TUCSON, ARIZ.—It’s hard to imagine Mayke, a sweet-tempered Belgian shepherd, in the vocation for which she was bred. Driving by a border patrol checkpoint on a highway connecting Tucson to Mexico, she betrayed no reaction.

If the drug-and-bomb-sniffing flunkout was a loss for Homeland Security, she has been a major gain for Arizona conservation biology. Mayke appears to be highly motivated by her new role: detecting jaguar scat. Earlier in the day, as Chris Bugbee, Mayke’s handler, turned onto a rutted road that rose into the foothills of the Santa Rita Mountains, Mayke began to pant.

“When she starts breathing like that, it’s because she recognizes where we’re going,” Bugbee said.

Soon they were scrambling down into a canyon studded with agaves, prickly pear cacti and death-white sycamores. The pebbled creek bed was bone dry. Bugbee and Mayke bolted ahead as Aletris Neils, Bugbee’s partner in wildcat conservation and in life, scanned the ground for animal tracks. She had already spotted a live bobcat perched on the hill above the road, and she quickly identified prints from a mountain lion and a coati, a hot-climate cousin of the raccoon.

At a boulder sheltered by a low tree, Bugbee stopped pick up a motion-triggered infrared remote camera. “It’s like Christmas morning,” Neils said, watching him click through the video.

The camera revealed footage of a fox, a coyote and a mountain lion. Several cows and some hunters wandered into its view.

But there was no sign of Bugbee and Neils’ primary research subject: America’s only known wild jaguar, El Jefe.

Neils was not surprised. “He’s a prime reproductive male,” she said. “He should start venturing out and trying to find females.”

Bugbee and Neils have collected footage of the jaguar at a dozen sites throughout the Santa Rita Mountains, a fringe of peaks south of Tucson that belong to a biodiversity hot spot known as the Sky Islands.

Mayke has also identified 13 jaguar scats that have been genetically verified in a lab.

But this creek bed, where El Jefe has been sighted several times, is of particular interest to conservationists. It sits on the doorstep of a proposed Canadian-owned open-pit copper mine. If approved, the Rosemont mine would be among the largest of its kind in the U.S. Environmental and citizen groups have been fighting the project for a decade. The final cascade of decisions to permit or deny it could arrive this month.

Rosemont would carve an 884-metre-deep pit on the eastern side of the Santa Ritas, and would produce more than 68,000 tonnes of ore and 225,000 tonnes of waste rock every day for 20 to 25 years. The mine’s 2,198-hectare project area would overlap with the jaguar’s federally designated “critical habitat,” and impact 11 other threatened or endangered species.

Questions about the Canadian extractive sector’s actions in distant and vulnerable jurisdictions have surfaced anew recently. A Toronto-based company is being sued in Canada — a legal first — for the rapes and shootings, in one case fatal, of indigenous people living near a Guatemalan nickel mine, actions allegedly perpetrated by mine security officials.

That company, HudBay Minerals Inc., also owns Rosemont. Arizona’s economy is larger than Finland’s, yet to Rosemont’s opponents, Toronto-based Hudbay is another foreign corporation exploiting weak regulations to extract resources in someone else’s backyard.

Hudbay categorically denies the claims in the Guatemalan civil suits and says it believes the allegations will be resolved in the company’s favour. In Arizona, the company has sought to project itself as a modern-day miner leveraging the latest science and technology to support the environmentally responsible extraction of an important resource.

“We import a third of the copper — 30 per cent of what we need — here in the nation. That means that some other country has the burden of our consumption on their environment,” said Kathy Arnold, Rosemont’s director of environment. “I’d like to think you’d rather have me standing there protecting the environment than somebody, maybe in China, maybe in Africa, with less environmental controls.”

Arnold described El Jefe as a transient, a wanderer from Mexico. Some biologists agree. Jaguars are a reliable source of controversy in Arizona, and within Tucson’s vigorous conservation community and beyond it, El Jefe’s significance is debated. Wherever he is, El Jefe is certainly unaware of the fight to calibrate the value of his life: as an individual of no consequence, as an unfortunate sacrifice to progress, as a proxy for incalculable environmental riches, as a sentry for the return of his kind.

“People need to decide whether they think this jaguar is worth saving,” said Neils.

His refuge in an ocean of desert

The mountains of southern Arizona irrupt haphazardly into the desert. Stranded like tumbled molars between two great mountain ranges that jaw to the north and south — the Rockies and the Sierra Madres — these peaks are known as the Madrean “Sky Islands” because the flora and fauna adapted to their inclines are isolated between oceans of desert or grassland.

Standing amidst cacti at the bottom of these mountains, it is not uncommon to see snow dusting the conifers on their peaks. Ecozones are stacked like Lego: desert to grassland to chaparral to oak-pine woodland to spruce-fir forest.

