LAS VEGAS — A week after the Bureau of Land Management approved Nevada’s third lithium mine, environmentalists and a Western Shoshone group filed a lawsuit alleging that the agency rushed the environmental review process and violated federal laws.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court on Thursday, is the latest in a long line of challenges to a lithium-boron mine proposed in rural Esmeralda County by Ioneer, an Australian mining company. The company says its mine, located miles away from the country’s only lithium mine in Silver Peak, would produce enough lithium to power 370,000 electric vehicles every year.

“The end use of minerals, whether for EV’s or solar panels, does not justify this disregard of Indigenous cultural areas and keystone environmental laws,” said John Hadder, director of Great Basin Resource Watch and one of the plaintiffs. “Approval of this mine risks rolling back standards of protection and advancing an era of relaxed mine permitting that we and future generations will seriously regret.”

Much of the controversy surrounding the mine has come down to a single endangered wildflower species, Tiehm’s buckwheat. The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental watchdog organization, successfully petitioned for Endangered Species Act protections, causing Ioneer to reduce its disturbance of the flower’s habitat.

The BLM gave its full approval to the project last week, with officials and politicians praising the move, though the center obtained internal agency emails through the Freedom of Information Act that called the review process “a very aggressive schedule that deviates from other project schedules on similar projects.”

Neither the BLM nor Ioneer immediately responded to a request for comment, though Ioneer executives previously told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that they don’t anticipate that a lawsuit would delay construction, which is set to begin in 2025.

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