Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)

By The Seattle Times editorial board

Construction of the Pebble Mine, a huge gold and copper mine, was officially rejected.
The mining would have destroyed the vast natural area in Bristol Bay, Alaska, and displaced indigenous people.

Where whales sing, seals and walruses live and there are extensive wetlands, a huge mine would have irreparably destroyed the region.

Bristol Bay is also known for its extraordinary stocks of salmon, which are the livelihoods of the native Eskimos, but also for food from orcas to thousands of brown bears.

Huge mines would destroy the last of the salmon populations, like in Bristol Bay, forever.

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.

It is fitting that the Corps stopped the mine by denying it a permit required by the Clean Water Act.

The impact on the wetlands surrounding Bristol Bay’s headwaters from excavating millions of tons of minerals each year could have been a catastrophe with long-lasting harmful reverberations.

But the Clean Water Act is not safe from political rollbacks.

The Trump administration proved this in undoing more than 80 environmental rules across the past four years, including seven water pollution regulations.

The time has come to permanently, and specifically, target Bristol Bay as a vital national resource. Its health must be preserved even if the Environmental Protection Agency is subverted.

For more…at https://worldanimalsvoice.com/2020/12/09/alaska-the-battle-for-bristol-bay-is-won-great/

And I mean…Developers wanted to dig a mine a mile wide and a quarter-mile deep, which would result in the destruction of 3,000 acres of wetlands and more than 21 miles of salmon streams.

You can’t put a gold and copper mine on top of the most productive salmon run in the world and not have substantial and permanent damage. Salmon and mining simply do not mix.

The ecosystem and fisheries would be seriously threatened by the largest gold and copper mine in North America.

The construction and operation of the Pebble Mine would have devastating impacts on salmon habitat, salmon populations, the Alaska Native communities that rely on subsistence fisheries, as well as the broader $1.5 billion commercial and recreational sockeye salmon fishery.

Arsenic, copper, nickel, and lead, contaminated drinking water, and salmon spawning grounds, that would be the consequences and an environmental disaster.

While most consider the salmon industry in Bristol Bay an axiomatic gold mine, it is the gold that lies beneath that threatens the future of what lies above.

This decision to torpedo the long-disputed mine marks a major victory for environmentalists and tribal rights.
The battle is won for now, but it is time to protect Bristol Bay for good.

My best regards to all, Venus

Filed under: GENERAL NEWS - International / National / Regional |