Perhaps it was God who put these two great resources right next to each other, just to see what people would do with them.
—John Shively, CEO of Pebble Ltd. Partnership
In the fall of 1986 a bush pilot named Tim La Porte picked up a crew of Canadian geologists from a remote spot between Lake Clark and Lake Iliamna, near Bristol Bay, on the Alaska Peninsula. As he pushed the throttle forward, his Cessna 206 floatplane lifted off the water with a roar, and the pilot turned to the lead geologist, Phil St. George, to ask a fateful question: “Whatcha been lookin’ for out here?”
St. George eyed La Porte. Experienced geologists, like experienced fishermen or poker players, tend to go monosyllabic when asked what they are seeking. But the two had known each other for years, and St. George eventually offered, “Coloration in the ground.”
“Like an orangey-green color?”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
“Shoot, I know a place like that right around the corner.” Banking the Cessna around, La Porte said, “Let me show you. Won’t take but a coupla minutes.”
The spot of colored ground La Porte had in mind was only about five miles from the geologists’ camp, near a hilly area between the Koktuli River and Upper Talarik Creek. It was known as Pebble Beach. A large caribou herd had established itself there, and La Porte had flown hunters up to Pebble dozens of times. As they drited over Frying Pan Lake, La Porte pointed off his port wing, where the lower slope of hillside had an orange-and-green cast. Then he pointed off the starboard wing, where a bigger hill also showed distinctive streaks of color along its flanks.
“What’s it mean?” La Porte asked.
The geologist took in the view, nodded noncommittally, and said, “It means there could be a mineral deposit under the surface.” Then he stared out the window.
La Porte shrugged and set a course back to the town of Iliamna, on Lake Iliamna. “It was no big deal,” he recalled. “Phil just looked out the window. He didn’t jump up and down or say much of anything. I really didn’t think any more about it.”
On Thanksgiving Day, not long after the flight, St. George and a crew returned to the colored hillsides by Pebble Beach—the land is owned by the state and is between Lake Clark and Katmai National Parks—where he staked out a mining claim on behalf of Cominco Alaska Exploration (CAE), a Vancouver-based mineral company. In 1988, St. George took a drill rig up to Pebble, sank a few holes, and hit more than one vein of high-grade gold. The following year he sank more drill holes and found traces of copper.
He had no way of knowing the enormity of the forces that he had set in motion because he had no way of knowing that this was one of the richest mineral deposits in the world.
Bristol Bay is an austere, silvery-gray expanse of briny water that lies 180 miles southwest of Anchorage, between Cape Constantine to the north, and the Alaska Peninsula to the south. It is fed by five major rivers and empties into the Bering Sea, south of the Arctic Circle. The terrain is green, yellow, ocher, and often snow-streaked, with wide, flat tundra, rolling hills, and dark, sharp-edged mountains. It is stunningly beautiful, home to Native tribes that have lived off the land for three thousand years, and is endowed with a rich trove of natural resources—including the last pristine salmon fishery in the world, fifteen species of whale, and four migratory flyways that bring birds from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas, making it one of the most diverse avian habitats on the planet.
As the human demand for minerals, food, and energy rises to new heights, Bristol Bay has become the focal point of a resource war—pitting constituents for each resource against each other and against those who oppose commercial development of the ecologically rich zone. At the heart of the controversy is water: how much of it could be used, how it could be used, and what could end up in it.
By the time I arrived on the Alaska Peninsula in the summer of 2008, geologists had revealed that the Pebble Deposit—which sits on state-owned land—holds the single richest load of copper, gold, and molybdenum (used in alloys for armor-plating and airplane parts) ever discovered in the United States. As exploration of the site continues, estimates of the resources in the deposit have steadily been revised upward. As of 2010, Pebble was said to contain at least 80.6 billion pounds of copper, 107.4 million ounces of gold, and 5.6 billion pounds of molybdenum, in addition to “commercially significant” amounts of silver, rhenium, and palladium. These minerals are estimated to be worth some $250 billion to $500 billion, and perhaps more.
Since 2002, a multinational group called the Pebble Limited Partnership (PLP), a partnership between Northern Dynasty Minerals and Anglo American PLC, which owns the mineral rights to 153 miles of mining claims around the site, has spent close to $400 million conducting soil and seismic tests, monitoring groundwater, and drilling over eight hundred exploratory boreholes up to a mile deep, in preparation for mining the site. If the Pebble mine is built, it will become the largest in North America and one of the largest mines in the world. Its giant open pit would spread nearly two miles wide at the top and sink over seventeen hundred feet deep at the bottom. (The Empire State Building, at 1,250 feet high, could easily fit inside.) It would bring thousands of workers to what is now a remote and largely uninhabited region, and the mine could operate for fifty to a hundred years. To extract minerals from the Pebble Deposit, at least 8 billion tons of rock would be crushed, of which only 0.6 percent would be useful ore. The remaining 99.4 percent of the tailings, or waste rock, would be deposited in massive dumps and covered with water “in perpetuity,” to prevent toxic chemicals in the tailings from reacting with oxygen and creating sulfuric acids. The water and tailings would be contained behind five massive dams, including one of the tallest dams in the United States, at 754 feet tall, and the tallest earthen dam, at 740 feet tall, both of which are taller than the Three Gorges Dam in China (607 feet high).
