Saving Seafood

ALASKA: At Pacific Marine Expo, Pebble worries dominate discussion

December 5, 2019 — Over 500 vendors exhibited at the 2019 Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle in late November. For commercial fishermen, processors and small businesses, it’s the place to be.

The expo was winding down on Saturday morning. But Naknek fisherman Reba Temple was causing a stir with her unusual get-up, made of the mesh netting that salmon tenders use to collect a catch.

“It’s made out of scraps of brailer material. So there’s grommets and mesh brailer material and black straps, and it’s a ballgown,” she said.

Temple said the expo is a great place to catch up with the people and the products in the industry.

“Everyone’s here, you can talk to your processors, you can talk to your friends, see hydraulic pumps cut open so you actually know how they work,” she said.

Stickers and signs saying NO PEBBLE MINE adorned booths, as they have for the past decade. The mine would tap large copper and gold deposits near the headwaters of two major river systems in Bristol Bay. And as the Trump administration breathes new life into the project, many people here are worried.

“Nothing in the world has zero risk — especially when you have a mine of this size with the existing data that show very definitively that there will be impacts,” said Daniel Schindler, director of the University of Washington’s Alaska Salmon Program.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Bristol Bay advocates push for new Pebble Mine assessment

November 22, 2019 — Advocates for the Bristol Bay said they need to keep pressure on federal agencies for an environmental reassessment of the Pebble Mine proposal – and on ways to keep the world’s greatest salmon fishery in the national eye.

At the keynote event for the Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle, a packed audience heard updates from longtime participants in the fight to protect the Bristol Bay watershed from a proposed gold and copper mine.

In Washington, D.C., Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, this week asked the Army Corps of Engineers to undertake a new environmental assessment of the mining plan that the Corps moved to clear in June, reported Mike Friccero, a 39-year Bristol Bay fisherman and activist.

Despite the federal Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump administration reversing its earlier position against the mine, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is also asking to revisit the mine’s potential impacts, Friccero told the audience.

In Congress, Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., has an amendment to the House appropriations bill that would prohibit the Corps of Engineers from spending money to work on permitting the mine, a process that on the current timeline could be finished in spring 2020, said Lindsey Bloom, a Bristol Bay gillnet captain and campaign strategist with the group Salmon State.

On the Senate side, Sen. Lisa Murkowski inserted language in a spending bill to express her concerns about Pebble Mine, but short of a spending block that advocates want to see, said Bloom. They hope that can be achieved in conference committee, she added.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

ALASKA: Next steps to protect the industry from Pebble Mine

November 19, 2018 — Stakeholders in Alaska’s Bristol Bay have watched the federal and state regulatory landscape heave and buckle with the shifting sands of federal oversight.

Fishermen invested in other watersheds threatened by mining waste and potential mine development have watched this battle, as well. But the lessons to be learned shift at every turn. Join me and a panel of insiders on Monday at Pacific Marine Expo for a public meeting on Pebble Mine, where we will discuss next steps for the industry.

The Trump administration breathed life back into the prospects for Pebble Mine.

Pebble CEO Tom Collier wasted no time in penning a January 2017 editorial praising his company’s efforts to address the concerns of Alaska residents, the thousands of fishermen who make their living in the shadow of the potential mine and its caustic byproducts, and the millions of consumers who rely on Bristol Bay’s pristine rivers to welcome back the world’s largest wild salmon run year after year.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Research finds trawling not as devastating as often portrayed

November 23, 2015 — An ongoing two-year independent study on trawling and its effect on benthic sea life — species that live on sea floors where trawling occurs – has found that the practice may not be as devastating as it is portrayed by some NGOs.

The study called, ‘Trawling: Finding Common Ground on the Scientific Knowledge Regarding Best Practices’, is being funded by the Walton Foundation and the Packard Foundation in partnership with the National Fisheries Institute, and is being done by a group of international scientists who are collecting and assessing data of global sea floors where trawling occurs.

The major data collection and analysis for the project has been completed, including assessments of mobile bottom contact gear in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, South Africa and most of the US, making it six times more extensive than and previous compilations.

According to Ricardo Amoroso of the University of Washington, who presented the data at this year’s Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle, public perception of trawling is often negative. Common public beliefs include the equivalent of 10 football fields are trawled every four seconds and that trawling is turning the seafloor into a desert.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News