The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Peter Else
The wildlife habitats and Indigenous cultural heritage of the San Pedro River region are suffering the same cancerous fate of resource exploitation as every other major watershed in Arizona, because America’s two main political parties and some highly corporatized environmental groups are allowing our decision-making processes to be dominated by major corporate interests.
I arrived at this conclusion by spending thousands of hours formally intervening in the proposals for the massive new SunZia infrastructure corridor and two local mining projects. Since 2015, I personally took legal action even when I could not afford to hire a lawyer and had to use do-it-yourself instructions. I presented testimony and was cross-examined by aggressive industry attorneys at hearings. I closely observed and recorded the actions of government entities and environmental groups that were facilitating the needless fragmentation of a landscape designated to mitigate the impacts of growth taking place in other major watersheds of Arizona.
Over 190,000 acres of land in various parcels of the lower San Pedro watershed have been designated to compensate for the ecological impacts caused by rapid growth. Despite two decades of local volunteers attempting to unify these conservation designations into an integrated voluntary opt-in conservation system, the governmental and corporate managers of these parcels still resist taking effective actions to prevent habitat fragmentation in the San Pedro region, often with the excuse that more study is required.
To erode solidarity among conservation interests, industrial corporations greenwash their assaults on the San Pedro conservation landscapes by getting some influential environmental groups to support their claims. For example, owners of the SunZia project claimed that increasing the mass distribution of New Mexico wind energy would mitigate the impacts of global climate change and that an entirely new power line corridor must be blazed through the San Pedro conservation corridor to achieve this goal. These two assumptions were passively accepted or actively promoted at critical decision points by six major environmental groups, but both assumptions are false:
• This project is not replacing fossil-fueled electricity with renewable energy. SunZia has spurred a significant new increase in the generation of fossil-fueled electricity that can be quickly dispatched when SunZia’s intermittent grid-based renewable energy is not available to meet an emerging and wasteful demand problem. This new demand problem is the over-proliferation of data centers by high-tech oligarchs who have a history of using self-serving algorithms to control consumer behavior and maximize their profits.
• There is no compelling reason why these massive power lines could not have been installed along an existing and shorter powerline corridor through central Arizona rather than making a giant loop southward to intersect with the gas-fired Bowie Power Station that has been planned by the original owner of SunZia since before it received its first permit in 2002.
Most notably it was the Audubon Society who pushed SunZia’s permit approvals across the finish line. Audubon declined to directly consult with local volunteer conservationists and Tribal Nations about considering far less damaging route alternatives in Arizona during the same recent period when the route was being significantly altered in the New Mexico portion of the project.
It was also the Audubon Society who teamed up with The Nature Conservancy to help plan a federal land swap that would result in the destruction of the sacred Apache Oak Flat site near Superior, Arizona by the Resolution Copper Corporation. This is just the latest phase in the 70-year betrayal of a federal promise to protect Oak Flat from landscape destruction. To add insult to this major betrayal, the primary 3,000-acre San Pedro Valley parcel proposed to be swapped for Oak Flat is now actively being degraded from habitat connectivity by yet another copper corporation’s activities.
These planning debacles took place during both Democratic and Republican administrations. With both political parties outsourcing critical planning decisions to profiteers, some professional environmental and academic groups are sacrificing basic conservation principles to get a special seat at the table with the rich and powerful.
I encourage reporters and concerned citizens to pursue accountability for those facilitating this unsustainable trend in wasteful resource exploitation.