The immense cost of building these facilities is not the only hurdle to building Pebble mine. Also standing in the way are a series of state environmental permits, the possibility of federal intervention, and a rising wail of protest that has reached around the globe.
Pebble’s supporters argue that the mine will create well-paid jobs in an impoverished region; it will generate large tax revenues for the state; and it will provide significant amounts of precious metals, which will lessen America’s reliance on foreign supplies. Environmental protections and safety measures at the mine will be state-of-the-art, PLP has promised.
But Bristol Bay is a special place, a natural jewel that is home to one of the last pristine salmon habitats let in the county, and the mine’s critics believe that PLP’s promises are too good to be true. The risks of destroying such an ecologically rich zone are too great, detractors say, and they would like the federal government to step in and preserve the region as a wildlife sanctuary or national park.
Opposition sprang up in the early 1990s, almost as soon as the mine was announced. A loose collection of Natives, fishermen, environmentalists, academics, cannery operators, ordinary citizens, NGOs, state legislators, and businessmen began to ask pointed questions about the size and impact of the project. They were concerned that an earthquake from nearby faults could destroy Pebble’s massive dams, unleashing a wave of toxins. They wondered how the mine’s explosions and giant rock crushers would affect the caribou and moose herds that Natives rely on for food. They fretted that new roads and power lines and people would destroy the delicate tundra. Most of all, they worried about how much water Pebble would use and what sorts of toxins the mine could release into local waterways.
“If our people knew that Pebble would truly benefit them, with no risk to the environment or water, then I think they’d listen,” said Lisa Reimers, a Yupik woman on the board of the Iliamna Development Corporation, a for-profit Native corporation that is working with the PLP. To the Natives who live near the mine site, Pebble represents the possibility of a steady income and an enhanced, modern way of life, but many Natives are ambivalent about the mine, fearing it could spell the end to their traditional lifestyle. “We are a small community. We are not wealthy. We are fishermen. But fishing is not sustaining our community,” said Reimers. On the other hand, she added, “The mine is a complete unknown, and people are not sure about it.”
Alaska is proud to define itself as a resource state. But in Bristol Bay, two of its defining resources, minerals and fish, have come into direct conflict on a large scale. While the mining giants behind PLP have defined their claim, many smaller exploration companies are sampling the area nearby for precious metals. If Pebble is permitted, dozens of other companies will file mining claims, which will radically change the region. The oil and gas industries are also hoping to drill offshore in Bristol Bay.
Pebble has created deep schisms, splitting families, disrupting state politics, and, thanks to Sarah Palin’s involvement, making national headlines during the 2008 presidential election. While many Native Alaskans are tempted by the mine’s jobs, many others are troubled by Anglo American’s record in South Africa, where ten thousand local people were allegedly moved from two villages to make way for an Anglo platinum mine (the company blamed local officials and denied it had told police to use force against protestors). In 2009, a delegation of Native elders flew to London to protest the Pebble project outside Anglo American’s annual meeting. A few months later, environmental activists dressed up as salmon protested the Pebble mine outside Congress in Washington, DC. Activists pressured Tiffany & Co, Fortunoff, and prominent independent jewelers in the United States and England not to use gold extracted from the Pebble mine.
The debate over Bristol Bay, with its wide implications for the US and the global economy, mining, and water politics, is being closely monitored by investors and environmentalists in Anchorage; Vancouver; Ottawa; Seattle; New York; Washington, DC; London; Zurich; São Paulo; Johannesburg; Melbourne; Bombay; and Tokyo.
Lying about a hundred miles upstream of Bristol Bay, the Pebble site is spongy and wet. Forty inches of rain and snow falls there annually, and so much groundwater surrounds the deposit that it is difficult to quantify. Indeed, the site is so remote and physically challenging that the government has never attempted to map it. As you fly overhead, long blue-black lakes and brown ponds glint in the sun, kettle holes dot the landscape, braided streams cut across the tundra, and rivers crash between blue-white glaciers and steep ravines. All the while gravity pulls trillions of gallons of nutrient-rich freshwater into Bristol Bay.
Every June, some 60 to 70 million salmon flow into Bristol Bay to spawn—the largest number of salmon to spawn in any drainage area in the country. This tsunami of fish is a highly anticipated event around which the entire ecosystem is scheduled. Ichthyologists, commercial and sport fishermen, lodge owners, cannery operators, floatplane pilots, former governor Sarah Palin, the rare freshwater seals in Lake Iliamna, bears, eagles, wolves, gulls, fish, and even the forests look forward to the annual influx of protein. As the salmon die at the end of their journeys, their rotting carcasses flush nutrients into rivers that support aquatic life and fertilize the areas alongside those streams.
Aside from oil and gas, fish are Alaska’s biggest export. The fishing industry is the state’s largest employer, accounting for more jobs than mining, oil, gas, forestry, and agriculture combined. By 2001, some fifty-four thousand people earned all or part of their annual income from fishing in Alaska. Yet mining is a not-inconsiderable business, too, employing some fifty-five hundred Alaskans, many of whom are Native. When it comes down to whose interests will prevail, the mineral industry is better organized and has a lot more money and clout than fishermen do.
