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Guest Essay
This Alaska Mine Would Destroy the World’s Largest Salmon Fishery
Carl Safina and
Dr. Safina is a marine ecologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Mr. Reynolds is a senior lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, where he directs the organization’s efforts in the American West.
For decades, a Canadian company has sought to excavate an enormous open pit mine at the headwaters of the 40,000-square-mile Bristol Bay watershed in southwestern Alaska. Called the Pebble Mine, it would destroy the planet’s most productive salmon fishery and impoverish the communities the fishery sustains.
How bad would this be? The breadth of the opposition offers an idea. The entire Alaska congressional delegation opposes the project. The Trump administration denied it a permit in 2020, and this year the Environmental Protection Agency issued a rare veto, effectively blocking the mine. The project is opposed by a consortium of Alaska Native tribes that represent about 80 percent of the people who live in the region. In 2016 it was condemned by a near unanimous vote of the World Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
All of the project’s major mining partners walked away a decade ago, leaving the scheme to its financially challenged Canadian owner, Northern Dynasty Minerals.
And yet this project to extract copper, gold and molybdenum has refused to die. Alaska’s governor, Mike Dunleavy, Northern Dynasty’s inexplicably loyal disciple, is trying to revive it again.
This past summer, at Mr. Dunleavy’s direction, the state bypassed the normal appeals process by going directly to the Supreme Court to challenge the E.P.A. veto. It’s no mystery why: Since last year, the Supreme Court has gut-punched the E.P.A. twice, first on climate change regulation and then, this spring, on clean water protection. The Dunleavy administration and the mining company are clearly hoping for another bolt of deregulatory lightning.
The court should decline the invitation.
While Governor Dunleavy claims to be representing the interests of Alaskans, he has for years supported the development of the Pebble Mine over the strong objections of Alaskans. In fact, a recent poll found that 74 percent of Alaska’s voters are still concerned that the E.P.A.’s rejection of the project won’t do enough to protect the Bristol Bay watershed from large-scale mining. The initial petitions that led to the E.P.A.’s veto were filed by six Bristol Bay tribes and later joined by a consortium of other federally recognized tribes.
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