Smoke and Mirrors for Perpetua’s Proposed Stibnite Gold Mine

By Meredith Diamond

Last month, Perpetua Resources held a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Stibnite Mining District within Idaho’s South Fork Salmon River watershed, with Idaho Governor Brad Little, U.S. Army Major General John Reim, and U.S. Department of Agriculture Deputy Undersecretary Kristin Sleeper in attendance. That same day, the U.S. Forest Service issued a conditional Notice to Proceed for the proposed Stibnite Gold Mine, provided that Perpetua Resources posts the required financial assurances. Speakers at the event framed the Stibnite Gold Mine as a turning point for American security, arguing that antimony derived from the mine would prove highly useful for military-grade munitions and advanced defense systems. John Cherry, Perpetua’s CEO, declared that “American readiness starts here,” labeling the mine as a critical source of antimony and thus a patriotic undertaking. 

This narrative, however, obscures the fact that Stibnite is fundamentally a gold mine. Moreover, the project is far from fully authorized, as significant legal challenges to the mine remain unresolved, including challenges brought by Advocates for the West and our partners, and the mine has not actually received all major environmental permits. This suggests that Perpetua’s recent ribbon-cutting ceremony is better understood as an act of political theater rather than a milestone for American national security.

According to Perpetua Resources, the proposed Stibnite Gold Mine is “one of the highest-grade, open pit gold deposits in the United States and is designed to apply a modern, responsible mining approach to restore an abandoned mine site and produce both gold and the only mined source of antimony in the United States.” Despite this claim, which positions the Stibnite Gold Mine as both essential for national security and ecologically responsible, our partner Idaho Conservation League (ICL) has explained that the vast majority of the project’s value will derive from the extraction of gold. Corroborating ICL’s claim, a study conducted in 2016 explains that, “gold accounts for approximately 93% of the value of the payable metals, antimony accounts for about 7% of the payable value, and silver has a negligible economic contribution.” This makes it abundantly clear that antimony would constitute only a marginal portion of the Stibnite Gold Mine’s total benefit. Moreover, antimony extracted from the mine would only be sufficient to supply a third of annual U.S. demand for six years, according to an article in the Idaho Statesman. ICL goes even further, arguing that because Perpetua Resources never presented the U.S. Forest Service with a targeted antimony mining proposal, gold constitutes the project’s primary focus.

Beyond its inflated national defense claims, Perpetua Resources has engaged in an extensive greenwashing campaign to frame the Stibnite Gold Mine as an environmental restoration effort. The corporation has emphasized its commitment to restore areas previously damaged by mining, open additional habitat to migrating fish, and improve local water quality. That said, a complaint filed by Advocates for the West and our partners in February 2025 explains that the Stibnite Gold Mine “would require deforestation of an additional 1,673 acres of public land.” In addition, “more than one-quarter of all new land disturbance will occur within important riparian areas or adjacent to streams.” In actuality, the Stibnite Gold Mine would cause severe habitat degradation, ultimately jeopardizing salmon, steelhead, bull trout, wolverines, and whitebark pine, each of which is protected under the Endangered Species Act.

In an attempt to placate both regulators and the public, Perpetua Resources has worked to manipulate the narrative surrounding the mine from one of destructive industrial expansion to one of ecological repair. Moreover, by invoking themes of national defense, Perpetua seeks to mask the project’s true nature: The proposed Stibnite Gold Mine is nothing more than a destructive gold mining operation.

(Meredith Diamond is Communications Intern at Advocates for the West for the fall 2025 semester. She is in her final year as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is majoring in Environmental Studies with a minor in Political Science.)