TIME MAY BE RUNNING OUT FOR BRISTOL BAY SALMON

This continent, and this nation, once hosted a wonderful array of living natural resources.

Passenger pigeon flocks once numbered in the billions, and were dense enough to darken the skies when they flew over northeastern woodlands.  But the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died in captivity over a century ago.

During the late 1700s, the American bison still traversed the Great Plains in huge herds; scientists estimate that as many as 60,000,000 bison were still running free.  Yet by 1889 only 541 bison were thought to remain alive.  The numbers have risen since, to 31,000 or so, although most of them are sequestered in Yellowstone National Park; should they roam out of park borders during the winter, they are subject to killing in surrounding jurisdictions, where ranchers fear that they’ll spread the disease brucellosis to cattle, the same disease that cattle initially transmitted to bison many, many years ago.

For many years, it had become a tradition for Maine to send the first Atlantic salmon caught in its rivers each season to Washington, D.C., as a gift to the sitting President.  That tradition ended in 1992, because dams, industrial pollution and overfishing offshore caused so much harm to the salmon that they were almost extirpated from Maine’s waters.  Today, the salmon are listed as endangered, and may not be caught or targeted by fishermen, as Maine’s fishery managers collaborate with experts at the National Marine Fisheries Service, trying to find a way to increase salmon abundance.

In the Pacific, the once abundant salmon of the Sacramento/San Joaquin river system have been devastated by dammed rivers and California farmers’ incessant demand for more and more water, used to irrigate crops that farmers have decided to grow in a sere and near-waterless land.  A court decision handed down a few years ago offered hope to the salmon, but David Bernhardt, Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, pandering to friendly agricultural interests (whom he used to represent, before entering the government) at the salmon’s expense, decided to let the farms strip additional water from the already drawn-down streams.

Farther north, in the Columbia River system, where some salmon and steelhead trout once ran over 900 miles to reach headwater spawning grounds, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has suggested that the states of Washington and Oregon no longer include maintaining such spawning salmon and steelhead among their priorities for the river.  In that way, they can be better assured of preserving the dams treasured by varied industrial interests, and more easily sacrifice the salmon, many runs of which are already listed under the Endangered Species Act.

But there are still a few places around where life and beauty prevail, where people can sustainably profit from nature’s bounty, while leaving the place—the ecosystem—intact.  In the United States, perhaps the best of them is Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency describes it this way:

“The Bristol Bay watershed in southeastern Alaska supports the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world…

“The Bristol Bay watershed provides habitat for numerous animal species, including 29 fishes, more than 190 birds, and more than 40 terrestrial mammals.  Chief among these resources is a world-class commercial and sport fishery for Pacific salmon and other important resident fishes.  The watershed supports production of all five species of Pacific salmon found in North America: sockeye, coho, Chinook, chum and pink. 

“Because no hatchery fish are raised or released in the watershed, Bristol Bay’s salmon populations are entirely wild.  These fish are anadromous—hatching and rearing in freshwater systems, migrating to the sea to grow to adult size, and returning to freshwater systems to spawn and die.

“…The Bristol Bay watershed supports the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world, with perhaps 46% of the average global abundance of wild sockeye salmon.

“The Alaska Native cultures present in the Nushagak River and Krichak River watersheds—the Yup’ik and Dena’ina—are two of the last intact, salmon-based cultures in the world.  Salmon are integral to the entire way of life in these cultures as subsistence food and as the foundation of their language, spirituality, and social structure…

“In the Bristol Bay region, salmon constitute about 52% of the subsistence harvest…

“These cultures have a strong relationship to the landscape and its resources.  In the Bristol Bay watershed, this connection has been maintained for at least the last 4,000 years and is in part due to and responsible for the pristine condition of the region’s landscape and its biological resources…

“The Bristol Bay watershed supports several economic sectors that are wilderness-compatible and sustainable:

·         commercial, sport, and subsistence fishing

·         sport and subsistence hunting

·         non-consumptive recreation (e.g. wildlife viewing and tourism)

Considering all these sectors, the ecological resources of the Bristol Bay watershed generated nearly $480 million in direct economic expenditures and sales in 2009, and provided employment for over 14,000 full- and part-time workers.

“The Bristol Bay commercial salmon fishery generates the largest component of economic activity and was valued at approximately $300 million in 2009 (first wholesale value) and provided employment for over 11,500 full- and part-time workers at the peak of the season.  [emphasis added]”

Wilderness.  Massive runs of native salmon.  Native cultures that date back for millennia.  Profitable, sustainable businesses based on the region’s natural resources.

It seems like a sort of utopia, a sort of natural paradise that has been erased from existence elsewhere in the nation, and in most of the world.

But now that paradise is being threatened.  A Canadian mining company, with the active connivance of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, is Hell-bent on committing an act of environmental and cultural vandalism.  It intends to rip the guts out of the Bristol Bay watershed, in order to build a huge open-pit mine that will churn out over 10 billion tons of toxic tailings and change the character of the region forever.

The proposed “Pebble Mine” has already become infamous, not only for the irreparable damage that it will due to the wilderness and natural resources of the Bristol Bay watershed, but for the way that the Trump administration has abdicated its duties to protect that pristine ecosystem for the current citizens of this nation, and for the citizens yet to be born who should have this wilderness preserved as a part of their living heritage.

Protecting Bristol Bay is not a partisan issue.

The late Ted Stevens, a Republican senator from Alaska who was a staunch supporter of the mining industry, called the Pebble Mine

“the wrong mine in the wrong place.”

A current Republican senator from Alaska, Dan Sullivan, stated that in his view, the 90-day public comment period on the draft environmental impact statement for the Pebble mine, which was set by the Army Corps of Engineers, was too short to allow the necessary examination of the issues.  