Hard-rock metal mining is water-intensive, and the fishing industry is deeply suspicious of the impact Pebble could have on the water around Bristol Bay. In 2006, Northern Dynasty (now part of the PLP) applied to use some 35 billion gallons of water a year, more than the annual consumption of Anchorage, to process minerals, run operations, and store toxic tailings. Critics believe that the withdrawal of such a tremendous volume of water will harm the caribou, elk, moose, bear, fox, birds, plants, fish, and humans that rely on it. They also fear the two likeliest sources of water pollution: acid mine drainage, which is the outflow of acidic water from hard-rock mining, and poisonous chemicals used to leach gold from crushed rock, which could slip into local waters.
The geology around the Pebble Deposit is complex and allows surface water and groundwater to intermingle. If metals extracted from the mine, particularly copper, or a toxin used in the mining process, such as cyanide or arsenic, enters the water in one place, it could easily reemerge in another place, and flow downstream into Bristol Bay.
Copper and fish, particularly salmon, do not mix well. Salmon have a keen sense of smell that they rely on for navigation and to identify predators, prey, kin, and mates. As they return to their natal streams, salmon follow telltale chemical signatures in the water. Copper is naturally occurring, but if present in just two to ten parts per billion over natural levels, it acts as a neurotoxin. Copper can disorient salmon, impair their immune system, or kill them. “Copper is the most toxic element to fish, even at very low levels, and salmon are some of the most sensitive fish around,” said Carol Ann Woody, a former USGS fisheries biologist. “If the state permits the Pebble mine, it will be putting public resources—which the salmon and the water are—at stake. That is just plain wrong.”
Bob Moran, the Colorado hydrogeologist, who has advised some of Pebble’s critics, said, “Even when a mine is well run, it is unavoidable that chemical contaminants will be released into the environment. I know of no comparable large-scale ore body that has been mined without release of significant concentrations of contaminants into nearby waters over the long term. And I don’t know of any other mine built near such a valuable and potentially vulnerable fishery anywhere in the world.”
Sean Magee, PLP’s former director of public affairs, acknowledged, “In many respects, it’s the water issues that are the most challenging…. If we can’t protect the fish and the water and the wildlife, then we won’t proceed with the project.” In spite of such reassuring words, PLP has continued to invest in Pebble, explore the deposit aggressively, and prepare itself for the state’s permitting process, which is slated to begin in 2011 or 2012.
In the late 1990s, several years after Phil St. George first staked out a mining claim for Cominco Alaska Exploration, the company, renamed Teck Cominco, spent $8 million to drill exploratory core samples around the Pebble mine site, to get a sense of what lay beneath the tundra. The company estimated the minerals there were worth about $10 billion. Teck Cominco continued to sink boreholes into the site until 2001, when, for reasons that have never been made public, the company, which has years of experience mining in the difficult conditions of Alaska, decided to sell off its Pebble holdings. Teck Cominco blamed “environmental reasons,” which presumably meant that conditions at the site were too daunting, or that operating a mine there would have such a negative impact on the ecosystem that it would be prohibitive. The company sold its rights for $10 million, a relative pittance, and, unusually, did not keep a share in the project.
The buyer was Northern Dynasty Minerals (NDM), a subsidiary of the global mining giant Hunter Dickinson, which is based in Vancouver. (Rio Tinto, based in London and Melbourne, owns 19.8 percent of NDM, and Mitsubishi, the Japanese conglomerate, owns 6.1 percent.) In 2007, NDM formed a fifty-fifty partnership with Anglo American PLC, the world’s second-largest mining concern, based in Johannesburg and London. Anglo American has been mining around the world for over a hundred years, has operations in forty-five countries on seven continents, and with a near-majority stake in the controversial diamond company De Beers and with metal mines stretching from Zimbabwe to Ireland to Nevada, has an environmental record that has been roundly criticized. The joint venture was named the Pebble Limited Partnership.
PLP’s first CEO, Bruce Jenkins, was a Canadian mining veteran with strong opinions and a tin ear. When Native families asked how Pebble would affect them, Jenkins replied, “We’re committed to preserving your subsistence way of life. Does that mean there will be no effects on your subsistence way of life? No, of course not. How could you have an open pit tailings pond with zero effect on your subsistence way of life? The real question is, what’s the nature, the timing, and the magnitude of the effect?”
The locals were horrified by Jenkins’s candor, and so were some of his colleagues. In April 2008, Jenkins stepped down as CEO. His replacement, John Shively, was cut from a very different bolt of cloth and came from outside the mineral industry. “He’s really bad news for us,” one Pebble opponent confided. “Shit, I actually like the guy. He’s a very smart hire.”
For five years in the 1990s, Shively was commissioner of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the agency responsible for permitting mines, oil and gas exploration, agriculture, and parks on 80 million acres of state-owned land. In other words, John Shively knew very well how Alaskan regulators evaluated projects such as the Pebble mine.
