THE SET-UP: Trump is “flooding the zone” with feces …and that’s making it difficult to keep track of the debris rushing by on the surge of informational sewage constantly pouring out of the White House.
It’s been non-stop since he took the oath for a second time … and it hasn’t really let up … nor is it likely to … ever. For one thing, I think he just likes it. Or loves it. He’s been shoehorning himself into newscycles since the 1980s, when he’d pose as his own press agent to leak stories about himself. So, now … when he can hold multiple press conferences, avails, gaggles and scrums throughout the day? Yeah, he’s as happy as a pig in informational sewage.
The other thing is that the flood makes many things possible … or anything possible … … like deep sea mining. That’s right, Trump has already signed an Executive Order to jumpstart deep sea mining. I guarantee there ain’t a lot of folks at a Trump rally just waiting for the opportunity to chant “U-S-A” when Trump rants about Deep Sea Mining. Then again, that’s not the audience he’s “entertaining” with this specific EO. Those “rallies” tend to happen in conference rooms. And conference rooms probably hosted the strategy sessions that generated the battle plans for Trump’s multi-front war on the natural world.
Interior, Energy, the EPA—they’ve all been handed-over to the industries they’re meant to regulate. Consequently, the land, the waterways, the forests and the fauna are all being eyed by corporate harvesters. But those policy-driven stories cannot compete with the trade war volleys he launches or the culture war bombs he throws. A disingenuous, legally arcane attack on the Endangered Species Act cannot compete with a trans athlete running track in high school or the fatuous renaming of a gulf. - jp
TITLE: President Donald Trump is driving a 21st-century gold rush that’s supercharging conservation battles on public lands across the West.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/shock-and-awe-trumps-mining-blitz-ramps-up-public-land-fights/
EXCERPTS: President Donald Trump is driving a 21st-century gold rush that’s supercharging conservation battles on public lands across the West.
While individual conflicts grab day-to-day attention, it’s the rapidly growing cumulative total that’s astonishing even longtime environmental activists concerned about the effect of mining coal and critical minerals on federal land and wildlife.
The effort is focused on spurring new projects and, with the help of Republicans on Capitol Hill, opening up areas that the Biden administration made off-limits to mining. The Trump administration is also swiftly advancing mines that were already in the pipeline, in many cases envisioned under former President Joe Biden as vital for a renewable energy future. Under Trump, the priority is no longer digging up minerals to feed construction of electric vehicle batteries and renewables, but instead to bolster supply chains for technology like artificial intelligence, as well as military applications.
“What’s scary about this time around with the administration is that it’s so much more coordinated,” said Sam Zeno, a senior policy analyst for conservation policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, about the mining projects already moving forward.
Marc Fink, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, added that Trump’s team seems to be making a strategic choice. “It’s kind of the shock-and-awe approach of this whole administration, to throw so much stuff out there that it’s hard for the public to know what to focus on,” Fink said.
In March, Trump inked an executive order that calls on federal officials to inventory mineral-rich federal lands where digging up critical minerals is to be prioritized. A month later, the Interior Department proposed cutting environmental reviews for certain projects down to a month or less, a process that some experts warn is rife with legal risks for both developers and regulators. Interior said Monday that it would complete within 14 days the environmental review to reopen a Utah uranium and vanadium mine.
The push for more mining and expedited reviews is occurring as top Trump officials move to shrink the reach of the Endangered Species Act.
[Interior Secretary Doug] Burgum’s truncated NEPA reviews, for example, would allow Interior — leaning on the president’s national energy emergency designation — to soften requirements for ESA consultations. Yet another move the administration is proposing: to redefine what it means to “harm” a protected species. Actions that directly hurt or kill animals and plants would be considered “harm” but not those actions that alter the habitats that species rely on.
Along with questions around Indigenous rights and water protection, challenges to mines have often focused on threatened and endangered species that could be harmed by proposed projects.
For example, groups rallying to halt mining near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness — more than 1 million acres of pristine forests, glacial lakes and streams in the Superior National Forest — warn the area is home to three federally protected species, including the gray wolf, the Canada lynx and the northern long-eared bat.
