Fighting for Precious Ground

Could a massive Alaskan gold mine jeopardize one of the world’s best fisheries?

Dave Atcheson had what some might consider a dream job: writing for magazines about fishing in Alaska. But he set his career aside for fear that the best spot he had ever fished could be destroyed.

"The fishing up there is outrageously good," Atcheson said. "I don't think it's something people outside Alaska could even comprehend, how amazing it is.

"You can go to streams up there and catch native rainbow trout that are eight, nine, 10 pounds, just one after another. You can go places where you catch 20, 30 king salmon in an afternoon that weigh 20, 30 pounds each."

The watersheds between Bristol Bay and Cook Inlet, southwest of Anchorage, are home to the largest salmon runs in the world, supporting fisheries worth $300 million annually. The marshy land has never been cut by roads or power lines. The water remains pure, in lakes that pock green meadows like the spots on a trout's back.

It took the promise of enormous wealth for anyone to consider disturbing such a place. Underneath these ponds lies one of the world's largest discoveries of gold, copper and molybdenum (a metal with various industrial applications). The gold alone is theoretically worth more than $90 billion, and the copper could fulfill a fourth of U.S. consumption for 50 years.

A partnership of international companies wants to dig a mine here, called Pebble. If fully developed, it would narrowly miss being the largest on earth -- a giant hole in the ground that would industrialize the area on a massive scale.

For Dave Atcheson, avoiding that prospect was enough to quit writing. He began by volunteering for Alaska's Renewable Resource Coalition -- a group focused entirely on stopping Pebble Mine -- then began working there full time. He now leads a foundation associated with the coalition.

 "That fishery is like the Grand Canyon, or the redwood forest," Atcheson said. "It's something we just can't take a chance with."

VAST IMPACT ON WILDLIFE

In Alaska, the battle over Pebble has raged for five years, although the developers remain a year away from saying exactly what they plan to do or applying for permits. They expect the approval process to take another three years after that.

Company officials, and some Alaskans who remain neutral on the project, say all the attention is premature. Supporters promise a mine engineered to avoid environmental harm, while opponents don't believe that's possible.

The issue has already spawned a major lawsuit, the biggest election initiative campaign in the state's history, ethics and campaign finance investigations, and controversial intervention by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who weighed in against the initiative just before the vote -- despite a law requiring official neutrality. (She was later judged to have appropriately exercised her right to free speech).

Now national environmental organizations are getting more involved. The Natural Resources Defense Council recently named Bristol Bay a BioGem and launched a campaign to preserve it, primarily by highlighting the dangers posed by Pebble Mine and providing feedback to federal oversight agencies. The National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and others are working with the many local groups that have mobilized.

NRDC and other groups are concerned about the vast potential impact of Pebble on fish and wildlife -- from salmon to caribou to whales and seals. The mine would require an immense open pit, as well as intentionally caved-in tunnels, permanent storage of perhaps 9 billion tons of acidic and metallic waste, a 65-mile road cutting through virgin country and crossing numerous salmon streams, and pipelines, a power plant and a major new deepwater port on Cook Inlet.

That inlet is home to an endangered beluga whale population, which is what first drew NRDC's interest. But NRDC's Taryn Kiekow and her colleagues learned that every aspect of the area's ecosystem depends on salmon. And the salmon, in turn, depend on clean water.

Harbor seals living in the fresh water of 77-mile-long Iliamna Lake are one of only two such populations on earth, said Kiekow, an attorney in NRDC's marine mammal program. "They're incredibly unique. They eat the salmon. Their watershed is directly below the mine.

"If anything happens to the salmon, it's sayonara."

HEAVY METALS, SEEPING TOXINS

Water quality is the key. A complex of major rivers, smaller streams and innumerable lakes around Bristol Bay provide perfect habitat for all five species of Pacific salmon, including the largest runs of red and king salmon anywhere.

Subterranean plumbing feeds the egg-laying gravels, as water bubbles up through the rocks with oxygen and stable temperatures ideal for incubating salmon.