One day in June 2008, I found myself at a small airport on the outskirts of Anchorage, waiting for Shively, who had offered to fly me out to the Pebble site for a tour. (I am leery of accepting favors from people I am writing about, but this was the only practical way for me to see the mine site and spend time with PLP’s CEO.) In the airport waiting room were a Native girl dressed in pink and a young, buzz-cut guy holding a rifle case, but nobody who looked like a corporate suit.
As I waited, a guy in a wrinkled brown shirt, rumpled blue jeans, and an old hat wandered into the waiting room and looked around distractedly. He pulled a cell phone from a leather case decorated with Native beads and mumbled into it, “Yeah, hey, this is John Shively. I’m at the airport and I’m supposed to meet a writer. You heard from him?” When Shively hung up, I introduced myself.
PLP’s vaunted new CEO was not at all what I expected. Sot-spoken, with big eyes that stared at the world with apparent curiosity, he’d occasionally flash a half grin. He was friendly, low-key, and disarming. He’s Columbo, I thought. Disheveled in the way that Peter Falk’s seemingly absentminded detective was in the old TV series.
Shively came to Alaska in 1965, by way of the VISTA program (Volunteers in Service to America), an antipoverty initiative championed by President John F. Kennedy. He was posted to the town of Yakutat, where he befriended Byron Mallott, the young Native mayor. Later, they worked together in community action organizations that sponsored rural Alaskan regional development corporations. For about eight years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Shively worked at NANA (formerly the Northwest Arctic Native Association), one of thirteen for-profit Native corporations, where he educated shareholders about the landmark $1 billion Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which conveyed some 44 million acres to Native corporations to resolve disputes over the trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Shively spent a lot of time in villages and rural areas, teaching people how to empower themselves. Shively served as chief of staff to Governor Bill Sheffield, a Democrat (in 1985, Shively resigned under a cloud, while Sheffield narrowly avoided being impeached for alleged perjury over an office lease). Shively’s wife is an environmental writer and organic farmer, and they have an adopted Native Alaskan daughter. All of which seems to peg Shively pretty firmly in the “hippie Left” camp. But there is a zealous side to his activism, dedicated to bringing Natives into the mainstream white world.
Before taking the job at PLP, Shively was working for the Holland America cruise line and was contemplating a quiet retirement. “If [PLP] had wanted to hire a mining guy, they could have done that. I admit I don’t know much about metals. But one of the skills I do have is negotiating,” Shively said. In the early 1980s, while working for NANA, Shively led the negotiations that resulted in the permitting of Red Dog, the largest zinc mine in the world, which is in the Brooks Range of northwestern Alaska. NANA’s partner in the deal was Cominco, the Canadian mineral company that originally developed Pebble. “Red Dog created a lot of Native jobs. It was one of the highlights of my career,” Shively said. “My hope is that maybe we can do the same thing at Pebble. There’s just not a lot of economic opportunity in rural Alaska. To me, this project is about improving people’s lives.”
From 2001 to 2007, federal environmental regulators listed Red Dog as the worst toxic polluter in the United States for six years in a row. Much of that pollution was mined waste rock, which is strictly regulated to prevent toxic metals from leaching into the ground and water. (In 2009, the EPA would fine Teck Alaska Inc., Red Dog’s operator, $120,000 for other cases of water pollution.) “Well, no question, there have certainly been some of those issues,” Shively replied, happy to discuss this touchy subject. “There was a case of acid-mine drainage when we first opened Red Dog. But it is safe and being tested now. That area never supported fish before, and now there are actually fish in Red Dog Creek.”
But what happens if there is a toxic spill at Pebble, near the headwaters of two of Bristol Bay’s most important salmon rivers? I asked. Wouldn’t that have far worse consequences than what happened at Red Dog?
“If I am not convinced that the Pebble mine is well designed and safe, I’ll walk away,” Shively said. “It is a very attractive prospect, and it concerns me that people are trying to stop it before we even have a proposal. Obviously, it is in a sensitive area. But we are confident we will address the fisheries issues. If we can’t mine it safely, okay, then let’s turn it into a wildlife refuge or something.”
But as well-intentioned as he may be, it hardly matters if Shively walks away from the project. The companies behind PLP—Anglo American and Northern Dynasty—have invested years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars in developing the mine; Anglo executives are deeply experienced with controversy over their global mining operations and are not likely to give up on such a rich prospect unless forced to by the state or the federal government.
At that airport outside Anchorage we boarded a single-engine plane and flew up to the village of Iliamna, on the edge of Lake Iliamna, Alaska’s largest lake and an important salmon breeding area. Iliamna, with a population of about one hundred, is PLP’s local headquarters. There we transferred to a sleek company helicopter for the eighteen-mile trip to the mine site. I sat in the let front seat, next to the pilot. Shively sat in back with Nicky, a cheerful Canadian engineer, who narrated through a headset. Below us, the tundra swooshed by like a movie—rolling green-brown hills, glintingly wet depressions, and patches of snow. There were no roads, or any sign of humanity.
We came upon an area of tall, undulating hills and broad meadows: Pebble. “There are two contiguous deposits, Pebble East and Pebble West,” Nicky explained. “The exact nature of the mining activities has yet to be finalized.” While Pebble West is slated to be mined as an open pit, the geology of Pebble East is less well understood, but it would probably be mined by the block-caving method, in which interlocking chambers are excavated deep underground. The logic was clear: most of the minerals here are of such a low grade that only a huge mine that could benefit from economies of scale made economic sense.