He said that

“It’s a very legitimate request from my perspective to have more time to do the due diligence on a project of this size.” 

Senator Lisa Murkowski, yet another Republican from Alaska, submitted the Senate Appropriations Committee report on the bill providing 2020 funding for the departments of the Interior, Environment, and related agencies.  With respect to Bristol Bay and the draft environmental impact statement for permitting the Pebble Mine, that report said

“…The Committee notes that multiple Federal agencies commented to express their concerns that the [draft environmental impact statement] is inadequate and does not meet the Army Corps’ obligations to thoroughly evaluate the potential impacts of the proposed project.  The Committee shares the agencies’ concerns that DEIS lacks certain critical information about the proposed project and related mitigation and therefore likely underestimates its potential risks and impacts.  Sound science must guide Federal decisionmaking and all gaps and deficiencies identified in comments from Federal agencies and other stakeholders, including Alaska Natives, must be fully addressed, even if that requires additional scientific study, data collection, and more comprehensive analysis of the project’s potential impacts…Adverse impacts on Alaska’s world-class salmon fishery and to the ecosystem of Bristol Bay, Alaska, are unacceptable.  To the extent [the Department of the Interior], [the Environmental Protection Agency], or [the National Marine Fisheries Service] are not satisfied with the Army Corps’ analysis of the project, the agencies are encouraged to exercise their discretionary authorities, which include EPA’s enforcement authority under the Clean Water Act, at an appropriate time in the permitting process to ensure the full protection of the region.”

Under the former administration of President Barak Obama, the EPA did just that, making a decision that Clean Water Act considerations necessarily prevented development of the Pebble Mine.  The Pebble Mine Partnership sued the EPA in response, but the Obama administration did not back down.

Things changed rapidly once the Trump EPA took over.  As noted in an opinion piece published in the Juneau Empire, written by long-time Alaskan fisherman and educator Jake Jacoby,

“our voices are not being heard by this administration, and politics is at play in the rushed permitting process for the Pebble Mine.  For example, after a single backroom meeting between the Pebble CEO and the ethically-challenged former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, the mine’s permitting process came roaring back to life in 2018.  The EPA hastily settled a lawsuit brought by Pebble and revoked its own Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment that went through years of scrutiny, public process and scientific peer review.  We have to wonder, what other closed-door meetings are happening now?

“It typically takes at least five years to complete the environmental review for a project of Pebble’s magnitude and complexity.  By some highly-suspect miracle, permitting for the proposed Pebble Mine is expected to be completed in half that time—conveniently right before the end of this presidential administration.  If it’s not for expedient politics, then what’s the rush?  From where we sit, the whole thing stinks to high heaven.

“Public filings show that Pebble Partnership CEO Tom Collier will receive a $12.5 million bonus if the Army Corps completes its Environmental Impact Statement process before 2021.  For Pebble and Tom Collier, getting permits before the end of 2020 is the only thing that matters—not the best interest of Alaskans.  Public records also reveal that of the $11 million that Pebble spent on lobbying since 2011, more than $4 million of that has been spent since President Donald Trump took office.  It’s clear that money spent on this administration is working…”

The final Environmental Impact Statement is going to be released very soon.  It is not very likely that the concerns expressed by the late Senator Stevens, by the committee report submitted by Senator Murkowski, or by the many fisherman and Alaskans such as Mr. Jacoby will be adequately addressed in that final version.

As Tom Sadler, Assistant Director of the Marine Fish Conservation Network has written,

“The fight to stop Pebble Mine has been going on for 10 years.  The proposals have not gotten any better nor the opposition any less.

“Backers of this mine ask us to make a choice between a sustainable resource that has supported native communities and small businesses and that brings healthy seafood to our dining tables or an extraction endeavor that has the potential to cause harm for years to come.

“The marine resources at risk are irreplaceable.  It is time once again to say no to Pebble Mine.”

Mr. Sadler also provided concrete ways to help.

If you’re an Alaskan, you can click on this link http://www.savebristolbay.org/take-action to contact Governor Dunleavy and insist that he tell the Army Corps of Engineers to protect Alaskans’ interest in a healthy Bristol Bay.

No matter where you live, you can click on this link https://www.defendbristolbay.com/take-action to send a message to your United States senators and House representative, and ask them to speak up to defend Bristol Bay.

We need to act now.  The clock is running down for Bristol Bay salmon.

Just a few weeks ago, the Trump administration senselessly opened up the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing, and put rare and effectively irreplaceable, 4,000-year-old deep sea corals at risk.

One of the early acts of that administration was to shrink the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase National Monument, and place its cultural artifacts, unique Mesozoic fossils and current high desert ecosystem at risk to the actions of fossil fuel drillers, miners and others who would plunder and deface lands belonging to all Americans.

In Minnesota, the same Trump administration is taking action that could lead to the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area being permanently degraded by waste from a sulfide-ore mine, operated by the U.S. subsidiary of a Chilean mining conglomerate.

So the Bristol Bay saga is just one more chapter in a long list of assaults on the special, beautiful and vital places that have been committed, or will soon be committed, by the Trump administration, a seeming effort to do as much harm as possible in the hopefully short time that this president has left to sell off the best of what’s left of America’s lands, waters and natural resources to his corporate cronies, who will gratefully destroy them before moving on.

Yet there is still time for Bristol Bay, time in which, if we’re fortunate and resolute, we can use in our efforts to assure that the lands, waters and fish that supported Americans for four thousand years before the United States even existed will still be able to support those Americans, physically and spiritually, in the centuries to come.