Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Ring of Fire lights up: Earthquakes near proposed Pebble Mine site

January 28, 2020 — This morning, residents in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region reported waking to a magnitude 3.6 earthquake near the proposed Pebble Mine site just before 6 a.m.

Earthquakes in Alaska are nothing new. But the rate of activity has increased. According to the Alaska Earthquake Center, 2018 and 2019 took first and second place for the most earthquakes recorded in the state: “With a total of 50,289 reported earthquakes, 2019 finished as a runner up to the record-breaking 2018. The earthquake depths ranged between zero and 165 miles.”

What does this have to do with mining and fisheries? Stay with me.

As we cannot yet predict seismic activity, we do the next best thing: Build to withstand earthquakes.

The 7.1 quake that hit Anchorage in November 2018, followed by a 5.7 aftershock and hundreds of aftershocks for days and weeks after, caused no fatalities. Why? Because we have engineered our lives and structures to survive earthquakes, especially in the Ring of Fire.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

ROGER SENSABAUGH & BOB MIRES: Alaska’s fisheries deserve support outside election season

December 30, 2019 — It seems that at election time, our candidates will do everything they can to show themselves as big proponents of our fisheries, posing as lovers of salmon, with pictures of themselves splashed across the media holding a king or coho, while touting our commercial and sport fishing industries. Yet once election season is over, our amazing natural resources — our salmon especially — seem to be all but forgotten, slipping back into the far reaches of memory, taking a second seat to all other issues, a neglected priority.

This is too bad, because as anyone who is aware of the history of once great fisheries around the world knows, ours are but a few of the last great remaining intact salmon runs. Cook Inlet- sized populations were once the norm throughout Europe, as were runs far into the 1800’s along the northeastern seaboard of the United States. Much more recently, over the past 50 years, 300 documented runs of wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest have met their demise, many of these during our lifetime.

With current changes, such as the very real prospect of Pebble Mine, and with the lifting of restrictions on the discharge of pollutants on both a state and federal level, there is no reason to believe this will not eventually be the case here in Alaska, as well, that our salmon will not face the same fate as those around the world. We need to hold our politicians’ feet to the fire and demand that they adhere to what they say when running for office. Finally, stop just paying lip service to our salmon and adopt a “fish-first” policy.

Read the full opinion piece at the Anchorage Daily News

Controversial mining company coached Alaska’s governor to lobby White House

December 23, 2019 — A mining company secretly collaborated with the governor of Alaska to lobby the Trump administration to move forward with a mining project that Environmental Protection Agency scientists warned could devastate the world’s most valuable wild salmon habitat, according to newly released emails obtained by CNN.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s office was given detailed talking points, ghostwritten letters and advice on lobbying strategies by Pebble Limited Partnership executives, emails show. Dunleavy and his office then used that material, sometimes adopting the company’s language word for word, in an effort that culminated in President Donald Trump promising favorable action on the mine, according to emails.

One striking example of the governor using Pebble’s language is an official letter Dunleavy sent to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in April about the length of a public comment period on the mine’s draft environment impact statement.

Read the full story at CNN

ALASKA: Pebble’s owner reports growing deficit and doubts about its future. Again.

December 6, 2019 — The company trying to develop the Pebble Mine is going to need a lot more money to keep up the pace.

Northern Dynasty, based in Vancouver, B.C., is the parent company of the Pebble Partnership. It reports losing about $40 million (CA$53 million) in the first nine months of the year.

Its deficit now exceeds $400 million. If the company can’t raise the money to pay its debts when they come due, it may have to “reduce or curtail” its operations “at some point,” the report says.

“As such, there is material uncertainty that raises substantial doubt about the Group’s (Pebble and its parent company’s) ability to continue as a going concern,” the report says.

Northern Dynasty has included nearly identical statements in previous quarterly reports.

Pebble spokesman Mike Heatwole said in an email that Pebble continues to look for a partner and is confident in its ability to continue advancing the project.

