In the west central Nevada desert, dozens of irrigation pivots cast circles of green around the community of Dyer. Primarily watering alfalfa and root vegetables, the crop circles run north to south along the California border, bound by the Silver Peak Range to the east and White Mountains to the west. 

Agriculture is the backbone of the small, tight-knit community of a little more than 300 people; without it, the place will dry up, literally and figuratively, residents say. 

So, a prominent Nevada environmentalist’s call for farmers to shut off irrigation in the valley in order to save a rare fish has united opponents seeking to halt its listing on the federal endangered species list. 

Shutting off the water would “completely shut down the economy of Fish Lake Valley,” said Kristene Fisher, president of the Central Nevada County Farm Bureau. “The survival of this fish is much bigger than the survival of this fish, it’s the survival of everything around it.”

But the valley’s use of groundwater has increased as its amount of available water continues to decrease, and the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), a national environmental group, says groundwater use must be curtailed to save the diminutive Fish Lake Valley tui chub from extinction.

The fish, once widespread across Fish Lake Valley, has seen its numbers decline as springs and lakes have dried up and the valley experiences what experts say is irreparable damage to the water table because of overpumping, so the center is petitioning the federal government to include it on the endangered species list.

In a May interview with Inside Climate News, Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director at the center, said that “The number one thing [to protect the fish] is groundwater levels must stabilize in Fish Lake Valley, and the only way to do that is to pump a lot less water. So, the answer is we need to have farmers shut off their [irrigation] pivots, but not for a year — forever.”  

Donnelly told The Nevada Independent that the comment required context — he wasn’t stating that all pumping must stop, but that some level of curtailment is needed in the vastly overappropriated basin that relies on agriculture for much of its industry. 

“We do not believe that pumping should stop across the whole valley, but some curtailment may be required, especially … close to the spring,” he said. 

While a decision is a long way away — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the agency tasked with deciding if the fish should or shouldn’t be listed, is still gathering public input — many Esmeralda County residents and others with a vested interest in the valley who are worried that Donnelly’s pronouncement could come true are rallying against the proposed listing.

On Monday evening, dozens of residents, joined by a diverse group including members of the Nevada Farm Bureau, The Nature Conservancy (which helped steer the meeting), Esmeralda County commissioners and the Central Nevada Water Authority, assembled at the Fish Lake Valley Community Center to talk about the proposal that many perceive as a threat to their livelihood, the county and their way of life.

The issue of agricultural pumping versus protection of the fish is being exacerbated by construction of a permitted lithium mine about 8 miles from the spring the fish call home. The mine would potentially divert thousands of acre-feet of water formerly used for agriculture, and some involved say the push to list the fish and stop pumping is an effort to upset the mine’s construction. 

“We’re not laying down,” Linda Williams, who’s called the county home for nearly seven decades, told The Nevada Independent. “We’re taking this the most serious I’ve ever seen our county take anything.”

‘It’s not the fishes’ fault this is a crisis’

Fish Lake Valley was once populated with springs and ponds that, over the years, have largely dried up.

Now, the only native habitat the fish still live in is a wide but shallow spring and pond known as the McNett spring system. The Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW), which has surveyed the fish at the spring intermittently since 1998, believes there are roughly anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 fish.

At some point, some of the fish were translocated to Lida Pond, a small water body outside Fish Lake Valley that is also fed by a spring. The fish were first discovered in the pond in 1993, although how and when they were introduced there is unknown. There are no estimates of how many fish live in Lida Pond, although NDOW has consistently reported their presence in the last several years.

“I don’t object to its existence, [but] it’s like a refuge,” Donnelly said of Lida Pond. “It’s not their native habitat — it’s like a zoo.”

The Fish Lake Valley tui chub are protected under Nevada’s administrative code, but those protections are limited and only prevent them from being fished without state authorization — they don’t provide habitat protections or guard the fish against actions such as mining or farming that could potentially harm them.

