Few Americans follow the nation’s lithium-mining industry as closely as Patrick Donnelly. Since 2021, he has set up 30 or so Google Alerts for variations on the word “lithium,” and he uses the findings to populate an online map of projects across the West. It is so useful that one industry insider has referred to it as “an investor’s handbook.”
This is paradoxical: Donnelly, who works at an environmental nonprofit called the Center for Biological Diversity, is one of the industry’s most vigilant watchdogs. The true spirit of his monitoring and mapping efforts comes through in a Twitter exchange he had with one mining firm, Rover Critical Minerals, a few years ago. In November 2022, he noticed an alert for a Rover project in southern Nevada, but he couldn’t find any information about its location. He decided to message Rover on Twitter. “In all of your materials, you never actually state where your Let’s Go Lithium project is located,” he wrote. “I’d like to add it to my lithium tracker map.”
The proposed mine, the company replied, would be in Pahrump, Nev., a town where Donnelly did his grocery shopping. But a month passed before a different alert revealed the project’s precise location: the edge of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a beloved and biodiverse wetland not far from where Donnelly lived.
He messaged the company again. “Just saw your map,” the message began. “I would abandon that project right now, because you stand zero, and I mean zero, chance of getting it permitted.” He ended, “No chance that mine moves forward.”
The company wrote back. “We believe otherwise. We are well outside any area of environmental concern.”
On Christmas Eve, Donnelly wrote one last time, calling Rover clueless. “Your mine is sitting on a vast carbonate aquifer system which sustains literally dozens of aquatic, endemic species protected under the Endangered Species Act. You won’t even make it to permitting. The agencies will laugh in your face. And if they don’t, we will bury you with litigation. If you think Ioneer has had a hard time with us,” he continued — referring to the Australian company whose proposed lithium mine triggered litigation over its potential threat to a species of buckwheat — “you ain’t seen nothing yet. This is my home.”
The company never responded.
Donnelly’s attitude toward lithium complicates an expert consensus that America must rapidly increase its capacity for renewable energy to confront climate change. Those heeding that warning have been prioritizing wind, solar and geothermal projects — as well as lithium mines, which provide the key ingredient for the batteries required to store all that renewable energy and also power electric vehicles.
This “green-energy transition” is underway on public and private lands across the country: Today there are more than 4,000 utility-scale solar facilities nationwide; more than 70,000 wind turbines scattered across the United States, a sizable number of which are in Texas; and 51 geothermal power plants on public lands around the West. Beyond Nevada, there are proposed lithium operations in California’s Imperial Valley, South Dakota’s Black Hills, the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, agricultural land outside Charlotte, N.C., and the Smackover Formation of southern Arkansas, home to Exxon Mobil’s first lithium project.
In the process, the expansion of renewable-energy infrastructure is fundamentally reshaping the landscape of the West, often at the expense of ecosystems. Lithium mining in particular alarms conservationists. Depending on the type of process used, mining can pollute groundwater, emit carbon dioxide, create toxic waste and destroy habitats. As companies scramble to acquire mineral rights, in many cases under an antiquated mining law, some conservationists are criticizing the fact that there isn’t a federal plan to protect the landscape, without which they fear a ruinous mining free-for-all. This rush to mine has put them in tension with proponents of the federal government’s green-energy projects, who warn against slowing an urgent process. Conservationists, in turn, worry that those supporters are being shortsighted in their disregard for the value of biodiversity.
Among the most strident of these critics are Donnelly and his partner, the scientist Naomi Fraga, who are well known in the American West for their work to protect Nevada’s ecosystems. While they understand the necessity of renewable energy, they also warn against the devastation that such projects might bring. They want the federal government to create a plan to identify sensitive places and prioritize the most environmentally friendly green-energy projects — especially when it comes to lithium mining.