In Idaho, conservation groups suing the Trump administration over Perpetua Resources’ Stibnite gold project, an open-pit project in the headwaters of the South Fork Salmon River, say the mining operation could decimate chinook salmon, steelhead, bull trout, wolverine and whitebark pine, which are protected as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
TITLE: Trump’s Fast-Tracked Deal for a Copper Mine Heightens Existential Fight for Apache
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/apache-oak-flat-resolution-copper-mine-arizona-trump-public-lands-rural/
EXCERPTS: Apache Stronghold, a nonprofit that aims to protect sacred lands including Oak Flat, won a reprieve on May 9, when U.S. District Judge Steven Logan granted an injunction blocking the land swap while the Supreme Court considers its case. The high court is expected to decide whether to take it by early July.
“The federal government and Resolution Copper have put Oak Flat on death row — they are racing to destroy our spiritual lifeblood and erase our religious traditions forever,” Wendsler Nosie Sr., founder of Apache Stronghold, said in a statement. “We are grateful the judge stopped this land grab in its tracks so that the Supreme Court has time to protect Oak Flat from destruction.”
Apache Stronghold’s temporary victory came after the four-day journey from Oak Flat to the federal courthouse in Phoenix ahead of the injunction hearing. The prayer run drew 60 runners, running in segments. Eighty-five faith groups and 44 tribal nations are supporting Apache Stronghold’s Supreme Court appeal.
The fight over Oak Flat offers a glimpse into environmental, public health, and religious battles that may intensify as Trump prioritizes tapping into domestic sources of minerals such as copper, a key ingredient for electronics and renewable energy projects. The case also could set a legal precedent for whether religious freedom grants tribes the right to pray on ancestral lands outside of their reservations.
The Oak Flat case highlights some of the health concerns that arise when ancestral Native American lands owned by the federal government are opened to mining, from physical illness — due to water and air pollution — to psychological, spiritual, and existential distress.
In roadside prayers and rallies along the run, members of various tribes offered visceral accounts of the harm they’ve experienced after sacred lands were tapped for minerals, fossil fuels, and heavy metals. They described attacks on health, identity, religion, and culture that many referred to as ongoing genocide.
At Oak Flat Campground, Apache Stronghold supporters gathered for a ceremony before the prayer run began. Runners were blessed with ashes to protect them on a route that would traverse vast fields of cacti, narrow mountain passes, and even two combative drivers on city streets.
Among those lacing up running shoes was Nizhoni Pike, 24, one of Nosie’s granddaughters. Pike has a deep connection to Oak Flat, where her family holds ceremonies and gathers medicinal plants and food. For Pike, her distress is visceral, immediate.
“This fight means so much,” she said.
Su:k Chu:vak Fulwilder, a council member of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, said loss of land and identity is taking a toll on her people. Fulwilder said her tribe suffers from high suicide rates, and her own son took his life in 2022.
“These sacred lands being disturbed — our spirits feel that pain and that anger,” she said.
Other supporters raised concerns about water quantity and quality in a time of long-term drought. Resolution Copper’s plans to conduct block-cave mining would require nearly 250 billion gallons of water and the natural water systems would be “altered forever and, in many cases, destroyed in perpetuity,” according to a federal environmental impact statement and hydrology report.
Henry Muñoz, 69, who worked in mines for nearly 24 years and is now chair of the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition in Superior, noted that the mine would require scarce water to pipe away toxic waste and copper concentrate. The toxic slurry would be sent to a tailings site, he said, where it would require more water so that dust laden with arsenic and sulfur doesn’t blow away. He noted that Resolution Copper is owned by foreign mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP, so much of the profit would go overseas.
With cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and mine and worker safety agencies, Muñoz added, “the company is going to have free rein to do as they please with the environment, and the public won’t have any recourse.”