The vast operation could include the construction of a new port at Iniskin Bay, on Cook Inlet, about 104 miles to the east. A haul road running along the north side of Lake Iliamna would connect the port to the mine. A pipeline next to the road would carry a slurry of metal concentrate from Pebble. The slurry would be dewatered, loaded onto ships, and sent to a smelter, while a second pipe would return the used water to the mine, where it would be treated. Underground mining requires more electricity than aboveground mining, and it is estimated that Pebble will require about 250 to 350 megawatts of electricity, which is more power than is used by the entire Kenai Peninsula and would require transmission lines.
While Nicky explained the layout, I stared out the windshield, trying to imagine this pristine landscape split open by a yawning pit, alongside two of the largest dams in the world holding perhaps 2.5 billion tons of toxic tailings, with miles of roads, bridges, pipelines, and power lines snaking here and there. PLP now estimates the mine will cost over $6 billion to build, a figure three times the initial estimate.
After we passed over Frying Pan Lake, the chopper lost altitude, bucked in a crosswind, and landed about two hundred yards from a temporary drill rig.
The rig and a small wooden shack had been placed here by helicopter and sat on wooden skids, so as not to harm the tundra. With a loud clatter, it was extracting core samples from deep underground. We jumped out and watched three scruffy men pulling sections of pipe out of the borehole, carefully removing rock-core samples and placing them in cardboard sleeves (the samples would be taken to a lab in Iliamna, inspected, and cataloged), then running new sections of pipe down the hole again. A hose snaked from a nearby pond, to supply the rig with water. The drill was noisy and the men worked quickly, with few words. Then the wind kicked up, and it was time to fly.
To help gain what John Shively calls the “social license” to mine here—industry jargon for obtaining permission from the local community—the Pebble Partnership maintains that it has gone “beyond the state’s environmental guidelines” to maintain a light footprint on the land. Instead of etching new roads into the fragile tundra with bulldozers, for example, the PLP ferries most of its people and equipment by helicopter or snowmobile. Groundwater is monitored. By 2008, the partnership had spent “in excess of $100 million” on assessing the mine’s potential environmental and sociological impacts, as is required by the permitting process.
Pebble mine, its developers say, will be good for Alaska: it probably won’t use all of the water it has requested, the explosions used to loosen rock will be contained, the gigantic dams will be engineered to withstand earthquakes, the poisonous tailings will be perfectly safe forever, and Pebble will bring nothing but good fortune to an impoverished corner of the state. This is a potent message, and many Natives support the mine.
The PLP has issued a steady stream of reassuring scientific reports about air, soil, and water quality at the site that have been posted on the company’s website. Shively noted that the mine site is on public land (PLP owns rights to the minerals, not the land) and that skeptics are welcome to visit it and perform their own tests there, as the Nature Conservancy has done.
But, critics counter, PLP’s tests are performed by consultants, its reports are written in-house and are not peer-reviewed, and the company refuses to detail its mining plans for independent review, making its reams of data useless. Critics are suspicious that the company is pretending to be open, while spinning the story to suit its agenda.
Mining is considered one of the dirtiest industries in the world. The chemicals used to process minerals are often poisonous, including lime and sodium hydroxide, sodium cyanide, hydrochloric acid, sodium metabisulfite, copper sulfate, polypropylene glycol methyl ether, xanthates, dithiophosphate and thionocarbamate, and methyl isobutyl carbinol.
The EPA estimates that hard-rock mining has contaminated the headwaters of over 40 percent of watersheds in the American West. In 2006, the agency estimated that the cost of cleaning up the worst of many abandoned mine sites in the United States would be at least $20 billion, or almost three times the EPA’s budget for 2007. Long-term water treatment is often the costliest aspect of mine cleanup, and an increasing number of large mines like Pebble require water treatment of tailings “forever.”
Mining’s dirty legacy is due in large part to the General Mining Law of 1872, passed by Congress to encourage economic development in the West. Calling mining the “best use” of public land, it allowed miners to extract precious metals for a token fee and made no provision for environmental cleanup. Now an estimated sixteen thousand miles of streams are polluted, as are lakes and reservoirs. Mining industry officials vigorously defend the statute and say the absence of federal guidelines has given rise to a tight regulatory framework and state laws that protect water, air, and endangered species. But the evidence is not reassuring.
In June 2009 the US Supreme Court ruled, 6 to 3, to allow the Kensington gold mine, northwest of Juneau, to dump as much as 4.5 million tons a year of mine-waste slurry into Lower Slate Lake—even though it would certainly kill the lake’s fish. The Kensington ruling was based on a 2002 Bush administration rule that allowed the dumping of mine waste into previously protected waters. Until that rule, the Clean Water Act had stipulated that the Army Corps of Engineers could dump “fill material” in waters while building levees and bridges. The Bush rule enlarged the definition of fill to include contaminated mining waste. As of this writing, it is unclear whether the court’s ruling on Kensington set a precedent that would affect water use at Pebble. But Bristol Bay residents have long worried about the PLP’s plan to dump mine waste into Lake Iliamna. “We will not put tailings into Lake Iliamna,” Shively told me. “There’s no lake big enough up there for the tailings.” The company claims this idea has been shelved. (According to the Anchorage Daily News, Pebble could conceivably fill in a different lake with clean dirt and load mining waste on top of it without breaking the law. Other mines in Alaska have used this tactic, including the Pogo and the Fort Knox gold mines.)