This and previous financial statements tell a story that’s much darker than the rosy image Pebble projects in its ad campaign, said Daniel Cheyette, a vice president of Bristol Bay Native Corporation.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

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

JESSICA HATHAWAY: On Pebble: Maybe I’ve had it wrong

October 25, 2019 — I’ve been covering Pebble Mine for my entire career with National Fisherman — coming up on 14 years.

In that time, I’ve pretty consistently hammered home that it’s foolhardy and short-sighted to trade one resource for another. The mine’s long-term risks to biodiversity and healthy, sustainable salmon fisheries in Bristol Bay simply outweigh the short-term benefits offered by the extraction of the Pebble metals deposit. This is based entirely on what we know about mining — not just the process itself, but rather more importantly, the remnants a mine like this leaves behind in perpetuity.

I still believe this, but today I have something else to say.

When I watched Alannah Hurley give testimony about her people, their way of life and that Pebble Mine is a threat to all of it, I had to go one deeper than I have before.

I’ve seen the comments attempting to justify the mine: “Don’t you like your car? Do you like having a smartphone? Then we need mines like this.” It’s true, we may need mines like this to sustain our lifestyles, but that doesn’t mean we need THIS mine.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

This Alaska mine could generate $1 billion a year. Is it worth the risk to salmon?

October 24, 2019 — A brown bear loped across rolling green tundra as Charles Weimer set down a light, single-engine helicopter on a remote hilltop.

Spooked, the big grizzly vanished into alder thickets above a valley braided with creeks and falls. Weimer’s blue eyes scanned warily for more bears. He warned his passenger, Mike Heatwole, to sit tight as the blades spun to a halt, ruffling red, purple and yellow alpine flowers.

The two men, each slim with a goatee, stepped out into the enveloping silence of southwest Alaska’s wilderness. Before them stretched two of the wildest river systems left in the United States. Beneath their feet lay the world’s biggest known untapped deposit of copper and gold.

Weimer and Heatwole worked for Pebble Limited Partnership, a subsidiary of a Canadian company that aims to dig Pebble Mine, an open pit the size of 460 football fields and deeper than One World Trade Center is tall. To proponents, it’s a glittering prize that could yield sales of more than $1 billion a year in an initial two decades of mining.

It could also, critics fear, bring about the destruction of one of the world’s great fisheries.

Read the full story at The Los Angeles Times

Anti-Pebble group asks SEC to investigate possible ‘insider trading’ involving project owner

October 23, 2019 — A conservation group on Monday asked federal regulators to investigate possible insider trading involving the owner of the Pebble copper and gold mine and an analyst who tracks the company’s stock.

Earthworks believes securities analyst John Tumazos “received and disclosed insider information” to investors in the weeks before the Trump administration in July released a decision favoring the project, according to a complaint filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The value of Northern Dynasty Minerals’ stock rose sharply following the July announcement. Northern Dynasty Minerals is based in Canada and owns the Pebble Partnership, the company aiming to develop the mine.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Groups pledge to fight Pebble Mine with their ‘last penny’

October 10, 2019 — Standing on the steps of the James M. Fitzgerald United States Courthouse in 40-degree Farenheight weather, speaker after speaker behind a banner declaring “Defend Bristol Bay”, lambasted recent federal actions that appear to ready the way for the development of Pebble Mine.

The proposed open-pit gold, copper and molybdenum mine is nearly universally opposed by the fishing industry out of concern that it could imperil salmon stocks in the prolific Bristol Bay fishery, the major driver of the state’s sockeye supply. That passion was on full display at the press conference held to mark the filing of a lawsuit against the US Environmental Protection Agency over its decision to withdraw protections implemented in 2014 under the Clean Water Act that could have posed a hurdle to the proposed mine.

In response to a reporter’s question about the cost of of the federal lawsuit, the plaintiffs — the Bristol Bay Native Association, the Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation, United Tribes of Bristol Bay, the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association and the Bristol Bay Reserve Association — spoke of the cost of inaction rather than detail a dollar figure.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News