And there are no formal agreements in place protecting the McNett spring system, leaving the future of the fish’s habitat uncertain.

That’s why the fish need federal protections, according to the center.

“It’s not the fishes’ fault this is a crisis,” Donnelly said. “The listing decision is made on science. Is the species in danger of going extinct? The answer for this species is unequivocally ‘yes.’”

More than 1,600 plants and animals are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). The center has secured federal protections for nearly half of those — over 760, more than all other conservation groups combined.

The center submits legal petitions and files lawsuits on behalf of plants and animals. Those lawsuits are driven, in part, by what the center says is a lack of urgency to protect threatened plants and animals on the part of the federal government, which takes an average of 12 years to list a species, according to the center.

In 2022, the center won protections for the Tiehm’s buckwheat, a plant found only in Esmeralda County in the Silver Peak mountains above Fish Lake Valley where the lithium mine is being built; another petition still pending with the USFWS seeks to list the Tacopa bird’s beak, a perennial flower growing in just a few wetlands including in Fish Lake Valley. And the center is looking to submit a petition for yet another plant that grows in the Fish Lake Valley area, Donnelly said.

Doug Busselman, executive vice president of the Nevada Farm Bureau and a longtime agriculture and wildlife advocate, says the Endangered Species Act has left him with what he describes as a “rather cynical viewpoint.”

“The people who want to use the Endangered Species Act as a tool to accomplish their objectives, they don’t come to the conservation meetings. They just wait for the opportunity to file the court case,” Busselman said. “The people who are committed to the well-being of whatever animal, they’re scrambling and trying to do whatever they can for the good of the animal and species, and also for their own livelihood.”

In the case of the Fish Lake tui chub, Busselman says the fight isn’t necessarily about the fish, but about efforts to halt Rhyolite Ridge, the permitted lithium mine.

The center has been one of the most outspoken opponents of Rhyolite Ridge, citing everything from its effects on species to the amount of water the company projects it will use — about 4,000 acre-feet of water annually, or one-seventh of Fish Lake Valley’s perennial yield. 

“They’ve tried to find anything they can to prevent that mine from going forward,” Busselman said.  

History repeating itself?

At the community meeting, Central Nevada Water Authority Executive Director Jeff Fontaine, who attended virtually, drew comparisons between the Fish Lake Valley situation and a recent Nevada Supreme Court ruling in Southern Nevada affecting a threatened fish and water flows.  

The Moapa Dace was once fairly widespread in the Muddy River outside Las Vegas, but river diversions and groundwater pumping have reduced the fish’s habitat so that they are now found in only a handful of locations. 

Plans for additional development that would have pulled water from the river attracted protests and state orders, with the state Supreme Court eventually weighing in to affirm the state’s broad authority to manage groundwater and surface water as a single resource.

Read more: Nevada Supreme Court issues major water ruling with implications for state groundwater management

Donnelly also cited that case to The Nevada Independent, pointing out that groundwater pumping in the area has not stopped — instead, pumping was altered so that the fish won’t go extinct and the community still has water. 

He also pointed to the landmark Diamond Valley Groundwater Management Plan as an example of what success could look like. In agricultural Diamond Valley, residents of the vastly overappropriated and overpumped valley were ordered to draft their own water management plan within 10 years to reduce pumping and stabilize water levels or else the state would intervene; they developed a plan that reduced annual allocations while ensuring junior water rights and domestic well users would continue to have access to water. 

“There are steps that can be taken to address overpumping,” Donnelly said. 

‘The survival of this fish is … the survival of everything around it’

Esmeralda County is a hot spot for the renewable energy boom gripping Nevada. 

The county is home to the nation’s only existing large-scale lithium mine, Silver Peak. Rhyolite Ridge, slated to become the nation’s third lithium mine, is about 8 miles from the spring the tui chub calls home. A utility-scale solar complex the size of Las Vegas has been proposed for an area north of Fish Lake Valley. And numerous geothermal and lithium projects are in various stages of exploration in the region, some as little as 2 miles from the spring system where the tui chub live.