The proposed Rover mine is just one of many projects they’ve opposed; in fact, they started dating while fighting a different lithium mine in southwestern Nevada. Rover’s project particularly rankles, though: Donnelly has called the area near Ash Meadows home for a decade, and Fraga studies the region’s plants. While on a hike near Ash Meadows in May 2023, Donnelly found claim stakes indicating commercial interest in the land. That summer, Donnelly and the Center for Biological Diversity sued the Bureau of Land Management for greenlighting Rover’s exploratory drilling, claiming that the agency had failed to obtain a proper environmental review of the project’s potential impacts. Over the next year, Donnelly started showing journalists the proposed mine site to bring attention to the story.
Their work highlights the difficult calculus stakeholders must grapple with as they confront climate change. To help prevent catastrophic global warming that will devastate ecosystems, the nation needs to build renewable-energy infrastructure. Domestically mined lithium is crucial to that infrastructure, green-energy advocates say, even if it means the prospect of destruction in parts of southwest Nevada. “There’s always a trade-off,” says Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering who studies energy. “But we have to do something. And the cleanest thing to do is add solar, to add wind, and that will replace much dirtier fossil fuels.”
Donnelly and Fraga think that these trade-offs might result in more enduring environmental damage than renewable-energy advocates want to recognize. They want people to think critically about these possible costs and are fighting certain lithium mines in order to reframe the national conversation: In our rush to harness green energy, what consequences might we be inviting?
On a spring afternoon in 2024, Fraga took the microphone at a dim casino conference room not far from Ash Meadows. She and Donnelly were there to present at a symposium concerning the Amargosa Basin, a 5,500-square-mile region around Death Valley defined by its eponymous river. The basin, which is home to Ash Meadows, is a vast desert watershed that feeds the Amargosa River. That water supports a diversity of plants and animals: At Donnelly and Fraga’s latest count, roughly 100 endemic species live throughout the basin, from microscopic snails to the rare, succulent Amargosa niterwort, on which Fraga is a leading expert. The place is also personally meaningful — in part because they met there nearly a decade ago.
Fraga, who is the director of conservation programs at the California Botanic Garden in Claremont, spoke about three alkaline plants native to Ash Meadows that could be imperiled by groundwater extraction and lithium mining. She was precise and efficient, describing research methods that would help collect more information and therefore aid in conservation. The symposium’s attendees included employees of the Nevada Department of Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management and the United States Geological Survey, people among whom Fraga is generally well-respected — and whom Donnelly has a history of suing.
Fraga’s work is quieter and less public in nature, but it provides scientific grounding for Donnelly’s endangered-species petitions and many of his lawsuits. Donnelly, meanwhile, is a divisive figure at times reviled for his refusal to stick to decorum. Bruce Jabbour, a Nye County commissioner who supports Ioneer’s mine in the Silver Peak Range, says he disagrees with Donnelly’s confrontational tactics, particularly his lawsuits against the Bureau of Land Management. “How is this solving the problem?” he says. “It’s only a distraction. It’s only temporary.” Mason Voehl, who works closely with Donnelly as the executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy, a local conservation nonprofit, says “it attracts a certain attention” when people discover Donnelly is on the conservancy’s board. “His reputation follows me around,” Voehl told me.
Earlier that morning, Donnelly wondered if he should change the title of his presentation from “The Amargosa Basin Resource Extraction Crisis” to “Amargosa Basin Apocalypse,” to jolt the audience. His presentation struck a typically intense tone. He said the conference attendees were sitting within 10 miles of five proposed lithium mines, and he singled out the Rover project, promising to sue the company if necessary. “We are watching a speeding freight train on a collision course with the biodiversity we’ve all been talking about today and we all love so much,” he said.
Of course, there’s climate change, that other freight train that projects like Rover are trying to slow. More than a quarter of the country’s emissions come from the transportation sector, and to reduce that number, the Biden administration pledged to make half of all vehicles sold electric by 2030. California, which aims to reduce net greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by 2045, has promised to ban the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars and light trucks by 2035. President Joe Biden’s signature piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, and a series of other investments through the Energy, Defense and Interior Departments set in motion a vast number of green-infrastructure projects intended to fundamentally transform the American energy economy.