The mine that most resembles the open pit proposed for Pebble is the Bingham Canyon Mine (aka the Kennecott Copper Mine), near Salt Lake City. It is the largest copper, gold, and molybdenum mine in North America, for the moment, with an ore body only half the size of Pebble’s. Pollution from Bingham Canyon has contaminated sixty square miles of groundwater in Utah. This resulted in the building of the largest waste-water treatment plant in the United States: it is designed to treat 2.7 billion gallons of polluted water annually for at least forty years.
Every spring, millions of salmon fry emerge from the gravel of the Bristol Bay region’s streams and lakes, migrate down to the bay, and swim out into the Bering Sea and beyond. Once they have matured, after two to six years of roaming the ocean, the salmon return to their natal streams, fin their way to the pool they were born in, and spawn.
In dry years, you can find stretches of waterway where a thin layer of brown water—as little as an inch deep—churns with a seething mass of red torpedoes wriggling furiously toward home.
“It’s a force of nature,” the locals told me. A “biblical flood of fish.” Because the prized sockeye develop red sides by the time they spawn, their onslaught is known as the red tide, or red gold.
Alaska has some of the most valuable fishing grounds in the world (if it were a nation, the state would be the ninth-largest seafood producer), which generated a catch worth a record $533.9 million in 2010. Bristol Bay is Alaska’s richest commercial fishery and the world’s most productive commercial sockeye fishery. All five species of Pacific salmon—pink, chum, sockeye, coho, and king—spawn in the bay’s rivers.
In 2008, 29.3 million salmon, valued at $113.3 million, were harvested in Bristol Bay; in 2009, 30.9 million salmon, worth $144.2 million, were taken; in 2010, bay fishermen hauled in 28.6 million salmon, worth a record $148.2 million.
In early June 2008, I flew into Dillingham, a weather-beaten fishing port on Bristol Bay, just as the sockeye were about to arrive en masse. A large silver sculpture of a salmon is suspended between two poles in a small park in the middle of town. Dillingham has three canneries, and everywhere you looked was the message NO PEBBLE MINE—on bumper stickers, posters, lapel pins, camouflage baseball caps, and flags flying from the radio masts of the fishing fleet. One guy wore a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the message PUCK FEBBLE!
People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment for the Bristol Bay fishing season, which lasts only about six weeks. A fisherman can expect to pay, on average, $325,000 to buy a new gill-netter, the thirty-two-foot fishing boats that are the monster trucks of the sea: wide, squat, stainless steel, blunt-nosed salmon-killing machines, armed with enormous engines and big spools of netting at bow and stern. That doesn’t include the cost of gas, crew, nets, and supplies you need to survive for days at sea in a harsh climate. But such is the nature of salmon fever.
June 1 is opening day for king salmon in Bristol Bay. A few days later, the sockeye arrive and begin to make their way up local rivers. When enough of them have passed the counting stations—tall towers set up along the rivers, from which fisheries biologists monitor the red tide—the governor goes on the radio to say something like “Okay, all you folks out there in Bristol Bay, it’s time to start fishing—good luck!”
By the end of the 2008 season, the Bristol Bay fishery was down 6.7 percent compared to 2007. Alaska’s statewide salmon harvest of 146 million fish brought in $400 million, 31.4 percent below the year before. Even so, it was still the sixteenth-largest catch since 1959 and was far healthier than the salmon fisheries in the Lower 48 states.
Thanks to overfishing, pollution, and the construction of dams on spawning streams, the Atlantic salmon of New England are listed as endangered species. On the West Coast, the California salmon season was canceled in 2008 and 2009 by federal regulators. Central Oregon fishermen were granted a nine-thousand-fish catch in 2008, and Washington State fishermen were granted only a short season in 2009. Millions of sockeye once spawned along Idaho rivers, before hydroelectric dams were built. Now the salmon have to swim nine hundred miles from the Pacific, surmount eight dams, and climb sixty-five hundred feet up to lakes in the Sawtooth Valley. In 2006 fisheries biologists suggested that Idaho sockeye were “functionally extinct.” In 1995, not a single salmon returned to the Sawtooth; in 2007, only four salmon were reported to have survived the trek. A hatchery program is promising, but whether hatchery-bred fish can survive the grueling life cycle of an Idaho salmon is an open question.
Today, far more farm-raised salmon exist in the world than wild salmon. Farming salmon adds pollutants, such as PCBs (the chemical that pollutes the Housatonic River), to the ecosystem, where they enter the food chain. The threat of domesticated salmon escaping and crossbreeding with native fish, and the amount of wild fish required to feed farmed salmon, add to the environmental stress. Salmon advocates across the country have petitioned Washington for sweeping changes in the way wild salmon stocks are managed, and in 2009, they asked President Obama to appoint a national salmon czar to oversee the care, maintenance, and rescue of fish populations.