Some people see growth as a problem. Others see the upside — in a county with few residents, little existing industry and lots of public land, development is a way to grow and diversify the county’s economy.

In May, Esmeralda County hired its first ever county manager. Joseph Dunn, a longtime Esmeralda County resident who worked at Silver Peak for about 20 years, is helping the county as it drafts its first ever development agreement ordinance, a guiding document to steer the county when large companies come in looking to build. Just as Dunn took his post, the federal government announced it was considering listing the Fish Lake Valley tui chub as endangered. 

The consideration marks the first potential listing of an endangered species by President Donald Trump during his second term in office — during his first term, the pace of listings dropped dramatically; now, his administration is seeking to eliminate habitat protections for endangered and threatened species by changing certain definitions in the Endangered Species Act. 

A listing, Dunn said, could have large-scale ramifications for the county.

“It [would be] a detriment to our farmers and cattlemen out there,” he said. “It’s potentially an economic burden. And if the irrigation stops, the greenness would go away and you’d end up with basically a dust bowl.”

But as fears about water restrictions swell, so does Esmeralda County’s water usage. Between 2008 and 2023, the number of crops grown in the Fish Lake Valley hydrologic basin increased nearly 250 percent, from roughly 4,500 acres to more than 11,100 acres. Nearly two-thirds of the county’s crops are alfalfa and other hay products.

But those crops are water intensive, requiring more than 4 feet of water per year.

As a result, groundwater levels have dropped up to 2 feet per year, meaning there is less water under the ground and it is harder and deeper to reach. The drawdown of groundwater over the years has had “direct negative effects on the habitat of the Fish Lake Valley tui chub,” according to the USFWS. “The primary threat to Fish Lake Valley tui chubs at the McNett spring system is continued groundwater extraction driven by agricultural operations in Fish Lake Valley.”

Under current practices, groundwater depletion is expected to continue — using groundwater models, the USFWS predicts the spring system will experience a drawdown of 5 feet over the next 50 years from agricultural pumping.

But those challenges aren’t immediately apparent on the surface. An analysis performed by Geo-Logic Associates for Ioneer, the company seeking to construct Rhyolite Ridge, found that although groundwater levels are gradually declining on the McNett Ranch property because of groundwater pumping, ground-level observations and aerial imagery of springs and wells on the ranch indicate there has been little to no effect on the McNett spring system from regional groundwater declines. 

“The shallow groundwater near McNett Ranch does not appear to have been significantly impacted by historical regional agricultural pumping,” the report said.  

The region’s water challenges have been acknowledged by the county and the state.

In 2023, the Nevada State Engineer's Office determined the basin was over appropriated by up to 250 percent, meaning that people are authorized to take out more than twice as much water as returns to the basin each year through snowmelt and rainfall.

And the county’s 2024 water resource plan acknowledges the basin is over tapped, pointing out that “Fish Lake Valley basin is experiencing irreparable damage from water production that exceeds annual recharge” and that “Preventing further decline of the water table … should be a priority for the County.”

The county-drafted plan offers potential solutions such as irrigating less land.

Donnelly cited the 2024 plan in a phone call with The Nevada Independent.

“I’m just saying what the county’s saying,” he said. “If they got a problem, they need to take it up with Esmeralda County, not with me.” 

Williams, 76, said she’s fought with the center for decades and she intends to keep fighting. As a kid, her dad, an avid hunter, taught her “to protect the land, protect the wildlife, protect the environment”; as an adult, she ranched, operated several Esmeralda County businesses, founded the Fish Lake Valley Heritage Center and Museum and, like many county residents, is rooted in its agricultural heritage. 

“That’s why I take this very seriously,” she said. “There are so many other ways the tui could be preserved and not face extinction and not make that valley another dust bowl.”