Conservationists sue to protect rare Nevada toad from proposed mining projects
Joe Duhownik
TUCSON, Ariz. (CN) — Adding to a long list of lawsuits aimed at stopping federal mining projects, conservationists in a new complaint say the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has missed its deadline to list a rare toad as an endangered species.
Railroad Valley frogs live only in a 445-acre wetland in central Nevada that, unfortunately for them, sits atop dozens of oil wells and lithium deposits that have caught the attention of the Trump administration, which is pushing to expand fracking and mining in the West.
Proposed drilling and fracking expansions, plus a new lithium mining project just 10 miles from the wetland, could swallow up the rest of the water the frogs rely on and dramatically reduce their numbers.
Though Fish and Wildlife acknowledged last year that the toads may need protections, it still hasn’t granted any to them, prompting the lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity Wednesday.
“This lawsuit is a final lifeline for Nevada’s embattled Railroad Valley toad,” staff attorney Megan Ortiz said in a press release. “Trump’s reckless push to ‘drill, baby, drill,’ could wipe these little toads off the face of the Earth. The Endangered Species Act is the most successful conservation law in the world at preventing extinction, and we won’t rest until Railroad Valley toads get the protections they urgently need.”
As the Trump administration urges federal agencies to rush into mining projects across the West, the center has done its best to slow progress.
The center first petitioned Fish and Wildlife to list the toads in 2022, but it wasn’t until the conservationists threatened legal action that the government conducted an initial 90-day study, in which it found that the species faces threats from fracking and lithium production, concluding that listing it as endangered “may be necessary.”
“The petitioners also presented information suggesting livestock grazing, infrastructure, mining, disease, nonnative vegetation, climate change and stochastic events may be threats to the Railroad Valley toad,” Fish and Wildlife wrote in its 2024 finding. “We will fully evaluate these potential threats during our 12-month status review."
That 12-month period wrapped in January, but four months later, the federal agency still hasn’t announced whether it will list the toads.
Fish and Wildlife could not be reached for comment.
The Railroad Valley toad has a brown and gray back with prominent warts and a black and white belly. It has evolved to survive in a rare spring-fed habitat in a geothermally active area, and is cut off from other toad species by miles of arid desert. Described as a distinct species in 2020, it is one of the smallest members of the Anaxyrus boreas species group. The center says it, like 40% of all amphibian species, is in danger of disappearing very soon.
One proposed lithium mining project in the valley would pump more than 32 billion gallons of water a year from the same aquifer that sustains the wetlands the toads call home. Post-processed brine would also be reinjected underground, which conservationists say could degrade the water quality of the wetland complex.
“As the driest state in the country, Nevada needs its precious groundwater appropriately managed so the native flora and fauna that evolved here can keep thriving here,” Ortiz said in the press release. “Trump’s love affair with Big Oil will doom Railroad Valley toads and many other species to extinction unless we work urgently to protect them. Now’s the time to act.”
In 2021, the center, Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Nevada Department of Wildlife all filed water rights protests with the Nevada State Engineer, objecting that the proposed use of water would harm the spring habitat. The applications are still pending, and there are hundreds of other active mining claims in the valley.