🦋itsStephanie🦋

One document is all it took to put uranium drills on the Continental Divide Trail. Not a vote. Not a public hearing. Not an environmental review. One filing. Because under a law signed by Ulysses S. Grant in 1872 — written to strip-mine the West during the Gold Rush — any company can stake a claim on federal public land, and the burden falls on the government to prove harm. The company just shows up. Gamma Resources Ltd. showed up in February. Out of Vancouver. $29 million in debt. Zero revenue from operations. Their own auditors have flagged them as a "going concern" — which in financial terms means: we're not sure this company will survive. They've changed their name twice in just over a year. And now they have a legal pathway to drill 12 uranium boreholes — up to 500 feet deep — into New Mexico’s Carson National Forest. Directly on the Continental Divide Trail. In the Chama Basin — the headwaters of the Rio Grande’s largest New Mexico tributary, a watershed that supplies drinking water to over half of New Mexico’s population. More than one million people. Twenty-three tribes and pueblos. Acequia farmers who have drawn clean water from this basin for over 400 years. Families on shallow wells with no alternative water source. They've already identified nearly 3 million pounds of "yellowcake" uranium in the ground. They want to start mining by April 2027. They put it in writing, in their own investor pitch: New Mexico’s land is “low-hanging fruit”. This isn't a loophole. This is the door that was never closed. The General Mining Act of 1872 still governs hardrock mineral rights — including uranium — on 350 million acres of American public land. Under it, foreign companies can freely prospect on land held in trust for every American, extract minerals worth billions, pay zero royalties to the government, and aren't even required to disclose how much they take or what it's worth. It has never been fundamentally reformed. Not once in 154 years. The 1872 Mining Act itself requires no reclamation bond. Zero. No legal requirement to guarantee cleanup. No financial assurance that the land will ever be restored. Nothing. The current administration's "Energy Dominance" orders made it worse — declaring uranium a national priority and signaling to the industry that federal land was open for business. Gamma Resources did the math and liked what they saw. New Mexico's entire congressional delegation has demanded a full environmental review and is drafting legislation to withdraw the Chama watershed from all mineral development. The Continental Divide Trail Coalition has raised the alarm. The Forest Service still hasn't decided if this even requires a full review. A 154-year-old law. A foreign company with no revenue. A watershed tended for centuries by people who were here long before any of this was possible. How is a law written for the Gold Rush in 1872 — still deciding the fate of our Public Lands in 2026? #DemsUnited

→ Texas Public Radio was on the ground for this one. Scorched bird eggs in empty nests. Indigenous voices. The people who've been fighting this since before most of us heard about it: tpr.org/environment/2026-06-…

→ The full breakdown of what's in this land swap - the acreage, the wildlife, the 25,000 public comments that got ignored, and who's suing to stop it. Outdoor Life did the math and it doesn't add up: outdoorlife.com/conservation…

The U.S. government just made a land deal with the world's first trillionaire. Not a sale. A trade. Because apparently that's how we do things now. 715 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge - built by Congress in 1979 to protect one of the most biodiverse wildlife corridors left in North America - handed to SpaceX. Endangered ocelots. Aplomado falcons. Piping plovers. Land the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas has called sacred since long before there was a United States. SpaceX built a rocket launch site next door. Then came the explosions. Concrete and metal hurled six miles across refuge land. A 2024 study found that after one launch, every single monitored shorebird nest near the site suffered egg damage or loss. The Fish and Wildlife Service's response was not enforcement. It was a land swap. FOIA documents show internal planning for this transfer started as early as April 2025 - while Musk was running DOGE and threatening to fire federal workers who didn't justify their jobs to him. The agency developed what they called "the most expedited schedule possible" to get it done. Part of what's being handed over includes the Palmito Ranch Battlefield - the site of the last battle of the Civil War. A National Historic Landmark. Once transferred, SpaceX can restrict public access whenever they want. 25,000+ people submitted public comments. Most opposed the deal. The government moved forward anyway. A coalition of tribal and conservation groups filed a federal lawsuit this week to stop it. Because someone has to. Why are we cutting real estate deals with a trillionaire when we could have just made him pay for it? #DemsUnited