All of this requires lithium. Currently, the United States sources most of its lithium from South America, and mining proponents argue that fostering domestic production could help the country reduce its reliance on China for battery technology. Today there are more than 100 proposed lithium-mining projects around the country. Even under the Trump administration, which will seek to undo many of Biden’s climate policies and prioritize oil-and-gas projects, lithium mining and the momentum of the green-energy transition are not likely to slow much. Nevada in particular has a large supply: The state’s unique series of closed basins has enabled minerals to build up over millions of years, resulting in enormous deposits of metals like lithium. (One of Donald Trump’s last actions during his first term was to approve a mine near the Oregon-Nevada border, where the nation’s largest known lithium deposit lies.)
Donnelly and Fraga recognize that the world needs lithium. After all, climate change impacts the land they want to protect. In 2020, Las Vegas, which is 90 miles east of Ash Meadows, went a record 240 days without rain; in 2022, Lake Mead dropped to its lowest level ever. But the couple also urge people to understand that healthy ecosystems are crucial to human survival. “Just because we need something doesn’t mean we have to do it at all costs and destroy everything to get it,” Fraga told me.
She and Donnelly defend the desert in particular because it’s a place that people imagine to be barren. In truth, the desert teems with life. Come springtime, wildflowers carpet the desert floor; snails, fish and toads dwell in turquoise pools and springs; blue-hued sage and pinprick monkeyflowers grow from ancient living crust. Lithium mining, they warn, could do irreversible harm to these plants and animals, whose dependence on scarce water means they are particularly vulnerable to environmental change. One lithium-mining method siphons billions of gallons of water for evaporation. Another blasts rock to create open pits and uses sulfuric acid to leach lithium from clay. This method might also mist the environment with toxins as a result.
Nevada, like the rest of the desert Southwest, is also prime for solar development. In December, the Bureau of Land Management finalized its long-anticipated Western Solar Plan, which would make available nearly 12 million acres of Nevada to solar, including by one estimate 220,000 acres in the Amargosa Basin. Fraga and Donnelly, along with a host of environmental groups, are worried about dust, water usage and habitat destruction. In theory, they want this kind of land-use plan, but the couple are concerned that sensitive places like Ash Meadows would still suffer.
Green-energy advocates say environmentalists like Fraga and Donnelly are missing the bigger picture. “The science tells us that we have to cut greenhouse-gas emissions for human activities to net zero as rapidly as we can,” says Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University who specializes in energy. To meet the urgent infrastructure needs of the green-energy transition, some species or ecosystems might become secondary concerns, says Seaver Wang, who researches renewable energy at the nonprofit Breakthrough Institute. “There’s no such thing as impact-free mining,” he says. “There’s no such thing as energy without impacts, either.” U.S.-controlled lithium production, he and others contend, would allow the country greater oversight over environmental impact and workers’ rights, reduce the need for diesel transport of materials and bolster national security by reducing dependence on other countries.
“We’ve got to meet the moment on climate change, and public lands have to play a foundational role,” says Laura Daniel-Davis, the acting deputy secretary of the interior under Biden. “I remain concerned that we’re presented with this false choice, that we can’t have balanced conservation and clean-energy development.” The United States, many people argue, has a better chance of saving species when mining takes place within its own borders, and there’s no getting around the fact that most of America’s known lithium deposits are in Nevada.
Lithium work is relatively new for both Fraga and Donnelly. Though Fraga, who is from Southern California, specializes in plants native to the desert, she didn’t turn toward activism until she reached out to Donnelly in 2015. At the time he was the director of the Amargosa Conservancy, and she wanted to get involved in the community beyond her normal fieldwork. Fraga, a scientist at heart, was trained to avoid emotional investment in plants, but while studying rare species that grew in extreme places, she began to think of the species she studied as vulnerable and in need of defense. She came to believe, like Donnelly, that culturally, Americans are taught to value certain types of ecosystems, like forests and oceans, and not deserts. This perspective had worrisome implications in Nevada, where there were few botanists working to identify rare plants. She feared plants in Nevada might go extinct before scientists knew they even existed.
