Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Groups band together against Pebble Limited Partnership

May 21, 2024 — On Friday, the United Tribes of Bristol Bay, Bristol Bay Native Association, Bristol Bay Native Corporation, Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation, Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, and Commercial Fishermen for Bristol Bay jointly moved to intervene in a challenge by Northern Dynasty Minerals and Pebble Limited Partnership to the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to protect our nation’s clean waters from the mining of the Pebble ore deposit.

After decades of study, the EPA determined that the mine would have unacceptable adverse effects on Bristol Bay’s resources, fishing industry, and communities.  Northern Dynasty’s challenge to EPA’s decision was filed in federal court in Alaska, and the Bristol Bay organizations moved to intervene in the case to ensure that the interests of the region, its Native communities, resources, environment, and economy remain protected and secure.

Below are statements from the organizations that filed the motion to intervene:

“With today’s filing, the people of Bristol Bay are standing up for our region and our way of life.  For decades, Bristol Bay Tribes, a majority of Alaskans, along with people across the country, have voiced their opposition to Northern Dynasty and its plans to develop the Pebble Mine,” said Shelley Cotton, Chief Strategy Director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay. “The Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act Final Determination is the result of years of effort by our people to protect the place we call home.  We have made our voices heard throughout the world.  And now we are taking our voice to the courts.”

“Pebble mine would jeopardize the world’s most pristine wild sockeye salmon habitat, tens of thousands of fishing-related jobs, and a salmon-based Alaska Native culture that dates back millennia. EPA relied on sound science, a thorough process, and the voices of tens of thousands of Alaskans to issue its Clean Water Act Section 404(c) Final Determination,” said Russell Nelson, BBNC Board Chair. “While we are confident these basic facts will prevail in court, Congress can and should also put this matter to rest by providing additional protections for Bristol Bay. Rep. Peltola’s Bristol Bay Protection Act is a good starting point, and we look forward to working with the entire Alaska delegation to ensure Bristol Bay’s future remains free of Pebble mine.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Debate over Pebble mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region moves to dueling Supreme Court briefs

November 16, 2023 — The company trying to build a huge copper and gold mine in the salmon-rich Bristol Bay will keep fighting for the project, despite a decision by the federal government to keep the proposed development site off-limits to large-scale metals mining.

John Shively, chief executive officer of the Pebble Limited Partnership, made that vow in a presentation at the Alaska Miners Association annual convention in Anchorage.

He said the Pebble mine had the potential to transform the economy and improve lives in the rural Bristol Bay region, just as he said the Red Dog Mine, one of the world’s biggest zinc producers, has done in Northwest Alaska.

“That’s why we’re still fighting this. The resources are there. We’re still here. We’re not going anywhere,” he told the convention audience in his presentation on Thursday.

The company’s fight is backed by the administration of Gov. Mike Dunleavy. At his direction, the state in July filed a lawsuit directly to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to overturn a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency that bars permitting for any Pebble-type mine in key areas of the Bristol Bay watershed.

Dunleavy, in brief remarks earlier this week at the miners’ convention, expressed pride in his support of the controversial project.

“I was told if I supported Pebble, I would never win another election. Well, I don’t know. I’m here. I’m still here,” he said on Tuesday, drawing applause from the audience. The Republican governor was handily reelected last November.

The EPA decision invoked a rarely used provision in the Clean Water Act to preclude any wetlands permit for the project. The agency determined that the Pebble mine posed an unacceptable risk to the Bristol Bay watershed, essential to a region with the world’s largest sockeye salmon runs and with major fisheries and wildlife populations that depend on that salmon.

To help reverse that decision, the Pebble Limited Partnership and its owner, Vancouver-based Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., in September filed an amicus brief in support of the state’s Supreme Court effort. Filing supportive briefs, too, were the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority and numerous Alaska and national resource-development groups.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon

ALASKA: Pebble Mine owners discuss delay in appeals process

August 17, 2021 — Northern Dynasty Minerals announced this week that its appeal of the Pebble Mine decision is receiving new oversight and is likely to take a year or longer.

In November 2020, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rejected the mining company’s permit application to build Pebble Mine at the headwaters of Alaska’s Bristol Bay under its subsidiary Pebble Limited Partnership, following a battle with local residents, Native tribes and fishing stakeholders that spanned three decades.

