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Saturday, August 23, 2008
Environment - "Vote in Alaska Puts Question: Gold or Fish? "
William Yardley reports today in a story on page 1 of the NY Times, headlined "Vote in Alaska Puts Question: Gold or Fish?" It begins:
DILLINGHAM, Alaska — Just up the fish-rich rivers that surround this tiny bush town on Bristol Bay is a discovery of copper and gold so vast and valuable that no one seems able to measure it all. Then again, no one really knows the value of the rivers, either. They are the priceless headwaters of one of the world’s last great runs of Pacific salmon.“Perhaps it was God who put these two great resources right next to each other,” said John T. Shively, the chief executive of a foreign consortium that wants to mine the copper and gold deposit. “Just to see what people would do with them.”
What people are doing is fighting as Alaskans hardly have before. While experts say the mine could yield more than $300 billion in metals and hundreds of jobs for struggling rural Alaska, unearthing the metals could mean releasing chemicals that are toxic to the salmon that are central to a fishing industry worth at least $300 million each year. And while the metals are a finite discovery, the fish have replenished themselves for millenniums.
“If they have one spill up there, what’s going to happen?” said Steve Shade, 50, an Alaska Native who has fished on Bristol Bay all his life, for dinner and for a living. “This is our livelihood. They’re going to ruin it for everybody.”
Rarely are Alaskans at odds over which of their natural resources they want to exploit. Oil? Timber? Minerals? Fish? While outsiders and some state residents may urge restraint, most people here typically just select all.
Yet the fight over what is known as the Pebble Mine is playing out as a war between economies and cultures, between copper and clean water, gold and wild salmon. Strange alliances and divisions have developed. Miners have been pitted against fishermen, as have Yupik Eskimos, Aleuts and Athabascan Indians and other Alaska Native people who want the jobs the new mine could bring versus those who fear it threatens thousands of years of culture.
Now the fight is expanding, from the bush to the ballot.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 23, 2008 06:17 PM
Posted to Environment