If You Think Multinational Mining Interests Want to Save the Environment, I’ve Got a Bridge to Sell You A sacred site for Native Americans is on the verge of being destroyed for profit, and profit alone—just one more colonial conquest of lands in the American West.

Thacker Pass in northern Nevada. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

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Ancient oak trees rise above gigantic boulders scattered across a high desert mesa in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest. This is Oak Flat (Chi’ chil Bildagoteel), a sacred site for Native Americans, including the Western and San Carlos Apache. And like many other lands across the West, it’s under grave threat from multinational mining interests, all in the name of climate mitigation, but most importantly, for the money.

Oak Flat is as stunning as it is vast, and even though it’s only an hour’s drive from the concrete sprawl of Phoenix, when you’re there, you feel as if you’re on an entirely different planet. When I say that the place is sacred, if anything I may be underestimating its significance. To the Apache and others, Oak Flat is the birthplace of life on Earth, their spiritual Eden.

“Here is the creation story of where a woman came to be, and where the holy ones came together,” Wendsler Nosie, tribal leader of the San Carlos Apache tribe, explains. “This is where we originated as people.”

Beneath this biologically rich landscape, home to a variety of dry-land species including the endangered hedgehog cacti and the ocelot wildcat, lies a rich deposit of copper, the conductive metal vital for the technologies needed to power the world’s green-energy transition.

The Apache and environmentalists have been fighting a legal battle over the future of Oak Flat, which the US government promised to protect in the 1852 Treaty of Santa Fe. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, Oak Flat has been shielded from mining for the last 60 years. However, that protective status came under attack in 2014 when Arizona Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake undermined the agreement by attaching a rider to the National Defense Authorization Act, handing over 2,400 acres of Oak Flat to Resolution Copper, a joint mining venture between Rio Tinto, the world’s second largest metals and mining corporation, and BHP, possibly the world’s largest mining company. It was a blatant and sinister land grab.

The legislation, later signed into law by President Barack Obama, intentionally undermined the National Environmental Policy Act through a subtle maneuver that allowed the mine’s approval to proceed, regardless of any adverse environmental impact findings that might result, by shortening the approval process before a judicial review could take place. The Arizona senators had manipulated the process to benefit the mining conglomerates, no matter the damage it would cause, which, by any measure, would be insurmountable. The two senators didn’t come up with that backroom scheme on their own. Flake had spent time as a paid lobbyist for Rio Tinto and, in 2014, the late John McCain was the company’s top recipient of campaign contributions.

The plan today, according to the mining juggernaut, is to gut Oak Flat using a novel process called “block cave mining,” which involves blasting the copper ore from below, causing the ground above it to collapse under its own weight. The results would be catastrophic, creating a 1.8 mile-wide, 1,000 foot-deep crater.

Such impacts are apparently just the cost of doing business (and supposedly fighting climate change) these days. Resolution Copper estimates that mining Oak Flat could yield more than 40 billion tons of copper over 40 years, generating more than $140 billion in profits and providing enough copper to power 200 million electric vehicles (EVs). In addition to the massive hole that the mine would create, the toxic waste from the operation, expected in the end to be 50 stories high and cover an area three times larger than San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, would also bury an unknown number of historic and traditional cultural sites of the Apaches and other neighboring Indigenous nations.

Ultimately, Oak Flat would simply be rendered unrecognizable.

“You can’t tamper with these sacred places. We’re talking about deities; we’re talking about angels; we’re talking about where the beginning of time to the end of time will never be lost,” said Apache tribal leader Wendsler Nosie in a virtual press conference in 2021. “Is this the way we are now?” he asked. “Is this the way we believe—to allow these places that give the gift of life to be destroyed?”