“If you start at bottom of one of these mountains and hike to the top, you will be hitting all the habitats that you would if you drove from Mexico to Canada,” said Jessica Moreno, conservation, outreach and development manager for the Sky Island Alliance, an organization dedicated to preserving the region.

The Sky Islands’ biological richness is compounded by their location at the hub of several major wildlife corridors. The Sierra Madres bring subtropical species such as jaguars, ocelots and parrots. The Rockies draw northern, temperate ones: grizzlies are now extinct here, but black bears are still common. Southern Arizona also sits at the confluence of two different desert zones: the flowering Sonoran desert, with its distinctive saguaro cactus, and the scrubbier, yucca- and agave-filled Chihuahuan desert. The Great Plains also contribute grassland species.

At least a third of North America’s birds can be found in the region. When Moreno compared tallies of native vertebrate species in the Sky Islands to those in Yellowstone National Park, she found more in a single Arizonan-Sonoran river, the San Pedro.

All five confirmed jaguars sighted in the U.S. in the past two decades were found in the Sky Islands, but they weren’t always confined to this corner of Arizona.

Ten days before Christmas 1900, the El Paso Herald published a thrilling bulletin from New Mexico under the headline “An immense jaguar killed near Engle and another one encountered.” The newspaper recounted that an assessor “was walking over the hills, near the camp, when he discovered an immense jaguar or American tiger coming straight toward him. He opened fire on him with a 30-30 rifle, and after firing 11 shots, the monster lay dead, with three mortal wounds in his head and body.”

The historical distribution of jaguars in America is pocked with uncertainty, but hunters’ trophies, newspaper accounts and government registers suggest that jaguars once roamed from coastal California to Texas’s eastern border with Louisiana to the Grand Canyon in the north. Breeding colonies existed, and as recently as 1963, an Arizonan hunter shot an adult female.

Big cats are especially vulnerable to human impacts. Jaguars have been eliminated from more than half of their historic range, which spans Central and South America, and are listed as “near-threatened” on the IUCN Red List.

Jaguars were explicitly targeted for extinction in the American Southwest. As David Brown and Carlos Lopez Gonzalez write in their book Borderland Jaguars, the U.S. government’s Predatory Animal and Rodent Control branch set out in the years after 1915 to poison, shoot, trap, or otherwise be rid of all wolves, mountain lions and other carnivores. Bounty hunters and state predator agents were paid for eliminating them.

For decades, jaguars were thought to be extinct in the U.S. It was only in 1997, a year after hunters’ dogs treed two individuals, that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed jaguars as an endangered species. Usually, that listing is accompanied by an official recovery plan and the designation of “critical habitat.” But the service declared these protections were not necessary, because the species qualified as foreign.

The Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity sued the Fish and Wildlife Service. A judge agreed the agency’s decision was based on bad science, and in 2014, the service finally designated 309,264 hectares of land in Arizona and New Mexico as jaguar critical habitat. (The Center for Biological Diversity also held the naming contest that gave El Jefe his boss-man moniker.)

Connectivity is key for jaguars, and in Arizona, habitat fragmentation is the species greatest barrier to recovery.

When Donald Trump vowed to build a “great, great wall on our southern border, and make Mexico pay for it,” he inadvertently staked himself as the anti-jaguar candidate. The fences Homeland Security has built along the Arizona border, 5.5 metres high and solid metal, can claim dubious success at stemming the flow of migrants and illegal drugs. But they have dammed the natural migration of animals — especially in the Sky Islands.

Other threats to habitat are baked into Arizona’s infrastructure. The state’s economy was founded on the “5 Cs.” The first three Cs — citrus, cotton and cattle — carved up the land for farms. Climate, the fourth, spurred a sprawl of housing developments. The fifth C has also remodelled Arizona’s landscape: copper.

The copper heart of Arizona

HudBay Minerals Inc. acquired Rosemont along with its previous owner, Vancouver-based Augusta Resource Corp., in a hostile-turned-friendly takeover. And like Augusta, which ran an aggressive marketing campaign with the slogan “Rosemont Copper: Redefining Mining,” the company has sought to project an image of a science-based mine invested in the community and mindful of the environment.

Arizona’s business community has been the loudest backer of Rosemont. The company has said the project will create 400 jobs and thousands more indirectly, and commissioned studies that peg the economic benefits of the mine over its lifetime in the tens of billions.

“Mining has always been sort of a foothold here,” says Rick Grinnell, vice-president of the Southern Arizona Business Coalition, a group created to support responsible mining. Grinnell was previously contracted by Rosemont to drum up local business support.

