Saving Seafood

Pebble petition: Alaska gov appeals on mine’s behalf

January 13, 2021 — On Jan. 8, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced the state would take action to appeal the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ decision to deny a permit application for the Pebble Mine.

The Pebble Limited Partnership submitted its plan for a mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region almost two years ago. The 1,500-page document was immediately and widely panned by scientists, fishery managers, fishermen and many representatives of Bristol Bay’s Native tribes.

“Bristol Bay residents and Alaskans have been clear that we will not trade one of the world’s last robust salmon fisheries for a gold mine, and the Army Corps decision affirmed that this toxic project is too risky for our home and does not serve the public interest,” said United Tribes of Bristol Bay Deputy Director Lindsay Layland, who participated in our Expo Online Pebble Mine panel in November.

Alaskans living and working in the region have fought the mine’s development for more than a decade, primarily because of the risks it would pose to the wild salmon habitat. The benefits to the region, they have said, would be short term, since the mineral rights are owned by Pebble’s parent company, Northern Dynasty Minerals, a Canadian company.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Investors sue parent company behind gold mine in Alaska

January 4, 2020 — The company behind a proposed copper and gold mine in Alaska faces lawsuits from investors claiming it misled shareholders who have seen an 85% drop in stock value since the summer.

Two lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court in New York claim Northern Dynasty Minerals violated federal securities law when project executives did not fully provide information about the project, The Anchorage Daily News reported Friday.

Developer The Pebble Limited Partnership and parent company Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. sought to build a mine about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage and near the headwaters of the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery in Bristol Bay.

The project was criticized by environment groups and also condemned by Alaska Republican U.S. Sens. Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Seattle Times

2020 was an eventful year for the Pebble Mine project

December 28, 2020 — It was a momentous year for people who have fought for and against the proposed Pebble Mine.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in November denied Pebble’s request for a federal permit, stopping the mine likely for good. The decision was met with mixed emotions from people in Bristol Bay.

Sue Anelon works for the Iliamna Development Corporation. She said the mine would have been a significant boost to village economies.

“I’ve seen the good and the bad,” she said. “When Pebble was here and a lot of people were working, they were paying for their own groceries, they were paying their own fuel. They were buying trucks, they were buying Hondas. People were paying for things. Now they can’t do that. They have to rely on the government.”

Billy Trefon Jr., a Nondalton resident, was elated by the decision.

Read the full story at KTOO

Mine developer to appeal US decision to reject Alaska permit

December 21, 2020 — A mine developer says it will appeal a Trump administration decision denying a permit to build a copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska.

Northern Dynasty Minerals President and CEO Ron Thiessen said in a statement Thursday that the government’s rejection was “without precedent in the long history of responsible resource development in Alaska,” the Anchorage Daily News reported.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied the company a permit in November, saying its plans to develop the mine were against the public’s interest and did not adhere to the Clean Water Act.

The proposed mine would have been built on state-owned land in the Bristol Bay region, near the world’s largest wild sockeye salmon fishery.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

ALASKA: Northern Dynasty to Appeal US Army Corps’ Pebble Decision

December 21, 2020 — Northern Dynasty Minerals (TSX: NDM; NYSE: NAK) said on Thursday its unit, Pebble Partnership, was preparing an appeal after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied a key water permit for the proposed Alaska mine.

The company’s shares cratered nearly 50% last week after its US-based subsidiary received formal notification that its application for permits under the Clean Water Act and other federal statutes was denied.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Shareholders file Pebble Mine class-action suit, parent company plans permit appeal

December 18, 2020 — This week, a group of shareholders filed a class action lawsuit against Northern Dynasty, claiming the company and its directors misled shareholders about the viability of the proposed Pebble Mine and that its stock prices were artificially inflated between Dec. 21, 2017, and Nov. 25, 2020.

Northern Dynasty is the parent company of the Pebble Limited Partnership, which owns the mineral rights to the Pebble deposit and has been promoting the mine to investors and engaging in the permitting process with Alaska’s U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

On Nov. 25, the Corps denied the permit application, stating the proposal did not “comply with Clean Water Act guidelines.” The stock took a nosedive of more than 50 percent immediately following the announcement. The permit process had been considered all but dead before the 2016 election of President Donald J. Trump, whose administration allegedly negotiated with Pebble officials to allow the permitting process to run its course.