Aside from limiting the catch, the best way to help wild salmon is to remove dams that block their spawn runs. In 2008, American Rivers reported that 430 outdated dams had been removed in the last decade. The first was the Edwards Dam, on the Kennebec River, in Maine. On the Penobscot, also in Maine, fish ladders will open one thousand miles of river to salmon. In the West, three dams in Washington State are slated for removal in 2011, while four dams on California’s Klamath River will be removed by 2015. But in Alaska dams aren’t the issue: salmon advocates fear contamination of the water, particularly by Pebble mine.
The anti-Pebble coalition is broad and loose and does not always work in sync toward a common goal: liberal-leaning groups, such as Trout Unlimited and the Nature Conservancy, certain Native groups, and most commercial and sport fishermen, oppose the mine. But so do many of the cannery operators, and a few conservative businessmen.
On the outskirts of Dillingham, Bobby Andrew, a diminutive Yupik man in a plaid shirt, was unloading a dozen freshly caught salmon from his skiff. He showed me around his smokehouse, where long, greasy strips of deep orange salmon hung from the rafters, curing. “I know an elder who found a place on a river in this area—and I’m not gonna say where—where you could pull out finger-sized pieces of gold,” he said. “My friend knew what they were worth, but he threw the gold back into the river. He didn’t want people to know about it. Gold only creates problems. The more you have, the more you want, and then the less you have. Gold creates greed.”
Speaking slowly, in a sot voice, Andrew opined that Pebble mine will make things worse, not better, for Natives. “The resources we subsist on, like salmon, are there. They are renewable. We’ve been fishing them for more than a thousand years, and we haven’t run out of salmon yet. So why would we ever want to risk losing that?”
I was introduced to Andrew by Bob Waldrop, who served as the Special Assistant for Natural Resources under Jay Hammond, Alaska’s famous “Bush Rat Governor,” and now helps to run the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, which assists commercial fishermen. One day, Waldrop took me across Lake Clark, inside Lake Clark National Park, which is adjacent to the Pebble site, to meet Bella Hammond at the log cabin she built with her husband, the governor. When I asked about Pebble, her gentle smile flipped into a scowl and her dark eyes flashed. “Jay always said, ‘I couldn’t imagine a worse location for a mine, unless it was right here in my own kitchen!’ ” the first lady said. “I couldn’t put it any better myself.”
One of the curious details of the battle over Pebble is that while the industrial mining giant PLP is led by the rumpled Democrat John Shively, the save-the-salmon opposition is (nominally) personified by Bob Gillam, an archconservative money manager who believes it is “stupid not to drill” for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge but has become a powerful behind-the-scenes force against the Pebble mine. An avid fisherman, Gillam has built an enormous lodge on Keyes Point, on Lake Clark, just downstream from Pebble, where he entertains clients. Gillam—who likes to say, “Only two things matter in life: getting rich and catching fish!”—denies that his lodge has anything to do with his opposition to Pebble, though the claim stretches credulity.
Gillam first heard of the mine in 2005. Inspecting the site from his private plane, he underwent a conversion. “You don’t have to be particularly smart to know that if you take away the water, the fish go away,” Gillam told the Wall Street Journal. “I cannot sit by and let this happen to my state.”
Said to be Alaska’s only billionaire, Gillam funds a nonprofit organization called the Renewable Resources Coalition, which runs anti-Pebble print and TV ads. He has hired an army of attorneys, lobbyists, pollsters, hydrologists, geologists, and fisheries researchers to build a scientific and legal case against the mine. His detractors estimate that he spends about $3 million a year on his anti-Pebble effort and seek to portray him as a rich man “throwing around his money … to protect his playground.” There is no end to the conspiracy theories about him, and several websites, such as The Bob Gillam Initiative to Kill Mining in Alaska, are dedicated to revealing the “real” Bob Gillam.
Even some of his supposed allies are suspicious of Gillam and have been trying to distance themselves. His investment management firm, McKinley Capital, holds more than $1 billion in mining stocks: when the firm bought over $7 million worth of shares of Anglo American PLC (the 50 percent owner of PLP) in 2007, the pro-Pebble faction snickered, while the mine’s critics grew alarmed. Some began to wonder, paranoically, whether Gillam might be a double agent for the mining industry, sowing confusion to split the opposition. Or perhaps, they theorized, he is a cynical opportunist playing both sides off each other for his own advantage. Only Gillam knows, and he declined to speak to me.
In 2008, Gillam was pushing Measure 4, a public referendum to disallow any new large metal mine from releasing chemicals that would damage salmonoid fish (a standard not included in Alaskan law), and a vote was scheduled for August 26. Pebble supporters complained that the referendum was designed only to stop Pebble, though Gillam denied it.
On August 20, polls showed that the two sides were neck and neck. That morning, Governor Sarah Palin called a news conference with no specific agenda, during which she said, “Let me take my governor’s hat off for just a minute here and tell you—personally, Prop 4? I vote no on that.” Bedlam ensued. The pro-mining side ran full-page ads featuring Palin’s photograph and the word NO.
