Without federal recognition, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band continues to petition throughout Santa Clara County to protect their ceremonial place from approval as a sand and gravel mine.
“The destruction of spiritual sites is a crime against humanity,” Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, said.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library hosted a panel on the culture and ecology of the tribe’s sacred homeland, Juristac, Thursday evening.
Lopez, conservation ecologist Stuart Weiss and Alice Kaufman, legislative advocacy director for the Committee for Green Foothills shared their insight on the cultural and environmental damage the project could cause.
Lopez said he believes preserving the land is a cultural responsibility and expressed his desire to care for Mother Nature, which he calls “Creator.”
“When the people started taking care of Mother Earth, they learned that the lands were sacred,” Lopez said. “They recognize that [the] Creator made these lands perfect . . . They created prayers, ceremonies and protocols such as reciprocation. Such as not taking more than what you need.”
Lopez anticipates that lawmakers will ignore the sacred significance of the Amah Mutsun Tribe’s land.
“If this was Catholic, if this was Buddhist, if this was Muslim, they would not dare think of mining a spiritual site,” Lopez said.
The space stretches along the Southern Foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains near Gilroy, California.
The area was purchased in 1992 and many requests to modify Juristac for residential development were rejected, Kaufman said.
“It was completely out of line with what’s in the county’s general plan for the area, which is agricultural ranch lands,” he said.
Kaufman said the former owners of the land filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and the space was bought by the Debt Acquisition Company of America.
In 2015, the new land owners submitted for a sand and gravel mine capable of passing as an agricultural ranch land, Kaufman said.
Kaufman said the mining space dubbed “Sargent Ranch” will be as large as 320 acres, divided up as four separate pits, each hollowing out the land hundreds of feet deep.
That requires 40-50 million tons of material to be excavated from the ecosystem, Kaufman said.
“The state of California requires every mine to have a reclamation plan once you’re done with your mining,” Kaufman said. “You put the overburden material back into the pit.”
The excavation is pushing Stuart Weiss and other advocates to vocalize environmental conservation efforts.
“One of the things we’ve got to realize is that most conservation takes place at a local scale,” said conservation ecologist Weiss.
Last spring, The United Nations assembled the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which classified the comprehensive study of earth as a massive extinction crisis.
“I think one of the biggest factors in it, especially for large animals, is the fragmentation,” Weiss said. “Creatures are not free to move around and that might be the single most important component that Juristac provides.”
Weiss pointed out that the area is an essential wildlife corridor for pumas.
“The Santa Cruz mountains are dependent on being connected to the rest of the world,” Weiss said. “Juristac came up as one of the connecting lands that allow the network of conservation lands to be continuous and allow the free movement of wildlife.”
If pumas, a keystone animal, go extinct, the deer population will not have a predator, Weiss said. This would allow deer to overpopulate, overfeed on native plants and strip the landscape.
Two areas somewhat link Diablo Range and the Santa Cruz mountains, including the Coyote Valley in between San Jose and Morgan Hill.
The Sargent Quarry obtrusion flows directly into the Pajaro River which could alter water quality, Weiss said.
“The geologic formation that they want to mine is actually really good ground water recharge because its sand and gravel is not hard rock or clay,” Weiss said. “The recharge is what provides water for Sargent Creek and Pajaro River. It will soon be the end of Sargent Creek as a viable watershed.”
The advocates said that these issues need to be examined for the Environmental Impact Report, which the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors has to consider before approving the project.
