A federal judge in an Arizona case upends long-abused law, sparing a beautiful valley and improving protectionsfor public lands.

• Author: Vanderpool, Tim

From Route 83 in southern Arizona, the Rosemont Valley spreads toward the Santa Rita Mountains like a rumpled carpet. Lying mostly within the Coronado National Forest south of Tucson, it is dappled with juniper and stitched together by small washes, a picturesque backcountry where the hush is broken only by the occasional plane.

But for all this seeming tranquility, Rosemont has long been bitterly contested. Hikers treasure its pristine beauty. Local businesses love the swelling ecotourism trade. And powerful international corporations such as Hudbay Minerals Inc. hunger for the sea of copper lurking below.

Until recently, it seemed that Hudbay, which had planned to open a copper mine on land it owns bordering Coronado National Forest, had won. But just before the Canadian-based company was to begin digging what would be the nations third largest open-pit copper mine, a federal court slammed on the brakes.

In a decision that could lead to profoundly greater protections for public lands, U.S. District Judge James Soto ruled that Hudbay could not dump waste rock and tailings on its claims in the adjacent Coronado, because those claims had not been proven valid. Soto chided Forest Service officials for approving the project, calling their decision "arbitrary and capricious."

Judge Soto's ruling not only made the project in-feasible for Hudbay, but also jolted an industry more accustomed to getting its way in our national forests. The judge's order is "likely the most significant federal court decision on federal mining law in several decades," blogged Phoenix-based mining industry lawyers James Allen and Michael Ford. It "will likely be received with shock and dismay throughout the U.S. hard-rock mining industry."

But for others, the real surprise was that such an obvious conclusion took decades to prevail.

"On the one hand, the ruling seems quite significant," says Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado Law School. "On the other hand, it's just applying the mining law in the way it was written."

If Judge Soto's decision survives appeal, it would upend a century-old interpretation of the General Mining Act of 1872, and could help defeat similarly questionable mining projects across the country. It would deliver a firm rebuke to a law written to encourage frontier development, but which has become terribly destructive today.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the 1872 Mining Act is...