TITLE: Scars from the world's first deep sea mining test 50 years on
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250509-blake-plateau-the-uss-50-year-old-scars-from-the-worlds-first-deep-sea-mining-test-site
EXCERPTS: The world's first deep-sea mining test was conducted by US company Deepsea Ventures in July 1970. A vacuum-cleaner-like machine bulldozed through the abyss and sucked up 60,000 baseball-sized lumps off the bottom of the ocean. The nodules – filled with manganese, nickel and cobalt that accumulate a few millimetres per million years – were hoped to become a resource for the nation's industrial endeavours. There remains high interest in them today, as they're replete with minerals for making batteries for electric cars and smartphones, as well as medical and military technology.
Deepsea Ventures' project fell through, and no more deep-sea mining was done off the US East Coast. But a remote-controlled robot sent to that segment of the Blake Plateau during a 2022 scientific expedition found the company's footprints. Scientists snapped pictures of defined dredge lines in the mud for more than 43km (27 miles). The lines dug into the abyss like train tracks, as if somebody had raked through it just recently, and the damage was "widespread and definable", according to reports. Where the tracks are, there is nothing: no nodules and no biodiversity. No curious squid. Nothing like the kaleidoscope of beauty [microbiologist Samantha] Joye encountered in 2018, just around the corner.
While no data is available on what that part of the Blake Plateau looked like before the deep-sea mining experiments in the 1970s, the contrast between the desolate scraped mud tracks and the rest of the Blake Plateau is stark. The site is a proxy for what might happen elsewhere, says Joye.
Before and after data from a mining simulation in an analogous area in the Pacific Ocean, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, south-east of Hawaii and poised to be a deep-sea mining hotspot, suggests these ecosystems take hundreds of years to bounce back. Segments there that had been test-ploughed through in 1989 had much lower diversity of large animals, especially filter feeders, and still had up to just half of their microbial communities after 26 years.
"And if you were thinking about something that was going to recover pretty quickly, it would be microbes, right?" says Joye. "And that was essentially a controlled experiment supposed to do minimal damage." Research from March 2025 confirmed the findings, noting that despite some recent recolonisation of the area, the impacts likely last for decades.
Aside from the wildlife impact, deep-sea mining in US waters can have some substantial impacts on the fishing industry, according to Robbins's recent report on potential conflicts in both oceans. "There are just too many unanswered questions that require us to take a step back to allow the fishing industry, frankly, to be better informed about the trade-offs," says Christopher Robbins, associate director of Ocean Conservancy.
Off the US West Coast, another study from 2023 suggested that the migration routes of bigeye, skipjack and yellowfin tuna could overlap with potential sediment plumes if commercial mining were to be unrolled. Other research has suggested that small developing countries catch as much as 10% of their tuna from areas likely affected by deep-sea mining.
The Blake Plateau, still scarred from the 1970 mining experiment, is likely not a target for deep sea mining yet, says Gorka Sancho, a fish ecology expert at College of Charleston, who penned a petition letter to President Joe Biden in 2024 calling for robust long-term protections of the Blake Plateau. "But everything can change on a dime these days," says Sancho.
The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, on the other hand, is where miners have set their targets. Studies suggest this area alone contains more nickel, cobalt and manganese than all of the deposits on land.
In April 2025 Trump signed an executive order to fast-track deep-sea mining called Unleashing America's Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources. Some days later, the government received a request for license to explore and to mine from the Canadian firm The Metals Company, including areas outside the US's jurisdiction. If the US granted such a permit, this could be in conflict with the international framework governing international waters and the seabed, known as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), according to the ISA's secretary-general Leticia Reis de Carvalho. (It's worth noting, however, that the US has never ratified Unclos.) The BBC contacted The Metals Company for comment but received no response by the time of publication.
Trump's order commits Noaa to expedite mining permits. Robbins comments that the executive order is at odds with Noaa's mission. Noaa told the BBC that the agency reviews applications for compliance and requirements in accordance with the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act and regulations for exploration licenses. "The process ensures a thorough environmental impact review, interagency consultations and opportunity for public comment," Noaa states.
In the meantime, the scars from the US's first foray into deep-sea mining testing are still there on the ocean floor, half a century on. They remain still in time, etched into the abyss, at the bottom of a world swirling with life.