The mining company submitted its appeal of the decision in January, and now the Corps has assigned a new review officer to the appeal, after the prior RO was promoted out of the position, according to a release from Northern Dynasty President and CEO Ronald Thiessen.

The release notes that “guidelines indicate the administrative appeal process should conclude within 90 days.” However, “the Pebble Partnership has been advised that the administrative appeal process for Pebble is likely to take a year or more given the complexity of the case and the scope of the administrative record.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

A tiny Alaska town is split over a goldmine. At stake is a way of life

June 23, 2021 — For 2,000 years, Jones Hotch’s ancestors have fished Alaska’s Chilkat River for the five species of salmon that spawn in its cold, clean waters. They have gathered berries, hunted moose and raised their families, sheltered from the extremes of winter by the black, saw-toothed peaks of the Iron Mountain.

Now Hotch fears a proposed mining project could end that way of life.

Hotch has an infectious, boyish laugh – but there is no mistaking how worried he is about plans to build a mine where millions of pounds of zinc, copper, lead, silver and gold are buried, beneath the valleys’ mountains. We arejust miles from the headwaters of the Chilkat, the glacial river that serves as the main food source of the Tlingit, the region’s Indigenous people, as well as the inhabitants of Haines, the nearest port town.

“You guys might have your Safeway,” he says, waving his arm across the valley. “There’s ours all around here.”

Hotch, a tribal leader, lives in Klukwan, a village that takes its name from the Tlingit phrase “Tlakw Aan” – “the village that has always been”. It is the hub of an ancient trading route – later known as the Dalton Trail – that runs from Haines to Fort Selkirk in Canada.

Here in south-east Alaska, the consequences of the climate crisis are already visible. “Our mountains used to be snow-capped all year round,” Hotch said. “Two summers ago, our mountains were almost totally bare.” In Haines, hardware stores sold out of box fans because it was so hot.

Read the full story at The Guardian

Alaska Native corporation deal with conservation nonprofit complicates planning for massive Pebble mine project

June 9, 2021 — Growing up in a village in Southwest Alaska, Sarah Thiele had a childhood defined by sockeye salmon.

Her father caught the fish in summer by the net-full as a commercial fisherman while her mother would cure and cold-smoke hundreds of fillets so Thiele and her eight siblings, plus the family’s team of sled dogs, could dine on sockeye year-round.

Now 66, Thiele is a board member of the Pedro Bay Corp., an Alaska Native group that owns land near Bristol Bay, the site of the most prolific sockeye fishery in the world. It is also the precise spot where the backers of the Pebble Mine hope to build a road to transport ore.

Late last month, Thiele and nearly 90 percent of the corporation’s shareholders voted to let the Conservation Fund, an environmental nonprofit organization, buy conservation easements on more than 44,000 acres and make the land off limits to future development – including the mining road.

“I feel like we are doing our mission of preserving our heritage and our pristine lands from any development,” she said. “That is totally our identity, the fish and our land.”

In exchange for the surface rights, the corporation would receive nearly $20 million, including $500,000 for education and cultural programs for those in the village.

Read the full story from The Washington Post at Anchorage Daily News

Alaska Native group protects land coveted by Pebble Mine developers

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.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

ALASKA: On Dillingham trip, Murkowski gathers ideas on permanent protections for Bristol Bay

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.

Read the full story at KDLG

JON BRODERICK AND KATE CRUMP: Stop the Pebble Mine forever

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.

Read the full story at The Daily Astorian

Corps: Appeal Review for Alaska Mine Could Take Over a Year

May 28, 2021 — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Thursday it could take more than a year to weigh an appeal by a developer seeking to build a copper and gold mine in a region that supports the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.

The corps’ Pacific Ocean Division in Hawaii is handling the appeal by the Pebble Limited Partnership, which was denied approval of a key permit for the project in Alaska‘s Bristol Bay region by the corps’ Alaska District.

A November decision signed by the district commander determined the proposed Pebble mine was “contrary to the public interest.”

The Pebble partnership in January filed an appeal request.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

On the Water in Alaska, Where Salmon Fishing Dreams Live On

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.

Read the full story at The New York Times