By Lucas Waldron | Special to the Arizona Daily Star
atagonia has one bar, one coffee shop, one gas station.
And customers at nearly all of them are divided between those in favor of a new mining project in this tiny southeastern-Arizona town and those against it.
Roughly half of Patagonia’s 900 residents support Arizona Mining Inc., a Canadian company that recently bought land near town for exploratory drilling. The rest oppose the mining company, seeking to preserve the region’s unique rare wildlife and steer the economy away from mineral extraction and toward environmental restoration.
Arizona Mining Inc. has vowed to create an estimated 500 jobs through a mine it plans to have up and running in 2020. In July, the company predicted the mine will extract 10,000 tons of minerals per day and could be viable for eight years.