On Dec. 17, 2020, two days after the class action filing, Northern Dynasty published a press release detailing its plans to file an appeal of the Corps’ decision, citing the quality of its mitigation plan to compensate for the degradation of habitat in the process of mining the deposit’s heavy metals.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

MJ JACKSON: Bristol Bay: ‘Now is the time to prioritize protection’

December 14, 2020 — As a 32-year Bristol Bay fisherman and vice president of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association (BBRSDA), I appreciated The Seattle Times editorial “Salmon-rich Bristol Bay deserves permanent protection” [Dec. 2, Opinion].

Thousands of fishermen like myself have struggled alongside Bristol Bay tribes, Alaskans and beyond for more than a decade fighting Pebble Mine. The recent denial of Pebble’s permit was a huge victory, yet Bristol Bay remains vulnerable until permanent protections are in place. Now is the time to prioritize protection of Bristol Bay’s renewable economic engine and Indigenous culture.

Read the full opinion piece at The Seattle Times

ALASKA: Relief and disappointment as Bristol Bay reacts to Army Corps’ Pebble permit denial

December 4, 2020 — When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last week denied the Pebble Limited Partnership a federal permit to develop a mine under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, it surprised people on both sides of the issue.

“I was ecstatic. I was elated. I was so happy to hear that it was finally over,” said Billy Trefon, Jr. from Nondalton, one of the villages closest to where the mine would have been built.

To the south, in Iliamna, Iliamna Development Corporation CEO Lisa Reimers said people feel hopeless.

“Well, we feel like it was — we were lied to by the Army Corps because they said politics wouldn’t be involved. And it ended up being politics,” she said. “The Army stated they’d recommend to build a mine, then out of nowhere they changed their minds.”

Pebble would have been one of the largest gold mines in the world. The Army Corps said last week that the mine proposal didn’t follow Clean Water Act guidelines.

For Trefon, in Nondalton, the project also went against the traditional teachings of elders.

“I was raised up listening to elders telling me that, if you take care of the land, the land will take care of you,” he said. “And it has been doing that for centuries, milleniums. So to us this land is important. The water is important.”

Read the full story at KTOO

SEATTLE TIMES: Salmon-rich Bristol Bay deserves permanent protection

December 2, 2020 — After the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ decision last week to reject a key permit for Alaska’s proposed Pebble Mine, it’s clear that federal protection is now needed to permanently preserve this uniquely valuable resource. The project threatened too much destruction to the immense salmon runs of Bristol Bay.

The list of reasons to protect the bay’s watershed is long. Its annual chinook and sockeye salmon runs are the largest on Earth. All five species of Pacific salmon live in Bristol Bay, and its watershed produces about half the world’s annual sockeye harvest. The commercial and recreational fisheries support large portions of the region’s economy, and Bristol Bay’s salmon have sustained Alaska natives for many generations. Thousands of Washingtonians fish those salmon each year, for work and recreation.

The bay’s diverse salmon runs feed other populations, too — from orcas to the thousands of brown bears on the Alaska peninsula. The mine was predicted to disrupt this food chain mightily in the name of extracting rich veins of copper and gold, and potentially molybdenum and rhenium.

Read the full story at The Seattle Times

NEW YORK TIMES: Good News for Salmon, Bad News for Prospectors

December 2, 2020 — The Trump administration’s indifference to the environment and President Trump’s hostility to the laws providing clean water and air, protecting endangered species and keeping public lands and forests free from commercial intrusion have been so unsparing that one had to blink twice at what, finally, after nearly four years, was a piece of undiluted good news.

Yet there it was: a decision by the Army Corps of Engineers to deny a permit for a massive gold and copper mine in Alaska proposed for the headwaters of Bristol Bay, the heart of a multimillion-dollar regional fishing industry. This is a devastating blow for the project and a triumph for conservationists, Native tribes and commercial fishing interests that believed, quite rightly, that the mine and its discharges would not only destroy a delicate marine ecosystem but also gravely threaten one of the richest salmon fisheries in the world.

The project was proposed roughly two decades ago by a Canadian-British mining consortium (only one of the original partners remains) that promised to add 1,000 permanent jobs to Alaska’s struggling economy while unearthing $300 billion in copper, gold and molybdenum. In 2008, the people of Alaska came very close to blocking the proposal in a referendum supported by three former governors, including two Republicans, and the then-powerful dean of the state’s congressional delegation, Senator Ted Stevens. A huge advertising campaign by the mining industry and a last-minute pro-mining push by then-Gov. Sarah Palin turned the tide in the mine’s favor.

Over time, however, the scientific evidence turned decisively against the project, and in 2014 the Environmental Protection Agency determined that even a carefully designed operation, in the words of Gina McCarthy, the E.P.A. administrator, would most likely cause “irreversible negative impacts on the Bristol Bay watershed and its abundant salmon fisheries.”

Read the full opinion piece at the New York Times