Lauren Redniss - Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West

Lauren Redniss is the author of several works of visual nonfiction and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. Her book Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future won the 2016 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Center for the Future of Arizona, and Artist-in-Residence at the American Museum of Natural History. She teaches at the Parsons School of Design in New York City.

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N OTES

Chapter 1

: This figure is one of Resolution Coppers core claims. See, for instance, Resolution Copper Project Profile, Resolution Copper (March 2016). See also: Dan Sullivan, Resolution Copper May Spend Billions on Mine, Arizona Daily Star (April 25, 2009); Senator John McCain, Copper Mine Will Boost Economy, Protect Sacred Sites, Arizona Central (December 28, 2014); Steven Norton, Mining a Mile Down: 175 Degrees, 600 Gallons of Water a Minute, The Wall Street Journal (June 7, 2017).

: Matthew Philips, Inside the Billion Dollar Dig to Access Americas Biggest Copper Deposit, Bloomberg Businessweek (March 14, 2016).

: Subsidence occurs when the underground excavation caves and movement of material connects all the way to the surface where a depression or deformation in the land surface is formed. Resolution Copper, General Plan of Operations (May 2016), 91.

: Alternatives Evaluation Report, Environmental Impact Statement (draft): Resolution Copper Project and Land Exchange, Tonto National Forest, U.S. Forest Service (Phoenix: November 2017).

: Resolution Copper says that the mine would have a forty-year operational life. Resolution Copper, General Plan of Operations (May 2016), 16.

Chapter 2

: Naelyn Pikes quotations throughout the book are from in-person and telephone interviews conducted between 2015 and 2017 unless otherwise noted.

: Senator John McCain III, Statement by Senator John McCain on Protest of Resolution Copper Land Exchange in Washington, D.C. Today (July 22, 2015).

: In the report that the San Carlos tribe commissioned, Power Consulting addresses the assertion that the Resolution Copper mine would generate $61 billion dollars over its lifespan. This is grossly misleading. It is the equivalent of saying that the pay associated with the mining jobs will be about $4 million per job instead of saying that the pay will be $75,000 per year. No one, certainly no economic analyst, would state the pay associated with a job in terms of the cumulative pay over 50 or 64 years.

The tribes consultants take issue with other choices that produced the numbers in the Pollack Report. For instance, the Pollack Report states, Costs associated with environmental and engineering issues and the cost of their correction were not included in the study. In other words, as the tribes consultants write, The environmental cost will be assumed to be zero. This is just one of a number of limitations the Pollack Report placed on its analysis, dramatically affecting the picture the report paints.

In short, the tribes consultants characterize the Pollack Reports design as deeply problematic: The design of the Pollack Report is non-economic, even anti-economic, in the sense that it takes a major industrial operation that has considerable costs associated with it and turns it into an angelic activity with no costs. By design the Pollack Report conveniently dodges almost all of the important policy implications associated with permitting the proposed mine. (Exaggerating the Net Economic Benefits of the Proposed Resolution Copper Mine, Superior, Arizona: A Critical Review of Resolutions Economic Impact Analysis, report prepared for the San Carlos Apache Tribe, Power Consulting, Inc., Missoula, MO: September 9, 2013, 36.)

: Emily Bregel, Massive Mine Proposed at Oak Flat, Sacred Tribal Land, Arizona Daily Star (September 8, 2013).

: John McCain, Why Ill Vote for Resolution Copper, Arizona Central (October 15, 2014).