Pebble prospect: Balancing 2 resources

[unhappycamper]

http://www.adn.com/2014/01/12/3270730/pebble-mine-pebble-prospect-balancing.html



Many Native Alaskans in the Bristol Bay region live a subsistence lifestyle, hunting, fishing and gathering their food for the year. Smokehouses in the village of Newhalen help the natives preserve salmon for the winter.

Pebble prospect: Balancing 2 resources
By DIANA BLASS and MARINA CRACCHIOLO
Medill News Service
January 12, 2014 Updated 6 hours ago

~snip~

This isolated place is home to the proposed site of North America's largest open-pit copper mine. Pebble Limited Partnership suspects that more than $300 billion worth of minerals lie below the ground.

But it also sits at the headwaters of the Bristol Bay fishery, home of the world's largest population of wild salmon and a major piece of Alaska's multibillion-dollar seafood export business.

"If you were to pick the world's worst place to put the world's largest open-pit mine, this is an ideal spot," commercial fisherman Mark Niver said, slamming a finger onto a map of Alaska at the anti-Pebble Mine headquarters, set up in one of Anchorage's oldest homes.

He's one of many who fear that mine pollution might leach into fishing waters and change the ecosystem where the salmon return upstream to spawn.