Is proposed pit mine in Idaho more of the same, or a saving grace?
Miles up the Salmon River, before it meets the Snake or flows into the Columbia, headwaters twist through the Payette National Forest, where they pass through a hundred year-old scar. The 'Glory Hole,' as it's called, is a former pit mining site in the Stibnite Historic Mining district, where the spiraling staircase hills have already grown swathes of conifers, and the blue-green drowned center shines with sun rays. There's also significant amounts of antimony, mercury, and other toxins in the water, as the water passes through mining tailings and the namesake hole. This is the final point that bull trout and chinook salmon can reach in their journey upstream on the Eastern Fork of the South Fork of the Salmon River (EFSFSR), and the justification for a new pit mine in the same location.
For Perpetua Resources, the company proposing a new mine at this site, these degradations offer an opportunity to do double-duty. The stibnite project is offered as a chance to both restore a site and fish passage, and access large veins of gold and antimony, and a stop-motion animation on the site says as much, complete with hand-drawn salmon.
Perpetua's new Stibnite Project was just approved by the U.S. Forest Service this January, and is nearing the end of a ten-year journey gathering permits. Their press releases and promotional websites tout the many benefits of the mine, including the national defense benefits of domestic antimony supply, and a focus on "stewardship" (including changing their name to Perpetua Resources from Midas Gold). Other stakeholders don't have the same perspective: the Nez Perce Tribe, which holds treaty rights to fishing along the Salmon, and conservation groups like Idaho Rivers United have advocated against the proposed mine since its inception.
Nick Kunath, conservation director at Idaho Rivers United, offers skepticism to Perpetua's win-win framing. "We think it's foolish to think that more of what got us here would solve it," noting the Forest Service's own EIS (Environmental Impact Statement), which ranks the "no action" alternative as having less impact than the Stibnite Plan of Operations. If the project goes ahead, there will be substantial changes to the bull trout & salmon habitat: stream temperatures could be increased for a century after the beginning of the project, 20% of critical habitat would be lost, and that's "assuming everything works well."
The Nez Perce's response to a draft EIS also questions Perpetua's framing of the project as critical for mineral extraction. Antimony will make up only ~5% of the material being extracted from Stibnite, which may seem instead, as Kunath puts it, like "a gold mine that happens to have antimony." Perpetua has already seen massive stock growth as the project edges towards approval, benefiting big-name investors like Trump-backing billionaire John Paulson. Stibnite will see more than 7 billion dollars of material extracted, over a twenty year period; definitely a success for the mining side, but what about the restoration aspect of the plan?
The other side of Perpetua's narrative, that of returning a degraded site to glory, also may not tell the full story. Perpetua's materials focus on the site as being a consequence of World War II era mining that has been since neglected. It's "disingenuous to claim that this site wouldn't be reclaimed," Kunath retorts. The Nez Perce Tribe's Department of Fisheries & Resource management spends about $2.8 million annually on "fisheries supplementation, research, and watershed restoration projects near, and downstream of, the Stibnite Gold Project," according to their DEIS response. The site's scars also aren't as old: Stibnite was most recently abandoned by the Dakota Mining Corp in the late 1990s, well after environmental review and permitting became part of the mining process.
From Idaho Rivers United's point of view, the site is not doomed or beyond saving. "A lot of what needs to be done is letting it resolve," Kunath says, adding that in these situations it "takes a long time to recover." Stibnite in this case may offer lessons for other cases playing out across the U.S., whether with defense-minded resources like antimony, or increasing demand for energy-related elements like lithium. When deciding where these sites go, it's a matter of perspective to see a neglected, out-of-the-way waste, or, what Kunath, even before working at Idaho Rivers United, called "one of my favorite places."
As Perpetua pursues the last few permits needed for the mine, the fate of the mine hangs in the balance. Whether Perpetua's success continues, and Stibnite becomes a decades-long extraction and renovation project, or it falls, and the steady recovery process continues, someone will be trying to steward the site.
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Calvin Probst is from Boise, Idaho, with an interest in rivers, stewardship, poetry, and land. He's currently a masters student in Environmental Communication at Stanford, and can be found from the coast to the Sierra.
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