It’s Monday, September 13, and the EPA is blocking a gold mine threatening the biggest sockeye salmon run in the world.
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, asked a federal court to allow the protection of Alaska’s Bristol Bay under the Clean Water Act. If approved, the petition will block the construction of Pebble Mine, intended to be one of the biggest gold and copper extraction sites in North America.
The EPA made the request based on the pollution the open-pit mine could send into Bristol Bay, where commercial and Indigenous fishers catch half of the world’s wild sockeye salmon annually.
Since its inception, the proposed mine has been surrounded by controversy. In 2014, then-President Barack Obama’s EPA blocked the project after finding that the mine would damage 1,200 acres of streams, wetlands, and other important water ecosystems. Five years later, Donald Trump announced that his administration would no longer oppose the project. But after recordings in which Pebble Limited Partnership employees detailed their close relation to U.S. lawmakers and officials went public, Trump’s U.S. Army Corps formally denied the permit for the mine in October 2020.
Indigenous communities applauded the decision to protect Bristol Bay. According to the Washington Post, Alannah Hurley, executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay, called the move “a monumental step in the right direction.”
— María Paula Rubiano A.
The Smog
Need-to-know basis
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— Joseph Winters
