Alaska produces more than 50 percent of US seafood, a success cultivated by careful regulation. “Alaska is the jewel of the world when it comes to fisheries management,” says Mike Erikson, the CEO of a small seafood processing plant in Juneau called Alaska Glacier Seafoods, “and that’s because you don’t see dams on our rivers you don’t see a lot of development in these watersheds that will have a negative impact.”
Salmon is the dominant fish on the menu in southeast Alaska, accounting for 75 percent of the region’s seafood economy. Five different salmon species — Chum, Pinks, Coho, Sockeye and Kings — swim up rivers here to spawn. The salmon life cycle is a well-documented natural wonder. Somehow, each fish manages to find its way back from the open ocean to a little freshwater stream where it was born. But last summer the salmon cycle was disrupted on one of the biggest sockeye rivers in North America.
On August 12, 2014, a dam holding back wastewater from the Mt. Polley copper and gold mine in British Columbia burst, sending more than six billion gallons of polluted water and mine waste into the Fraser River, just as the fish had begun their journey upstream.
It’s still too early to know how the Mt. Polley spill will impact the salmon runs on the Fraser, but some fishermen see the Mt. Polley disaster as the first shot in a growing conflict between Canadian mining businesses and the Alaskan salmon industry. British Columbia is in the midst of a mining boom, and several BC metal mines are planned along rivers that ultimately flow into Southeast Alaska — rivers like the Unuk, the Taku, and the Stikine. All of the mines would create massive amounts of toxic mining waste that will need to be stored and kept out of rivers.
“[The mines] are all in very close proximity to major salmon streams and they are in remote very geologically unstable, wet environments,” says Chris Zimmer of the conservation organization Rivers Without Borders. Zimmer says that the accident at Mt. Polley shows that mining companies don’t have the technology to mine safely in sensitive ecosystems like wild rivers.
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