On August 26, 57 percent of Alaskans voted against Measure 4, defeating it. Opponents blamed Palin for tipping the balance. Alaskan law forbids officials from using state resources to advocate for or against ballot initiatives. Tony Knowles, a former Democratic governor, charged that Palin broke the law by issuing her statement. “Being governor is not a costume—you either are the governor or not,” he said. “The only reason the press was there was that they were called by the governor.”
Three days later, Senator John McCain surprised nearly everyone by naming Sarah Palin his vice presidential nominee.
Just before Thanksgiving in 2008, Bob Moran flew from a water pollution conference in Papua New Guinea to Tyonek, an Athabascan village on Cook Inlet. The salmon fleet was gone, and a bitterly cold wind whistled through the quiet, snow-streaked streets. Standing in front of about twenty-five Native Alaskans in a classroom, he ran PowerPoint slides and said, “Companies routinely claim that they can operate a modern metal mine without environmental impacts. This is simply false.”
Talking to me later, he explained that Anglo American and Northern Dynasty have been in business for a long time, in some of the most difficult environments in the world, and had been very successful. “The truth is, they don’t really care what happens this year, next year, or even five or ten years from now. They are playing for the long term, fifty years, maybe one hundred years down the road. They know that the minerals in Pebble will just get more valuable over time. They can afford to be very, very patient.”
John Shively had told me essentially the same thing, noting that the Pebble Deposit could be mined for eighty to one hundred years but that PLP would apply for only twenty-five-year permits for its first phase. Once the first stage is successful, he said, permits for further work would not be as controversial. “The minerals are in there,” he said. “They’re not going anywhere.”
Moran looked at the crowd of concerned faces in Tyonek and said, “If the mine is built, the wastes will remain on the site forever, available to be released into the water. The question you need to answer is, is that risk acceptable to you?” The crowd muttered, then shuffled out into the cold to think it over.
Miners and fishermen are not the only ones with their eyes on Bristol Bay. In 2007, President George W. Bush lifted a moratorium on drilling for oil there, which had been imposed by his father in 1990 in response to the Exxon Valdez disaster. The 2007 decision was yet another reminder of the growing competition for resources, and it enraged fishermen, environmentalists, and Native groups, who sued and delayed oil exploration in the bay.
Drilling in Bristol Bay would generate an estimated $7.7 billion worth of oil and gas over twenty-five to forty years, which is a relatively modest return. Taking the bay’s notorious storms, ice, and cold into account, the former Minerals Management Service predicted that drilling there would result in at least one major oil spill. Environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund charge that it makes “no sense” to drill in Bristol Bay and argue that large oil and gas rigs could pollute the bay’s $2 billion fishery, disrupt the migratory patterns of salmon, and disturb whales and migrating birds.
On March 31, 2010, President Barack Obama proposed opening vast new areas on the East and West Coasts, and in the Gulf of Mexico, to oil and gas drilling. Under the plan, the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in Alaska would be opened to drilling, while Bristol Bay would be designated as a sanctuary in which no drilling would be allowed. Three weeks after the president’s controversial announcement, the Deepwater Horizon, an exploratory drill rig leased by BP, exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, creating the largest oil spill in US history and touching off a furor over offshore drilling.
As of this writing, it remains unclear if Obama’s proposal will be enacted, or whether the BP disaster in the Gulf will have any impact on oil, gas, or mineral exploration in Alaska. Over the summer of 2010, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson flew to Alaska on fact-finding trips and held meetings with proponents and opponents of the Pebble mine, though they were careful not to tip their hands.
Unless the federal government steps in, Pebble will live or die by the sixty-seven state and federal permits it is required to get. The mine site lies on state land (Shively refused to speculate about what sort of taxes or fees PLP would pay to mine the claim). State mining coordinator Tom Crafford said that while acid rock drainage and metal leaching are “a major issue of concern” if the mine is permitted, PLP’s exploration of the site by about two hundred people a day “will have no significant impact on fisheries.” The Alaska Department of Natural Resources is in charge of permitting mines, and only rarely does that agency not grant permits. Critics note the “revolving door” of personnel between regulatory agencies and mining concerns, which, the critics say, stacks the deck in favor of miners.
“Industry has hijacked the regulatory process,” snorts Carol Ann Woody, the former USGS fish biologist. “The state’s permitting process is set up to permit. I worked on about thirty permits in my career at USGS. Once they file their Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for Pebble, we’ll get their environmental data, but by then it will be game over. As far as I know, there has never been a mine that filed an EIS that was not permitted.”
Over a halibut lunch in Anchorage, John Shively tilted his head to one side, as if something had just occurred to him, and said, “Alaska is a natural resource state. It’s what we do here. I don’t want to wreck things in the environment, but I don’t believe our resources should be locked up forever, either. We’d never trade fish for mining. Our challenge is to see them coexist, and I believe we can do it. There’s no sense in sacrificing one resource for another.”
In the twenty-first century, humans’ previously unbridled use of natural resources is yielding to a new era of limits, pressures, and restrictions. Just as geologists are looking for new mineral prospects, so hydrologists are searching for new water supplies. For water managers, the focus of this search has led to a quest to find a limitless, “drought-proof” supply of freshwater: the hydrologic Holy Grail.