July 8, 2021: Last week, the Sierra Club and our allies secured a complete victory in our decades-long effort to prevent destructive hard rock mining operations in Montana’s Cabinet Mountains Wilderness in the Kootenai National Forest.
The Sierra Club and our allies have actively opposed the Rock Creek Mine since it was first proposed in the 1990s, including filing multiple legal challenges, under the Endangered Species Act and other laws, to the biological opinions prepared by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the project in 2001, 2003, 2006, and again in 2017.
The Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, with lakes and valleys cut by prehistoric glaciers, is home to one of the four remaining grizzly bear populations in the continental United States and to lynx, elk, moose, black bears, bighorn sheep, and bull trout. The Rock Creek Mine is a proposed 10,000 ton-per-day mine adjacent to the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness that would have been accompanied by a 300-acre parcel for its ore- and waste-processing facilities alone. In addition, the proposed mine would have diverted a significant amount of water from the Lower Clark Fork River system and Lake Pend Oreille, which have been designated as “critical habitats” for the bull trout.
Most recently, the Sierra Club and allies Rock Creek Alliance, Earthworks, Center for Biological Diversity, Ksanka Kupaqa Xa’clin, and Montana Environmental Information Center, represented by Earthjustice attorneys Katherine O’Brien and Elizabeth Forsyth, successfully sued to challenge the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service’s 2019 Supplemental Biological Opinion and 2018 Record of Decision. In April 2021, District Judge Donald W. Molloy held that Fish & Wildlife and the Forest Service acted arbitrarily and unreasonably by segmenting its analysis of the proposed mine’s impacts to threatened species and by failing to prepare a comprehensive biological opinion for the bull trout.
In the final days of the Trump administration, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service appealed the decision, but last week, the agencies announced that they are voluntarily dismissing their appeal. This welcome move by the Biden administration concludes a nearly 30-year campaign by environmental organizations and Native American groups to oppose the proposed 481-acre copper and silver mine.