Donnelly, who dropped out of college and moved to the Mojave Desert in the early 2000s, took a different path to their work in the basin. (He eventually earned his bachelor of science from the University of California, Berkeley.) He spent an autumn hiking in Utah and reading every Edward Abbey book in the Moab Public Library, and then campaigned against the slaughter of wild buffalo in Montana. There, he spent his downtime with texts about deep ecology, which argues against a human-centered worldview in environmentalism. He developed an old-school approach to conservation that often prioritized biodiversity over people; his efforts to protect a butterfly species led to a Girl Scouts camp’s closing. His first major conservation fight was against the Green Path North, a transmission line to deliver wind and solar energy to Los Angeles that he worried would harm the California desert. He joined the Center for Biological Diversity in 2017, and his early work focused on opposing a Trump-administration plan to lease land in northern Nevada’s Ruby Mountains for oil drilling and fracking.
Donnelly’s and Fraga’s careers changed in 2018. The Center for Biological Diversity had gotten word that a proposed lithium and boron mine in southwestern Nevada threatened to exterminate a rare species of buckwheat known as Tiehm’s. Donnelly started filing Freedom of Information Act requests for project materials, and he felt he could use a botanist’s expertise. He asked Fraga if she wanted to work with him. On June 1, 2019, they visited the proposed mine site together. The Silver Peak Range was blooming, and the buckwheat was bursting with yellow pom-pom-shaped flowers. They walked the entire range of the species — 10 acres scattered across three square miles — and saw evidence of mineral exploration. Until then, Fraga believed the role of a scientist was to identify and describe, to remain dispassionate. But when she saw the bulldozing that the mining company, Ioneer, had done around the buckwheat’s habitat, the tiny plant seemed vulnerable, and Fraga, knowing this was the only place in the world that it grew, felt a jolt of pain. She knew that she had to go to war for the plant.
While they worked — often camping and hiking together — they grew closer. “He had this way of living as a desert curmudgeon,” Fraga told me. “He cultivated this image of a lone guy in the Mojave with his dog, living in the middle of nowhere Death Valley, who doesn’t want to be bothered by people.” He, in contrast, thought she was a “total square.” Gradually, though, she dazzled him with her knowledge, and Fraga saw the softer side that his spiky public persona obscured, like how he home-cooked his dogs’ food. She was drawn to him because his identity, like her own, was inextricable from his work — with an intensity that bordered on obsession. After one especially lush visit to a Tiehm’s bloom, they decided to date. Last summer, they got engaged while Fraga was surveying the Amargosa niterwort.
The buckwheat fight led to more crusades to protect species from the fallout of renewable-energy projects. Fraga advised on various Endangered Species Act petitions, did research that bolstered lawsuits and conducted plant surveys to provide agencies with data for conservation plans. But she proceeded cautiously; her job depended on maintaining scientific credibility, and her work often relied on funding from the very agencies that approve renewable-energy projects. They both love to be right, and the couple’s differences in approach — emotion versus precision — occasionally led to friction. For her part, Fraga says: “Patrick is a very, very knowledgeable person, but he also has limits to his knowledge. When he crosses the border into my land, into botany, I’m just like, Let’s be correct here.” Donnelly, meanwhile, relished his role as an attack dog.
By June 2024, Donnelly’s lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management had helped delay Rover’s exploratory drilling, and he had taken a back seat on the fight. Voehl led the charge instead, meeting with Native American tribes, politicians and residents of Amargosa Valley, a town not far from the proposed mine, on a regular basis. But Donnelly’s efforts “did give us time to start gathering our forces and doing more research,” says Mike Cottingim, the town’s clerk. Judson Culter, Rover’s chief executive, arrived in Amargosa Valley for a community town-hall meeting, hoping to salvage the project.
Donnelly was optimistic that the Rover mine would never be built. Lithium prices were plummeting, stalling projects like Rover’s, and locals were nearly uniformly opposed. In this town of 1,350 people with an anti-government bent, residents didn’t want outsiders using their already-overallocated water. “If you can’t protect the water, you can’t protect the people,” Brenda Dymond, who has lived in Amargosa Valley for around 50 years, told me. And yet the opposition did not fall along partisan lines. The fight brought together strange bedfellows, from the conservative Nye County board of commissioners to tribal nations to progressive Las Vegas environmentalists. Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, Democrats who are generally friendly to the mining industry, supported a proposed 20-year ban on mining near Ash Meadows.
