Miles and miles of dark green hills interspersed with sandy snakes of roads. Small cliffs falling into shadow alongside a thread of green trees that marks where the San Pedro River soaks into the ground and feeds the surrounding area.
And then — some of the same features but cut by a highly geometric blue pool, by the sharp angles of an old open pit mine.
Those images are two views of the same region — one a part of the Lower San Pedro Watershed shaped by more than a century of mining, and one untouched by it.
Photographer and artist Andrea Koesters has been documenting the region’s landscape and its mining legacy from the air, with help from conservation flight group EcoFlight, capturing the past and present and offering a stark look at a possible future.
That comes as the Trump administration has supercharged its efforts to open previously protected public lands to mining, logging and other extractive industries. The Bureau of Land Management approved mineral exploration for a proposed copper mine, called the Copper Creek Project, in Southern Arizona last June.
The Center for Biological Diversity, the San Carlos Apache Tribe and the Lower San Pedro Watershed Alliance sued the Trump administration in August in an effort to stop the exploration for the mine, raising alarms about the exploration’s impact on Mexican spotted owls and other wildlife.
That’s one thread of the broader effort to protect the San Pedro Watershed, which has come from tribes, residents and a range of environmental organizations. Through public meetings, informational tours and lawsuits, they are highlighting the home of the jaguars, owls and beavers that roam the cottonwood-tree studded area.
Melissa Crytzer Fry, chair of the Lower San Pedro Watershed Alliance and a Mammoth resident, says that the area holds a conundrum right now: 6,000 acres of it are protected as part of a formal mitigation area to account for environmental harms in other parts of the state.
“We watched the community around rivers like the Santa Cruz say ‘oh my gosh, we screwed up, we need to repair those river systems.’” she said. “We are trying to repair those river systems to get them back to a state we already have on the San Pedro.”
Now it’s threatened.
By looking at the area from above, the wild expanse of the area becomes clear, as well as what could be lost, say advocates.
“When you look at areas that have been impacted, and juxtapose them against areas that haven’t, I wanted people to come away with an understanding that once they are degraded, they really cannot be repaired,” Crytzer Fry said. “You cannot put it back the way it was. Once it’s gone it’s gone.”
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