The Land Desk

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Monday Micro-news-dose
www.landdesk.org

Monday Micro-news-dose

Briefs from around the West

Jonathan P. Thompson
May 2
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The wildfires in New Mexico continue to rage, with the largest being the Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak blazes near Las Vegas, which grew together into one, 104,000-acre monster. In the Jemez Mountains, the Cerro Pelado remains just 10 percent contained. Check out twitter #NMFire for real-time coverage and follow reporters such as Shaun Griswold and Laura Paskus, who are on the ground keeping a tab on things.

Twitter avatar for @shaun505Shaun Griswold @shaun505
Pretty much every holdout I met in Mora County is leaving their home, including Kristy Wolf who lives behind the Mora Inn off NM HWY 518. She sent this half an hour ago. Evacuation info here >>
nifc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappvie… #CalfCanyonFire / #HermitsPeakFire

May 2nd 2022

39 Retweets74 Likes
Twitter avatar for @LauraPaskusLaura Paskus @LauraPaskus
Some info from the #cerropelado meeting at 3 pm today: recreation center is being prepared for containment crew; Pueblo of Cochiti has been working on that. 1/t

Laura Paskus @LauraPaskus

Went to the #nmfire meeting at Cochiti Lake for #CerroPeladoFire - Will have more info to share when I get to better Internet access. But here’s a link to a video with the deputy IC of the Southern Area Red Team: https://t.co/Wx2OlIfX6p

May 2nd 2022

9 Retweets19 Likes

Arizona regulators issued a key water quality permit to Energy Fuels, the owner of the Pinyon Plain uranium mine just outside Grand Canyon National Park, reports Debra Utacia Krol for the Arizona Republic. Officials from the nearby Havasupai Tribe say they will continue to fight to stop the mine from opening. It’s just the latest indication that the domestic uranium industry may be on the brink of a revival.

The Land Desk
Scrappy watchdogs gear up for a new mining boom with court victories
Here’s what’s great about electric vehicles: You don’t need to fill them up with dirty, stinky, volatile gasoline; they don’t spew any exhaust; and they contribute less to climate change, so long as they are charged on a grid not dominated by fossil fuels…
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2 months ago · 6 likes · 4 comments · Jonathan P. Thompson

The Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth reports that California Gov. Gavin Newsom may attempt to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant running past its scheduled 2025 retirement date. Newsom said that would give grid operators and utilities more time to increase renewable and battery capacity to avoid future rolling blackouts.

The Land Desk
The Diablo's in the details
… but first … The Biden administration plans a 20 year ban on federal oil and gas leasing within 10 miles of northern New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. It’s yet another sign that Biden is beginning to deliver on his beginning-of-term promises regarding climate change and oil and gas development. He announced the mineral withdrawal as part of a larger initiative to build “a new era of nation-to-nation engagement,” tribal nation that is. The…
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6 months ago · 4 likes · 6 comments · Jonathan P. Thompson

Perhaps you’ve seen the headlines in the last few days hailing a $90 million settlement related to the Gold King Mine spill. And perhaps you thought: What, another $90 million settlement!? It’s not—not another settlement, that is. It’s the same settlement we wrote about a while back that was just now approved and finalized. Read the deep dive on the settlement here:

The Land Desk
Wonkfest: Sunnyside Gold King Settlement, explained
Last week’s $90 million settlement relating to the 2015 Gold King Mine Blowout that turned the Animas and San Juan Rivers TANG-orange for over 100 miles downstream did not bring an end to the legal saga that has dragged on for more than six years (lawsuits against the federal government are still pending). But when the agreement is finalized, Sunnyside Gold Corp—the owner of the nearby, now-shuttered Sunnyside Mine—will finally be free of the mess. Extricating themselves from any further liabilities has cost them about $67.6 million: $40.5 million to the feds…
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4 months ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Jonathan P. Thompson

From the Follow-up Department

Remember last week’s story about the vanishing pinyon jay? Reader Audrey Kruse, with the Grand Canyon Trust, kindly wrote to fill me—and you—in on some more pinyon jay conservation efforts:

I wanted to let you know that we've got a pinyon jay citizen science project currently underway to help better understand the extent of the declining population and to hopefully leverage that into protections of the PJ woodlands that are threatened by large scale removal projects on federal lands. 

There's also a citizen/community science project from the Great Basin Bird Observatory, doing something similar - and we're loosely partnering with Audubon SW's pinyon jay hub as well. A few breweries are actually going to be launching a pinyon jay conservation-focused brew, I think sometime in July - the Bosque Brewery in Albuquerque and the Drinking Horn Meadery in Flagstaff.

Sounds to me like we’ll have to add a couple of beverage stops to the great Land Desk green chile bookstore road trip.

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