June 18, 2021 — Home to the greatest wild salmon fisheries in the world, Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska also lies near prized natural resources long sought by a mining enterprise. To protect the pristine Alaskan frontier, the Obama administration’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sought to restrict a proposed mining operation in 2014 — a move later dumped by the Trump administration.
Conservationists sued, but a federal judge found the Trump EPA’s decision unreviewable and dismissed the case.
On Thursday, a Ninth Circuit panel ordered the case remanded to determine if the EPA’s about-face was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or contrary” to federal law.
The legal history surrounding this pristine slice of Alaskan wilderness stretches back to 2014, when the EPA announced it would seek to restrict mining operations in Bristol Bay under the authority of the Clean Water Act. The proposed Pebble Mine operation would extract copper, gold and other minerals and would be the largest of its kind in North America. The operation’s toxic waste pits could sit at the headwaters to Bristol Bay, and any type of collapse would likely contaminate the region’s watershed.
But in 2019 the Trump EPA withdrew its proposed determination. Several lawsuits followed including a complaint filed by Trout Unlimited, a nonprofit advocacy group, in the District of Alaska. The group challenged the agency’s withdrawal decision as a violation of the Clean Water Act and the implementing regulations.