Salmon biologist Carol Ann Woody said the unknown details of the interlocking watersheds and aquifers could determine the spread of heavy metals and other toxins seeping from the mine, damaging salmon runs.

And that's even if Pebble's colossal waste storage ponds never break through their dams and cause a catastrophic spill.

Woody is nervous that the Pebble Partnership won't find or call attention to the watery connections. She's currently leading expeditions to study remote salmon streams in the area, cataloging where spawning occurs. Her work is funded by the Nature Conservancy. She said her exploration has already discovered more new spawning grounds -- and reported them to state officials for protection -- than Pebble's scientists have disclosed.

"The company that stands to make billions of dollars is in control of all the science that is being done," Woody said, "and from my perspective, that is a problem."

The situation is not unusual for a development project. When companies apply for state and federal environmental permits, they also pay for the required environmental studies -- not the government.

But supporters say Pebble has done an unusual amount of work even before applying. Jason Brune, of the pro-development Resource Development Council, said the company has set a new standard for resource businesses in the state. His group, which includes fishing interests, has not taken an official stand on Pebble. Brune says it is too early, because exact plans haven't been announced.

$100 MILLION ON STUDIES ALONE

The Pebble Partnership is owned by Northern Dynasty of Vancouver, Canada, and London-based Anglo American. Pebble is Northern Dynasty's only project, while Anglo American is a large multinational mining company.

The partnership's CEO, John Shively, says the companies have followed the rules -- and gone well beyond them.

Pebble has already spent more than $100 million on environmental studies alone. He said the firm's exploratory work has caused less impact than the permits allow. And the land where the company is working has long been designated for mining by the state of Alaska.

But opponents say that Alaska's permitting process for mineral exploration is better suited to a prospector with a pick and a gold pan than to a project that would transform a region.  

Shively was commissioner of natural resources for Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles and is a former executive of an Alaska Native regional corporation. His management team is full of well-known Alaskans, many with strong Native links.

Among the projects Shively worked on in the past was the Red Dog Mine, developed 20 years ago near Kotzebue in northwest Alaska. Boasted to be the largest zinc mine in the world, it is a notable economic success story, employing Alaska Natives in an area where jobs previously were scarce or non-existent.

But metal-laden dust and water pollution from Red Dog have long concerned villagers in the region. In September, the mine's owner, Teck Alaska, agreed to pay the EPA a $120,000 fine for violating wastewater permits.

Pebble has mounted an unprecedented community outreach campaign to the Native people of the Bristol Bay region and hired local villagers for a variety of jobs supporting exploratory work, while spending some $260 million on the project.

"CARETAKERS OF OUR LAND"

Low salmon prices for commercial fishermen and other economic pressures have hit the region hard. Villages are losing population, and many are in danger of closing their schools because too few young people have stayed.

Shively says he took the job with Pebble last year as part of a career of trying to bring economic development to rural Alaska. He said some of the opposition to the mine, which appears to discount village economic concerns, strikes him as "the height of elitism; urban, white elitism."

Yet strong Alaska Native opposition has developed in the region, too. The cash economy relies entirely on fish -- whether caught by commercial nets or by tourists -- and for most families, subsistence hunting and fishing also put food on the table.

A survey showed more than 70 percent of villagers opposed to the mining project, said Bobby Andrews, a subsistence hunter and fisherman from Dillingham who is spokesman for Nanamta Aulukestai, a coalition representing eight Yup'ik village corporations.

In English, the name means "Caretakers of Our Land."

Andrews said his group has studied how mining affected indigenous people elsewhere. They traveled to Nevada and met with Paiute and Western Shoshone people who live with contaminated mining land, where cleanup attempts have failed. Those tribes once heard promises like the ones the Yup'ik are hearing now from the Pebble Partnership.

For Andrews and others like him, the risk is too great, even if, as Shively promises, the mine will be engineered to protect water quality.

Fish and wildlife and the purity of the natural environment provide a renewable economic and food resource for the Yup'ik people, as well as spiritual sustenance in an ancient culture based on the land.

"We have to try and protect what we have now in perpetuity," Andrews said. "We can't do it on our own. We need the support of everyone to fight."