RENO, Nev. — Conservationists and a Native American advocacy group are suing the U.S. to try to block a lithium mine in Nevada that they say will wipe out an endangered desert wildflower, disrupt groundwater flows and will threaten cultural resources.

The Center for Biological Diversity promised the court battle a week ago when The US Department of the Interior approved Ioneer Ltd.’s Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron mine, in the only place Tiehm’s buckwheat is known to exist in the world, near the California line, halfway between Reno and Las Vegas.

It’s the latest in a series of legal battles over projects that President Joe Biden’s administration is pushing under its wing. clean energy agenda aimed at reducing dependence on fossil fuels, in part by increasing lithium production to make batteries for electric vehicles and solar panels.

The new lawsuit says that Approval of the mine by the Department of the Interior marks a dramatic turn by American wildlife experts who warned Almost two years ago, Tiehm’s buckwheat was “endangered now” when they listed it as an endangered species in December 2022.

“You can’t save the planet from climate change while simultaneously destroying biodiversity,” said Fermina Stevens, director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project, who joined the center in the lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Reno.

“The use of minerals, whether for electric vehicles or solar panels, does not justify this disregard for indigenous cultural areas and key environmental laws,” said John Hadder, director of Great Basin Resource Watch, another co-plaintiff.

Rita Henderson, spokeswoman for the Reno Bureau of Land Management, said Friday the agency had no immediate comment.

Ioneer Vice President Chad Yeftich said the Australia-based mining company plans to intervene on behalf of the US and “vigorously defend” approval of the project, “which was based on its careful and thorough permitting process.”

“We’re confident the BLM will prevail,” Yeftich said. He added that he does not expect the lawsuit to delay plans to start construction next year.

The lawsuit says the mine will harm sacred sites for the Western Shoshone people. This includes Cave Spring, a natural spring less than a mile (1.6 kilometers) away, described as “a place of intergenerational transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge.”

But it focuses on alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act. It details the Fish and Wildlife Service’s departure from the dire picture it earlier painted of threats to the 6-inch (15-centimeter-tall) cream- or yellow-flowered wildflower that lines the open-pit mine Ioneer intends to dig three times as deep as the length of a football field.

The mine’s permit anticipates that up to one-fifth of the nearly 1.5 square miles (3.6 square kilometers) the agency has designated as critical habitat around the plants — home to various pollinators important to their survival — will be lost over decades, some definitive.

When it is proposed to protect the 910 acres (368 hectares) of critical habitatthe service said “this facility is critical to the conservation and recovery of Tiehm’s Buckwheat.” The agency formalized the designation when it listed the plant in December 2022, rejecting the alternative of less stringent threat status.

“We believe threatened species status is not appropriate because threats are severe and imminent, and Tiehm’s buckwheat is endangered now, as opposed to likely to become endangered in the future,” the agency concluded.

The lawsuit also reveals for the first time that the plant’s population, numbering fewer than 30,000 in the latest government estimates, has suffered additional losses since August that were not accounted for in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s biological opinion .

The harm is similar to what the office concluded was caused the rodents that eat the plants in a 2020 incident that reduced the population by as much as 60 percent, the lawsuit says.

The Fish and Wildlife Service said in its August biological advisory that while the project “will result in the long-term (approximately 23 years) disturbance of 146 acres (59 hectares) of the plant community . . . and the permanent loss of 45 acres. (18 hectares), we do not expect the adverse effects to significantly diminish the value of the critical habitat as a whole.”

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Eds: This story has been corrected to show that the Western Shoshone Defense Project is a Native American advocacy group, not a recognized tribe.