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| © Robert Glenn Ketchum |
| Click photo for more pictures of Southwest Alaska by Robert Glenn Ketchum. |
So there's a bill in the House to protect Bristol Bay, the marine estuary. But what about the rest of Southwest Alaska?
The onshore campaign is trickier, and the threat is more sinister. Part of the problem is that it's not so much a federal issue as it is a state issue, because the state owns the land. And the state essentially designated the area as a huge mining district when private prospectors found evidence that it's mineral-rich, and registered claims. Unfortunately, the very same area is home to the headwaters of Southwest Alaska's two most productive salmon fishery rivers, the Nushagak and the Kvichak, which are also a world-class destination for Rainbow Trout fishing.
So the state granted the mining interests exploratory permits, and they've already dragged in all their drilling equipment and are flying helicopters in and out. They've taken core samples that have come back very rich in copper, with some gold presence as well. The company doing this has American registration, but when you follow it it's actually Canadian, a group called Northern Dynasty. When you follow it even further, it turns out that Northern Dynasty is a shell for a London-based investment group that may include Middle-Eastern interests, possibly Saudi Arabians. We've actually offered a $10,000 reward on the Internet to anybody who can trace the corporate board lineage of this corporation.
This group's proposal to the state for the Pebble Mine, as it's known, is so huge that it could end up as the largest open pit copper mine in the world. And it will also create one of the largest cyanide-leach gold mines in the world.
What does that mean?
Cyanide-leach gold mining is the most lethal mining process ever visited on planet Earth. What it amounts to is that since nugget-size gold is pretty much all discovered at this point, the gold that's left is in the form of flake and it's suspended in compound rock. So they dig up tons and tons of rock, crush it, put it in a lined pit, pile it up on top of itself, and spray a cyanide solution over it. And as the cyanide trickles down through the rock, it extracts the gold.
The gold goes into solution?
Yes, it goes into solution and drains to the bottom of the pit. Then it's run through a filter and the gold is pulled out. And what you're left with is a toxic slurry that's primarily cyanide and can never be recycled. So it has to be contained forever in a lined pit. And with the Pebble Mine complex, the lined pit will be a slurry lagoon 20 miles square requiring an earthen dam -- not concrete, but unstable dirt and rock -- larger than the Three Gorges Dam in China.
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| © Robert Glenn Ketchum |
| Click photo for more pictures of Southwest Alaska by Robert Glenn Ketchum. |
Unreal.
Totally. I mean, it's off the chart. It's so classically Alaskan in terms of being over the top.
So much so that [Alaska Senator] Ted Stevens is even against it.
Ted is against it. That's the amazing thing. Ted is probably pro the offshore oil because he's an oil boy. But he is absolutely against this onshore mind. Nobody in their right mind would vote for this cyanide-leach gold mine in the middle of a salmon fishery, but you can never underestimate the stupidity of the state. So the state's still supporting it and reassuring the second-stage permits. And the mining interests will come in and say to the people who live there, you'll love this because we're going to give you all jobs, which isn't true because the indigenous people don't have the right experience and they won't get those jobs. The jobs will go to guys brought in from out of state.
So why isn't the mine proposal getting as much attention in Washington as the offshore drilling agenda?
So the resistance to this mine is now happening at a much more grassroots level. It's being advanced by a lot of Internet users. It's a lot of smaller groups that are on the ground, a lot of native village groups, tribal corporations that'll be affected because this is all in and around their lands, and it will affect their subsistence way of life. It'll screw up their water. It'll screw up their air quality. It'll drive away the game that they depend on for their survival. Most of the native villages in this area hunt and fish entirely for life support, and many of the villages function almost entirely without cash.
These grass roots groups are using me and my photographs to familiarize people with the area and show why it shouldn't be trashed, and they've developed really interesting alliances with all of the national sports fishing groups and the big commercial marine fishery groups. So we're getting support not just from tree-huggers but from serious blue-collar families who are maybe not always allies of the conservation community. We're working it in a different way than through the legislators in DC. We're working it through public action. For instance, some of the locals went to the Northern Dynasty stockholder meeting in Canada posing as stockholders, and they stood up in the middle of the meeting and asked really pointed questions about the toxicity of the cyanide-leach process so that it would unsettle the investors.
At one point an executive from Northern Dynasty was asked who would be liable for the toxic waste after the mine closes -- who pays for the cleanup. And thinking he was, you know, in a sympathetic group, he said -- and this was with tape recorders running -- he said that our experience from other mines we've operated in Montana is that we will simply walk away from the site, back across the Canadian border. The American government will not pursue us, and it'll get dumped back on American taxpayers as a Superfund site [an area designated for government-funded cleanup of toxic waste]. The “spies” at the meeting recorded him saying that and brought it back to the native villages and played it. And the villages that had been on the fence, thinking they were going to get jobs out of the mine, are now uniformly against the proposal.
So if this campaign is so grassroots, how do people get to see your photographs?
They're handing out the latest book left and right. We did massive illustrated mailings to fishermen's groups. And we also did a huge targeted mailing to foundations whose charitable giving includes a marine fisheries component, such as the Pew Charitable Trusts or the Turner Family Foundation. We made sure that whoever was in charge of that part of their giving got my books and a description of the impending assault. One of the big hits was the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation of San Francisco, which has a specific interest in fisheries. They made a $10 million pledge, to be paid over three years to Southwest Alaska conservation groups, to deal with habitat protection and fight off these exploratory predators. That's a huge gift, $10 million.
I can't say the books did it alone. The books were part of a multi-faceted, ongoing campaign that involved hundreds of people on the ground, researchers, and environmental groups lobbying the heads of those charitable trusts. But the bottom line is that you can't make this happen if those people don't know what the place looks like and have no empathy for it. And the books fulfill that.
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