Mineral riches were critical to Arizona’s modern history, from the Spanish conquistadors who sought cities of gold to labourers lured by the 1872 General Mining Law. The law, meant to encourage settlers to come west, declared that citizens who struck a deposit on federal lands — including national forests — had a right to mine it, with little recompense to the public purse. By the early 20th century, one in four Arizonans was a miner.

Last year, Arizona produced 70 per cent of all the copper mined in America. Rosemont would be the third-largest copper mine in the country. Yet if mining is a foothold, it has become a narrower one. Mining accounts for less than 2 per cent of Arizona’s economy and employment, and Rosemont’s 400 jobs would add a fraction of a per cent to the state’s current civilian labour force.

An environmental group opposed to the mine commissioned its own study that said even a small decrease in regional tourism would outweigh the benefits of the mine. The Tucson Audubon Society commissioned another study that concluded birders and other wildlife watchers contribute $1.4 billion (U.S.) to Arizona annually.

Grinnell says he has no idea where the environmentalists’ numbers come from. “People don’t come to southern Arizona to go climb in the Santa Rita Mountains,” he said, arguing that if anything, Rosemont’s open pit would draw tourists. “People want to see something like this.”

As for the environment, “mining is impactful, by its own nature,” acknowledges Kathy Arnold, Rosemont’s director of environment. “My goal has always been to make sure we understand what we need to do to make the least impact that we can.”

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At the project site, Arnold pointed out test plots where staff were monitoring an experiment with soils and seeds to determine how best to re-establish the natural grasses. She emphasized that the company would begin reclaiming land within the first year of operations. She pointed out equipment used to measure rainwater and better understand the hydrology of the site, and cited the dry-stack tailings system that would use up to 60 per cent less water.

We visited Rosemont’s mitigation lands, 1,950 hectares that the company had pledged to restore as conservation areas to offset the impacts of the mine. The company has committed to paying $4.25 million for an invasive species removal program and a habitat improvement program for two imperilled bird species, funding for a staff biologist to oversee conservation measures, and millions more for other community and environmental projects.

As with the mine’s economic impact, it is possible to array an alternate set of facts about its environmental impact. In a 2013 letter, the Environmental Protection Agency called Rosemont’s mitigation plans “grossly inadequate,” describing the methods used to assess the sites as “scientifically flawed.” The EPA has not publicly commented on a recent update to the plans.

While land reclamation would begin on day one, the mine’s 283-hectare pit would never be reclaimed, and EPA officials wrote that the pit will convert the site from a water source to a water sink, lowering the regional aquifer and causing a permanent reduction to streams that support endangered wildlife. In 2014 an environmental group, Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, sued to rescind Rosemont’s air quality permit and won — a decision that is being appealed.

Rosemont occupies a small fraction of the total jaguar critical habitat, but the site blocks off part of a major corridor. When I asked Arnold about this, she said El Jefe “might have to time his trips,” but also that there’s no reason the jaguar has to use that corridor, calling its boundaries “arbitrary.”

In response to a question about whether Rosemont would damage a sensitive biodiversity hot spot, Arnold responded that “I’m not sure why someone would say that’s a biodiversity hot spot,” compared with other locales elsewhere in the Santa Ritas or nearby.

The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, a program administered by a consortium that includes the World Bank, the European Union and Conservation International, lists the Madrean Pine-Oak Woodlands — a region that includes the Santa Rita Mountains — as one of 36 global biodiversity hot spots.

Rosemont has facts to counter these facts, and conservationists have facts to counter those, like a never-ending game of tennis that no one wants to watch.

Even the litany of federal and state agencies tasked with assessing Rosemont do not agree. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released its updated “biological opinion” this month. It concluded that Rosemont would adversely affect but not jeopardize the existence of endangered species, including the jaguar, and that it would lower the water table but not destroy important streams. The EPA, which can veto a crucial water permit or refer the case for higher review in Washington, previously wrote that the mine would unacceptably degrade the ecosystem and should not be permitted as proposed, but has been mum of late. The Forest Service says that because of the 1872 Mining Law, which still stands, it cannot deny the project; it has not said when it will issue its final decision.

“The permitting process is a piecemeal process where we look at slices. What companies and regulators want you to think is once done we have the whole pie,” said David Chambers, an environmental consultant.

Chambers conducted an assessment of Rosemont for a county opposed to the project. But he was quick to say there is no definitive answer to whether the mine is good or bad.

“Ultimately, one is looking at whether the economic benefits of a project outweigh the environmental and social costs. And there, beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” he said. Everyone has to bake their own pie: the decision is a value judgment. And for Rosemont, that judgment will be partly based on how you value the life of a wildcat.

How much is one cat worth?

For the Mayans, jaguars were a symbol of war and a jaguar pelt decorated the seat of ultimate power. For the Aztecs, jaguars were a totem of authority and jaguar gods were associated with the Earth.

