Donnelly, who dropped out of college and moved to the Mojave Desert in the early 2000s, took a different path to their work in the basin. (He eventually earned his bachelor of science from the University of California, Berkeley.) He spent an autumn hiking in Utah and reading every Edward Abbey book in the Moab Public Library, and then campaigned against the slaughter of wild buffalo in Montana. There, he spent his downtime with texts about deep ecology, which argues against a human-centered worldview in environmentalism. He developed an old-school approach to conservation that often prioritized biodiversity over people; his efforts to protect a butterfly species led to a Girl Scouts camp’s closing. His first major conservation fight was against the Green Path North, a transmission line to deliver wind and solar energy to Los Angeles that he worried would harm the California desert. He joined the Center for Biological Diversity in 2017, and his early work focused on opposing a Trump-administration plan to lease land in northern Nevada’s Ruby Mountains for oil drilling and fracking.
Donnelly’s and Fraga’s careers changed in 2018. The Center for Biological Diversity had gotten word that a proposed lithium and boron mine in southwestern Nevada threatened to exterminate a rare species of buckwheat known as Tiehm’s. Donnelly started filing Freedom of Information Act requests for project materials, and he felt he could use a botanist’s expertise. He asked Fraga if she wanted to work with him. On June 1, 2019, they visited the proposed mine site together. The Silver Peak Range was blooming, and the buckwheat was bursting with yellow pom-pom-shaped flowers. They walked the entire range of the species — 10 acres scattered across three square miles — and saw evidence of mineral exploration. Until then, Fraga believed the role of a scientist was to identify and describe, to remain dispassionate. But when she saw the bulldozing that the mining company, Ioneer, had done around the buckwheat’s habitat, the tiny plant seemed vulnerable, and Fraga, knowing this was the only place in the world that it grew, felt a jolt of pain. She knew that she had to go to war for the plant.
While they worked — often camping and hiking together — they grew closer. “He had this way of living as a desert curmudgeon,” Fraga told me. “He cultivated this image of a lone guy in the Mojave with his dog, living in the middle of nowhere Death Valley, who doesn’t want to be bothered by people.” He, in contrast, thought she was a “total square.” Gradually, though, she dazzled him with her knowledge, and Fraga saw the softer side that his spiky public persona obscured, like how he home-cooked his dogs’ food. She was drawn to him because his identity, like her own, was inextricable from his work — with an intensity that bordered on obsession. After one especially lush visit to a Tiehm’s bloom, they decided to date. Last summer, they got engaged while Fraga was surveying the Amargosa niterwort.
The buckwheat fight led to more crusades to protect species from the fallout of renewable-energy projects. Fraga advised on various Endangered Species Act petitions, did research that bolstered lawsuits and conducted plant surveys to provide agencies with data for conservation plans. But she proceeded cautiously; her job depended on maintaining scientific credibility, and her work often relied on funding from the very agencies that approve renewable-energy projects. They both love to be right, and the couple’s differences in approach — emotion versus precision — occasionally led to friction. For her part, Fraga says: “Patrick is a very, very knowledgeable person, but he also has limits to his knowledge. When he crosses the border into my land, into botany, I’m just like, Let’s be correct here.” Donnelly, meanwhile, relished his role as an attack dog.
By June 2024, Donnelly’s lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management had helped delay Rover’s exploratory drilling, and he had taken a back seat on the fight. Voehl led the charge instead, meeting with Native American tribes, politicians and residents of Amargosa Valley, a town not far from the proposed mine, on a regular basis. But Donnelly’s efforts “did give us time to start gathering our forces and doing more research,” says Mike Cottingim, the town’s clerk. Judson Culter, Rover’s chief executive, arrived in Amargosa Valley for a community town-hall meeting, hoping to salvage the project.
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