June 9, 2021 — The road to Pebble Mine is getting rougher.
Pedro Bay Corp., a Native organization in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region, announced late last month that nearly 90 percent of its shareholders voted in favor of conservation easements for more than 44,000 of the corporation’s 92,100 acres of land in southwest Alaska. The agreement would make the land off-limits to development, including Pebble Corp.’s proposed mining road.
June 8, 2021 — U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski visited Dillingham last week.
She said the primary reason for her visit was to gather ideas for permanent protections against developments like the proposed Pebble Mine.
Murkowski used to chair the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and has historically supported resource development. For years, she declined to support or oppose Pebble, saying it was important to wait for the federal permitting process to play out.
As the Army Corps of Engineers neared its final perit decision last year, and undercover tapes emerged of Pebble leaders doubting she’d take a stand against the project, Murkowski did just that.
In Dillingham, Murkowski met with people from the commercial, subsistence and recreational fisheries. She also held a closed meeting with select community leaders at the Dillingham Middle/High School.
June 3, 2021 — Every summer, thousands of commercial and sport fishermen, seafood processors and sport fishing guides — many of them Oregonians — migrate to western Alaska for the remarkable annual return of tens of millions of wild sockeye salmon to Bristol Bay.
Bristol Bay’s salmon have sustained the Indigenous people of Bristol Bay for millennia, and today they remain the backbone of the bay’s local communities. These salmon also support a thriving, renewable industry that feeds Alaska’s economy and provides income for families like ours in the Pacific Northwest.
In recent years, Bristol Bay’s salmon generated 15,000 American jobs and created $2.2 billion in renewable annual revenue. Half of all the sockeye salmon sold in global markets comes from Bristol Bay.
And yet, since the late 1980s, Bristol Bay’s rare and sustainable fishery has been threatened by plans for a colossal open-pit gold and copper mine — the Pebble Mine — that a Canadian mining company would blast out of the bay’s pristine headwaters, irreparably disrupting the watershed and leaving behind significant toxic mining waste that must be stored in perpetuity.
May 10, 2021 — The Biden administration issued a conservation plan Thursday called “America the Beautiful.”
At 22 pages, it’s more of a statement of principles. The centerpiece is a goal of conserving 30% of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030, in part to combat climate change.
Republicans in Congress immediately criticized it as vague and an attempt to lock up natural resources.
Meanwhile, conservation groups are eyeing parts of Alaska they’d like to see protected. Their eyes are on salmon.
“It’s hard to think of two better candidates than the Tongass in Southeast Alaska and Bristol Bay in Southwest Alaska,” said Tim Bristol, executive director of Salmon State.
He said conservation measures in the Tongass and Bristol Bay would protect fish, wildlife and save thousands of jobs which depend on renewable resources.
April 23, 2021 — A third of the state’s subsistence salmon harvest was caught in Bristol Bay in 2017, according to a new report from the McKinley Research Group. The subsistence economy is critical to Bristol Bay’s culture, and it’s the oldest and most continuous use of salmon.
The report, “The Economic Benefits of Bristol Bay”, attempts to quantify what it would cost to replace subsistence salmon with other protein sources from stores in the region.
Bristol Bay subsistence fishers caught over 500,000 pounds of salmon in 2017, according to the latest data available. The research group estimates that it would cost $5-$10 million to replace that catch with other sources of protein. Rebecca Braun is one of the researchers who worked on the report.
“Because the world speaks in dollars, we tried to translate the subsistence harvest into dollars,” Braun said. “And it’s kind of an inherently impossible exercise because subsistence values goes beyond economics.”
April 19, 2021 — My camera lens is pressed against the window of the small floatplane as it flies below a thick ceiling of clouds. The mist clings to the hillsides of a temperate rainforest that descend steeply to the rocky coastline of southeast Alaska.
The plane banks, and a tiny village comes into view. A scattering of houses are built on stilts on the water’s edge. We circle and I see fishing boats tied up next to a large dock and a floating post office. The pilot throttles down and the pontoons skim across the glassy water inside the bay. We taxi to the public dock and I step out in front of the Point Baker general store.
Life along the Alaska coast is economically and culturally dependent on fishing. Each summer, millions of salmon — after maturing in the ocean — begin their journey back to the rivers in which they were spawned. Fishermen, along with whales, eagles and bears, share in the abundance.