The jaguar means different things to different people in Tucson’s conservation community.

“If you have a jaguar, that’s an indication of a really healthy habitat,” says the Sky Island Alliance’s Jessica Moreno. “The jaguar is telling us, by his presence in the Santa Ritas, that the Santa Ritas are a very critical, very important, very valuable place.”

Moreno, like other Tucson conservationists I spoke to, said that water is the critical issue with Rosemont. In Arizona, everyone cares about water, and the long-awaited water permits may be the best way to stop the mine. Not everyone cares about El Jefe.

“Depending on your perspective and how much you care about wildlife, depends on how you weigh that single jaguar,” Moreno said.

Even those who have spent their lives saving wildcats don’t agree on the worth of a single jaguar. When the Fish and Wildlife Service finally declared it would designate critical habitat for the species, Alan Rabinowitz, the CEO of Panthera, an organization devoted to wildcat conservation, called that decision “a slap in the face to good science.” With just a few individual jaguars spotted over decades and no known breeding populations, he wrote, money and effort was being diverted from the jaguar populations that were critical to the survival of the species. Panthera’s jaguar corridor initiative, which knits together habitat in 14 countries, ends in Mexico.

Rabinowitz has not changed his mind. “Look, I think there are lots of reasons for saving that beautiful landscape in the Southwest,” he said. “Find other reasons to save it. But don’t ask me as a jaguar biologist, who has spent my entire career studying jaguars, to use the animal when I don’t think the data calls for it — and so much of its other habitat where it does exist in the tens of thousands needs work.”

Neils and Bugbee, who have also devoted their conservation careers exclusively to wildcats, bridle at such thinking. “I get very frustrated with some of the scientists who say this jaguar is not important. Because every individual jaguar is important,” said Neils.

Peripheral populations — animal at the fringes of their natural range — often have unique adaptations, genetic diversity that can be vital to long-term conservation of a species. Biologists have argued that the American Southwest may become more important for jaguars as climate change shifts habitats northward. And, Neils wondered, how can America possibly pressure other countries to protect their jaguars when it can’t even save one?

Still: “We shouldn’t be focused on the single jaguar that’s here now. We should be focused on ways we’re going to recover the jaguar to its former territory,” says Bugbee. “We know the Santa Ritas had female jaguars. And every mountain range to the south, north, east, west, they all had jaguars. They were here.”

We can bring them back; we eliminated them in the first place, after all.

In February, under the banner of their non-profit, Conservation CATalyst, and in partnership with the Center for Biological Diversity, Neils and Bugbee released remote camera video of El Jefe prowling the rugged wilds of the sky islands. The video made news across the country for days.

“That was our main goal, just to get people to talk,” Neils says. “We’re really at a turning point here, where if this mine goes in, we’re saying for the rest of time that jaguars are not an important endangered species for the United States. That we don’t care about jaguars, period. So the public needs to weigh in on this decision.”

The risk, of course, is that the public will weigh in, and decide that the economic benefits of Rosemont are worth the loss of a single jaguar, or the chance to restore jaguars in America, or even the physical beauty and biological richness of the Santa Rita Mountains.

A small car contains 20 kilograms of copper. A luxury SUV contains 44 kilograms. “I see a watch. I see a recorder. I see your cellphone,” Arnold responded when asked why the mine’s environmental impacts were worth it. She pressed a button and rolled down a reporter’s car window. “Every time we build a little motor just to roll down your window, there’s copper wire.”

That copper does not have to come from Rosemont. But if demand for copper continues to grow, it will come from somewhere. Rosemont’s opponents have been granted a reprieve not because of their protests but because of the current slump in the commodities market: Hudbay once hoped to begin construction this year, but recently stated that Rosemont will be built when copper prices improve.

In its economic impact report, the Arizona Mining Association says that when it measures the contribution of the industry to the state’s economy, “we exclude the capital income of the mining companies themselves since that income accrues largely to shareholders worldwide rather than to residents of Arizona.” In the case of Hudbay, those are shareholders in a company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and headquartered at 25 York St. In Tucson, I kept asking Arizonans what they would want Canadians to know about Rosemont.

“Ask them if them if they’re willing to give up their cellphones. Ask them if they’re willing to give up their electronics, give up their solar,” Rick Grinnell said.

Jessica Moreno, meanwhile, wrote in an email that lack of awareness enables environmental destruction. “What I hope Canadians can take from this, and Americans too, is that we have a responsibility to be informed, even when the activity is happening in someone else’s backyard or in another country. These companies should be held accountable at home.”

In earlier conversation in Tucson, she tendered an invitation. “I would hope that Canadians would love to come out here and visit, and hike the Arizona Trail, and think about being in a place where jaguars live.”

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