The Wrong Mine for the Wrong Place
By Paul Greenberg, Mark Kurlansky, Carl Safina and John Waldman
©Donald Trump Jr./Instagram
Every creature deserves a chance to spawn.
Consider the scene above, captured on Instagram. The fish is a sockeye salmon. It is on its way to its breeding grounds in Alaska’s wild interior. It has been intercepted — for a few minutes — by an angler who has come to America’s 49th state to partake in the fantastically abundant spectacle of tens of millions of salmon surging upstream to make a next generation. The angler has brought his own offspring to marvel alongside him. But all this joyful happiness, this celebration of abundant life-continuing-life, is in imminent danger of ruination.
The angler holding the fish is Donald Trump Jr. The child is Donald Trump III, or D3 as his father likes to tag him on Instagram. Thanks to D1, the pater familias of the happy fishing duo pictured above, this immensely valuable fish faces a fast-approaching savaging. The means of that savaging is the proposed open-pit copper and gold Pebble Mine that would be dug at the headwaters of the sockeye salmon’s largest remaining spawning ground.
The project was effectively dead at the end of the Obama administration. But thanks to a reversal engineered by Scott Pruitt, the disgraced former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the permitting process is rushing forward on a scaled-back proposal that would still be disastrous. This despite high profile Republican voices of opposition. Even Ted Stevens, the longtime and often industry-friendly Republican senator from Alaska who died in a 2010 plane crash en route to a fishing lodge, said of the Pebble Mine, “I am not opposed to mining, but it is the wrong mine for the wrong place."
The 40,000-square-mile Bristol Bay watershed that would be affected by the Pebble Mine is home to a fishery that, in recent years, has supported some 14,000 jobs and generated some $1.5 billion annually in sales value. All that stands between this thriving fishery and its despoiling is a go-ahead from the gung-ho Trump administration and the pro-development state government.
First, though, the public, including outdoor sportsmen, has a chance to weigh in on this deeply anti-wilderness plan in a comment period that ends June 29. It would be beyond the scope of this short essay to detail all the ins and outs of the Pebble project. (All four of us fisherman-authors have followed this story closely for over a decade.) Suffice it to say that Pebble would be an out-of-place industrial juggernaut, financed by a Canadian mining company, to dig an enormous gold and copper mine (1.3 miles long by 1 mile wide and dug to a depth of 1,970 feet), replete with vast collecting ponds of sulfurous liquid waste in a roadless, earthquake-prone sweep of forest and tundra in Southwest Alaska.
Five years ago, Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, warned after three years of study that the Pebble Mine “would likely have significant and irreversible negative impacts on the Bristol Bay watershed and its abundant salmon fisheries.” But in 2017, the Trump administration reversed course and opened the way for the mine now under consideration. This move has been opposed by Democrats and Republicans alike. Ms. McCarthy’s predecessors from the Nixon, Reagan and two Bush administrations denounced the administration’s actions on Pebble in a recent full-page ad in The Washington Post, saying: “We oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to sweep nearly a decade of science and Clean Water Act review under the rug.”
The network of roads and industrial infrastructure needed to haul out the millions of tons of Pebble Mine gold and copper-laced rock would be a stake driven into the heart of Alaska’s wilderness, opening miles of untrammeled territory to exploitation. The proposed mine would store toxic mine wastes behind earthen dams. This technique has failed in the past and is even more risky for the streams and creeks upstream from Bristol Bay. The substrate surrounding the mine site is so sulfurous that the administrators of the pre-Trump Environmental Protection Agency noted in an assessment of the project that if the site were developed as the Pebble Partnership outlined it, on-site remediation would be required “in perpetuity.” In other words instead of pristine salmon runs, we’d have toxic-waste management, forever.
More than all that — if more is needed — the photograph above lays bare the larger gaslighting of American sportsmen and sportswomen under President Trump. In the past two years, the real estate developer turned president has arguably done more to harm the future of hunting and fishing grounds in this country than any president in history. The rescinding of the Obama-era rule on disposal of coal tailings poses imminent risk to trout streams throughout West Virginia and other trout-rich states. The gambit to open offshore oil drilling along the East Coast and the seismic testing that would accompany such a boondoggle has the potential to damage fisheries from redfish off the Carolinas to bluefish off New England. The administration’s potential gutting of the so-called Waters of the U.S. regulations would remove federal protection for half of many states’ wetlands, which are vital for the propagation of waterfowl so many American hunters love to pursue.
The mine being rushed by the Trump administration has such glaring disregard for the interests of hunters and fishers and nature lovers who back the president, that even the interests of such ardent Trump supporters as his own son and grandson are cast aside in this rush to industrialize one of the planet’s last great wild places. Also cast aside are values the angler, his son, and most American outdoor enthusiasts presumably share. Indeed it seems almost fraudulent that the present administration should brand itself with the same party affiliation as the most conserving of American conservatives, Theodore Roosevelt.
Editors’ Picks
The Lying Boss and Your Bottom Line
‘Unpredictability in the System,’ and Other Travel Lessons From the Summer of ’23
‘One Piece’ Is a Smash, and It All Starts With the Casting
Pristine salmon runs are also mines of sorts. But they are the kind of mines that provide self-renewing free sources of food, employment and recreation. As Donald Trump Jr. writes in the post that accompanies the photo above, “If you haven’t read about the journey these amazing fish make and the transformations they make in their life, you should because it’s unbelievable.”
We agree. Furthermore we hope that Donald Jr. might undergo his own transformation into, dare we say it, a conservationist. If he can’t make the point abundantly clear to his father that Alaskan salmon are worth saving, maybe it’s time for him to scrub the Bristol Bay trophy shots from his social media. Pebble Mine with its slipshod dams and shortsighted planning is finite in the wealth it will bring. Hardly any of it will flow into the creels of anglers. When the dams finally break, it will be American sportsmen like Donald Trump Jr. who will taste the bitterness of all the muck that washes downstream.