There’s gold in them thar…. swamps.
A lot of gold, in fact—up to $120 billion of it, lying within the Bristol Bay watershed in Alaska. Which is why a Canadian company, Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., wants to dig one of the world’s largest open-pit mines to get it.
Naturally, there’s a fight. Mines are messy, and this one—the Pebble Mine—could threaten delicate salmon spawning grounds.
But this fight is different—because there are Republicans on both sides.
“I am a commercial fisherman; my daughter’s name is Bristol,” Sarah Palin said in 2006, while running for governor. “I could not support a project that risks one resource that we know is a given, and that is the world’s richest spawning grounds, over another resource.”
And there’s the rub: These aren’t just endangered fish that the Pebble Mine could threaten—they’re commercial fish. So, alongside the more typical coalitions of tribal groups and environmental organizations warning of a “three mile wide hole and 9 billion tons of waste…right in the heart of Bristol Bay” are a number of Alaskan conservatives concerned about the fishing industry and all it represents for Alaska.
Republicans against the mine have included former senator Ted Stevens (the fight has been going on for decades), two (other) former Republican governors, and a number of self-described Redneck Republicans in local Alaskan politics. Each side has their public opinion polls, but it seems clear that a majority of Alaskans are against it.
On the Green side, all the major environmental organizations are against it, celebrities including Robert Redford have been enlisted to oppose it, and major jewelers (including Tiffany, Zales, and Boucheron) have promised not to use any gold that comes from Pebble Mine. Not the usual allies of Redneck Republicans.
To be sure, some Republicans are supportive. Senator Lisa Murkowski, notably, has supported it, or at least, opposed the EPA’s efforts to regulate it. And Palin herself equivocated once she was in office—her own administration had ties to the Pebble Mine developers, and she loosened environmental restrictions affecting it.
It doesn’t help that Northern Dynasty is a Canadian company, that its major business partner pulled out in 2013, and that a successful ballot initiative now requires the Alaska state legislature to sign off on any mining permits. There’s also the small-c conservative argument against. The salmon industry is a known quantity (a $500 million-per-year quantity, to be precise), spawning grounds are scarce, and even a small leak from the mine’s tailings could be devastating. As that Redneck Republican, state Senator Rick Halford, put it in an interview with The Guardian, “If God were testing us, he couldn’t have found a more challenging place.”
Via thedailybeast.com
image credit nationalgeographic.com
