The battle between environmental conservation and business development continues in Alaska where voters sent in ballots on Tuesday October 4th to decide whether to prevent a mine from being built near the headwaters of Bristol Bay – one of the world’s premier salmon fisheries, according to the Associated Press (AP).
Citizens of the affected “Lake and Peninsula Borough” sent in ballots by mail to decide whether to ban the mine, but results will not be known until October 27th. There are only 1,192 registered voters in the borough, and “turnout in recent municipal elections have ranged from 191 in 2007 to 384 last year,” according to Forbes.
The ballot specifies banning “large-scale resource extraction activity, including mining, that would destroy or degrade salmon habitat,” according to AP.
The vote would not be the end of the story, however, as a challenge to the ballot initiative has already been filed by Pebble Limited Partnership, the group promoting the mine.
Art Hackney, director of the Alaskans for Bristol Bay group, said that the measure
“is clearly aimed at making Pebble Mine confront what they’ve promised: that they won’t kill salmon streams. If they can engineer it so it does not destroy salmon streams, by all means they can develop it.” He added: “Our contention is simply that this is trying to cast in concrete what Pebble Partnership has been saying all along, they won’t hurt salmon.”
AP added that “this year, the commercial harvest of salmon was valued at nearly $138 million, which doesn’t include fish caught by Alaska Natives for subsistence.”
The two companies developing the mine, Canada-based Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. and Anglo American plc of the United Kingdom, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars researching the mine which they say has the potential of producing 53 billion pounds of copper, 50 million ounces of gold and 2.8 billion pounds of molybdenum over nearly 80 years.
The New York Times writes that Bristol Bay salmon “is the fish you can eat with the least amount of guilt,” since it is one of the largest remaining wild salmon populations left. They also mention that the 100 year potential value of the Pebble Mine ranges from $100-300 billion, while the value of 100 years of salmon amount to $30 billion. That is because customers are ignorant of the high quality of Bristol Bay salmon, and much of it can sell for just “pennies on the pound, wholesale,” according to the Times.
