Interview with Protect Thacker Pass Organizers

Protect Thacker Pass

Interview with Max Wilbert

By Emma Lugo

The Biden administration is set to engage in a years-long project which will devastate huge tracts of land in southeast Oregon in order to engage in lithium mining.  These mining projects have the potential to devastate the aquifer of Southeastern Oregon, disrupt flyways of hundreds of migratory bird species and leave long-term ecological devastation which will take millennia for the land to recover from, all in order to secure Americans the illusion that there is something about automobiles that is green and sustainable and that somehow this act of hypocrisy can help save the planet.

Protect Thacker Pass is a grassroots movement to protect Thacker Pass and the McDermitt Caldera in Northern Nevada and Southern Oregon from mining projects like Lithium Nevada Corporation’s Thacker Pass Lithium Mine Project.

We are in a crisis of climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss. Thacker Pass is critical wildlife habitat for threatened, endangered, and endemic species including the greater sage-grouse, pronghorn, Lahontan cutthroat trout, and golden eagles. Thacker Pass, known as Peehee Mu’huh in Paiute, is sacred to regional Native American tribes.

For more information visit: www.protectthackerpass.org