoenix and the Mogollon Rim. Other environmentalists want to protect Oak Flat because it is a rare desert riparian area and home to several endangered species, including mammals, birds and reptiles. For the San Carlos Apache Tribe, Oak Flat is a sacred site, a pastoral setting that was the center of Apache life long before written records. It is also a burial ground, the location of Apache Leap, where approximately 75 Native men jumped to their deaths rather than surrender to the invaders.
For years after this bloody engagement, Apache skeletons could be seen wedged in the crevices of the cliffs over which they had leaped in a desperate attempt to escape...
For all of these reasons—ecological, recreational, cultural, religious—in 1955 the Eisenhower administration designated the 760 acres that constitute Oak Flat as a "Withdrawal Area" within Tonto National Forest, which specifically prohibited mining. More than a mile beneath the surface, however, is an estimated 1.6 billion tons of of copper, which Resolution Copper Mining, a UK/Australian firm, has been aching to dig up for more than a decade. Resolution is a subsidiary of
Rio Tinto-BHP, which doesn't exactly have a stellar environmental and human rights record.
In 2005, Arizona Senators McCain and Kyl, among the top recipients of mining industry cash, went to bat for Resolution and introduced legislation that would swap 2,400 acres of Tonto National Forest, including Oak Flat, for 5,300 acres the company owns elsewhere. Under the deal, Resolution would acquire the public land and the Withdrawal Area status would be rescinded. The swap was introduced at least a dozen times since 2005, and even with the backing of powerful Arizona politicians, gobs of lobbying money, and local officials who wanted jobs, it never passed in Congress.
So, what do you do when a piece of legislation can't win on its own merits? Natch, you use a little fearmongering and less-than-transparent late-night shenanigans, which is precisely what Sen. McCain did last year when he inserted the land swap into a defense appropriation. His excuse? Fighting the bad guys, of course:
"To maintain the strength of the most technologically-advanced military in the world, America’s armed forces need stable supplies of copper for their equipment, ammunition, and electronics."
Despite a worldwide
copper glut, the defense authorization
easily passed in January 2015
without a single public hearing, President Obama signed it, and now Oak Flat prepares for the onslaught. But it's not mining you may be familiar with; rather, it's called
block caving, which environmentalists everywhere hate because it involves deep underground blasting that creates huge sink holes (perhaps the size of
Meteor Crater in Oak Flat).
Resolution says it will work with environmentalists and the Apache tribe; and, further, the mine will generate $61 billion in profits and create 3,700 jobs. Unsurprisingly, given Rio Tinto's checkered history, critics are skeptical of the company's pledges, and they wonder where these profits will go and who will get the jobs. Even officials representing the small, economically depressed town of Superior, which originally supported the land swap because the area stands to gain jobs, have withdrawn their support pending further studies of the fragile ecosystem. In addition to the huge sink hole, for instance, the mine's output may create a 20-story slag heap covering 3,000 acres, and the operations will use millions of gallons of water annually—water the arid region desperately needs.
The most vocal opposition to the land swap comes from the San Carlos Apache Tribe, who've been occupying Oak Flat since early February, beginning with a 44-mile march from the tribe's reservation to the protected area. Concerned about their own land and rights, twenty other Arizona tribes have joined the protest, hundreds of people showed up at a recent ceremony, and dozens of activists remain at the site, refusing to leave until the defense authorization is reversed or Oak Flat is designated a national monument.
"There was never any transparency in how the bill passed, and now people are outraged," says Wendsler Nosie, San Carlos Apache district councilman and leader of the protest. He calls the land exchange a violation of human rights and religious freedom.
Wingers here cite "religious freedom" in order
to discriminate against the LGBT community, but when it comes to invoking that same freedom to protect the homeland of the state's first peoples, not so much. An online petition has been started by the San Carlos Apache Tribe, which you can find
here. The petition notes that "The Confederacy of the Six Nations" is among the world's oldest democracies, something America's founders studied. Maybe it's time to revisit the democracy thing.