Confluence: Protect Thacker Pass, Nevada
Channel: Weave News
Date: 28/03/2022

Confluence's mission is to empower the voices of river guardians and highlight stories of communities and waterways around the world. To learn more visit: weave news.org/confluence. 

Name: Max Wilbert
Location: Paiute and Shoshone Territory, Nevada, USA
Organization: Protect Thacker Pass
Website: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/about-us/

Transcript:
Good morning everyone. I'm here in Thacker Pass, Nevada. This is a site that is threatened by the planned construction of a vast open pit lithium mine, so everything you can see behind me is under major and imminent threat of being blown up. This mine is being resisted, I've been out here off and on since really October of 2020 and set up camp out here and started spending a lot of time here on January 15th of last year 2021. The concerns with this mine are many, they include the destruction of land, very vital habitat for some threatened and endangered species, the harms to Sacred sites and very culturally important sites to the indigenous people of this region and harms to the water.
 
Right now we're in the Watershed of the Kings River Valley and the Queen River Valley. Those waterways are already over pumped, farmers are taking way too much water from those aquifers already and so the land is going dry here. There's a major state of drought and this this mine would use 4.6 million gallons of water per day for its mining operations and it would pollute a lot of that water as well as directly harming the groundwater flows and springs in the area and interrupting the water cycling that's provided and infiltration that is provided and done by the the land in the plants and animals who live here. 

So we want to fight this project, we want to stop it and we want to protect the water.  The water is crucial for all the life out here: Nevada is the driest state in the country and this is really essential for the lahontan cutthroat trout who live back in these mountains here, a federally listed threatened species, and the Kings River Pyrg snail species who only live in the springs over here on this mountain. So I hope folks will support what we're doing out here, check out Protect Thacker Pass for ways that you can get involved and support. Thank you for watching!