Alaska is home to five species of Pacific salmon. These fish are anadromous; they begin their lives in freshwater rivers and lakes and eventually make their way down rivers and into the ocean. Depending on the species, salmon may spend between about one and seven years in the ocean before beginning their journey home to the freshwater where they were born.
The ability of salmon to find their way home is one of nature’s greatest miracles. Among other navigational aids, salmon can detect a single drop of water from its home stream mixed in 250 gallons of saltwater.
April 16, 2021 — The following was released by the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association:
Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association (BBRSDA), Certified Quality Foods (dba Seafood Analytics) and Digital Observers are teaming up for a second year to provide digital quality monitoring for the 2021 Bristol Bay sockeye salmon season. In 2020, despite of COVID challenges that infiltrated the region, the monitoring program was successfully completed. Quality measurements from over 6,000 sockeye salmon, off 200 boats, were taken by Digital Observers on five tenders through-out Bristol Bay. The Certified Quality Foods (CQF) cloud-based business intelligence platform analyzed the data and allowed for key takeaways around trendlines, comparisons between regions, seasons, boats, tenders etc. Generic reports were shared with leading industry professionals, while a detailed report with individual boat and tender names is available to the customer. A generic example of one of the reports can be seen here (https://mkcox.clicdata.com/b/bbrsdageneric).
Having a robust amount of data from the 2020 Bristol Bay sockeye season provides a valuable baseline for comparison of salmon quality and salmon fat content harvested each year.
During the 2021 fishing season, Quality Control technicians working on 15 tenders across Bristol Bay will measure the quality of salmon at the point of delivery using the noninvasive ‘Certified Quality Reader,’ a device that uses electrical currents to measure cell degradation of the salmon. It is a fast and objective way to measure the freshness of salmon that accounts for more than just temperature.
2021 is going to be a great year. The program is tripling its measurement capacity, and expanding from paper entry to digitized apps so other metrics such as odor, visual, temperature and whether the fish has been bled can be tracked in conjunction with quality measures. For an example of how a digital datasheet is used click here (https://youtu.be/rAQC0VZ1IEg).
April 8, 2021 — On Wednesday, 50 investors representing $105 billion sent a letter calling for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Congress to permanently protect Alaska’s Bristol Bay against large-scale mining.
The signatories are concerned about the long-term social and environmental impacts of the Pebble mine, a massive open-pit gold and copper project in the Bristol Bay headwaters proposed by Canadian junior Northern Dynasty Minerals (NYSE: NAK).
On Tuesday, Northern Dynasty announced it had written to the recently confirmed Administrator of the EPA Michael Regan with a status update on the Pebble project and had urged the new Administrator to support a full and fair process for the project.
The investors said that while recognizing the importance of natural resource development to support economic growth, they are concerned waste from the proposed mine would threaten the world’s largest wild salmon fishery, located in the Bristol Bay area.
April 7, 2021 — Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, U.S.A.-based Envisible has joined forces with Juneau, Alaska, U.S.A.-headquartered Certified Quality Foods, Inc., which does business as Seafood Analytics, in a push to capture quality product data on the former’s blockchain-enabled Wholechain traceability system.
The initiative will initially focus on sockeye salmon sold by Northline Seafoods in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Utilizing Seafood Analytics’ handheld certified quality reader (CQR) device, Northline will gather product quality metrics and measure the electrical properties of its salmon at the point of harvest.
April 7, 2021 — The following was released by the Natural Resources Defense Council:
Fifty investment firms representing more than $105 billion called on EPA and Congress to permanently protect Alaska’s invaluable Bristol Bay from the destructive Pebble Mine.
Led by Trillium Asset Management, investors released a letter urging EPA to “use its authority under Section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act to immediately restrict mine waste disposal in wetlands, rivers and streams within the Bristol Bay watershed.” The letter also urged Congress to “enact legislation to establish a National Fisheries Area to provide permanent federal protection against large-scale mining within the Bristol Bay watershed.”
The letter echoes the formal requests from United Tribes of Bristol Bay (UTBB), Commercial Fishermen for Bristol Bay (CFBB), and Representatives Peter DeFazio and Jared Huffman asking EPA to use its Clean Water Act 404(c) authority to protect Bristol Bay from the threat of the proposed Pebble Mine. NRDC also sent a letter to EPA urging permanent protection.