America's electric cars need lithium so badly it may wipe out this species

Source - Center for Biological Diversity

The challenge of balancing conservation versus commerce is ages old and not getting any simpler.

Whether it was the desires of companies to harvest timber in the Pacific Northwest running into conservationists attempts to protect the spotted owl in the 1990s or the more modern concerns of lithium miners who see the Nevada desert as a 'gold' mine running afoul of lovers of Tiehm's buckwheat which, according to a cnn.com article, "grows on 10 acres in... Southwest Nevada... and... can grow nowhere else in the world", the concerns are infinitely more complicated than they first appear.

The environmental side of me says that we need lithium. We need it because that's one of the keys to shifting from internal combustion to electric vehicles.

But is it worth the extinction of a single species to accomplish that?

Man, it's not my place to say, but it's not as easy a question as it might at appears to be to some on either side of the question.

(Update: As of October, Tiehm's buckwheat looks to be headed toward the endangered species list and all the protections that involves at the urging of the Center for Biological Diversity.)