On an evening in June, Donnelly walked into the Amargosa Valley Community Center for the town-hall meeting with Culter. The last time Donnelly was there, he supported a state order that would change groundwater regulations in the Amargosa Basin, which residents thought would curtail economic opportunities. Some locals branded him then as an eco-terrorist, and he worried about how they might respond to him now. A few people approached congenially, and he made small talk, handing them “Save Ash Meadows” stickers before taking a seat in the bleachers from which he would post live updates from the meeting to X. (Fraga was attending a botanical conference.) Soon the center was filled with about a hundred people; one leathery-faced man brought along his Chihuahua. A pastor led a prayer for civility, but public comment swiftly descended into criticism of Rover. The mine, one resident said, would poison the Amargosa River. Others worried it would deplete the arid region’s limited water. Near the end of the meeting, the crowd turned raucous as the town board chair, Carolyn Allen, rallied them. “We’re going to save the town, OK? All of us together.” The audience cheered.
Culter cut an awkward figure in his sapphire suit as he tried to persuade locals of economic benefits and assuage their environmental concerns. “Sorry it’s taken us so long to get down here to do a town hall,” he said as a means of introduction. He lived in Canada; locals didn’t like that he wasn’t American. “We’re here to create jobs. You know, if we’re successful — the U.S. government is funding billion-dollar facilities for construction, and those bring great opportunities for local communities.” Culter justified Rover’s project by explaining that clay mining already existed in the Amargosa Basin and that the proposed lithium mine wouldn’t be any more damaging than that operation. For all his efforts, though, locals were not persuaded, and out of precaution, a sheriff walked Culter back to his car. Later, Culter compared Donnelly to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The meeting was “so nasty,” he told me. “He’s trying to turn the community against us.”
“Ash Meadows,” Donnelly told me months before the meeting, “has catalyzed a whole new movement.” In January 2025, it appeared he was right. The couple’s yearslong work in Ash Meadows had succeeded, at least in part: With a week until Trump’s inauguration, the Biden administration granted a temporary two-year ban on mining near the refuge. (That ban is not expected to affect existing claims like Rover’s.) But the win was bittersweet: The next administration would need to approve a full 20-year ban, which, given Trump’s stance toward the mining industry, seems unlikely.
But now Donnelly isn’t so sure these victories are transferable. Despite their apparent success, Donnelly and Fraga’s ad hoc approach to fighting lithium-mining infrastructure is not a likely blueprint for future activism. Donnelly had relied on a motley alliance to fight Rover’s proposed mine: Small-town conservatives, Las Vegas environmentalists and Native tribes were all part of the effort, but they all had their own interests in opposing mining near Ash Meadows. Plus, mining in the Amargosa Basin threatened local water rights, as well as a recognizably biodiverse ecosystem — elements not at stake at every contested mine site. This was an opportunistic and unintended coalition, one that was not necessarily portable. Personally, the couple’s work was becoming increasingly draining.
For Fraga and Donnelly, it can be hard to accept the reality that people may care less about desert ecosystems than they do. But, Fraga told me in the spring, she didn’t get as despairing as Donnelly did. The three of us were speaking on a breezy afternoon in the Amargosa Basin. Winter rain had yielded lavender and white blossoms, a sight the drought had robbed for years. “I see the plants, and I see how incredibly resilient and strong they are, and they’re here, and they can’t move anywhere,” she said. “They’re stuck in this fight regardless. I don’t want to get too down on it because I feel like they need someone rooting for them.”
As they headed home, Fraga seemed melancholic. How, she wondered aloud, would she be able to remember the Amargosa at this moment — these colors and blooms, these smells? “How do you absorb it?” Fraga asked. “You never know when you’ll see it again.”
Meg Bernhard is a writer from California. She is the author of “Wine,” part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Lucas Foglia is a photographer whose upcoming book and exhibition, “Constant Bloom,” turns the longest butterfly migration into a metaphor for human connections across borders.
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