The Wild Salmon Center and Trout Unlimited yesterday published a bruising (112 pages with the annotated bibliography) as well as damning treatise on Bristol Bay’s Wild Salmon Ecosystems and the Pebble Mine.
A mighty effort, superbly done from where we sit, and while we’ve not yet ground through the report in it’s entirety, if so empowered we’d make this required reading for any and every fly fisherman on the planet.
Required reading? Yep, even though I know that term makes some folks skin crawl, there’s a simple yet compelling reason to say so.
Offered as just one man’s opinion, I think we’ve reached a point in human history where technology allows us to devise ‘projects’ that are of such a colossal scale they’re almost unimaginable to we mere mortals.
Here’s a couple of examples from the report with astronomical numbers…
The mine would produce up to 10.8 billion tons of waste rock. To put this number into perspective, if Pebble Limited Partnership used rail cars capable of carrying 100 tons each to transport the 10.8 billion tons of ore, the effort would require 108 million rail cars. Using standard 65-foot-long rail cars, the train would measure 1.33 million miles, long enough to circle the Earth at its equator over 50 times.
Nine miles of dams reaching up to 740 feet high would be required to impound just 2.5 billion tons of the toxic waste produced (called tailings). These impoundments, known as tailings storage facilities, would be some of the largest in the world and must impound the tailings forever to protect the highly productive Nushagak and Kvichak Rivers.
If you’ve read anything about Bristol Bay and Pebble over the past few years you’ve probably captured a glimpse of the richness the region’s rivers hold, particularly the Nushagak and the Kvichak.
Here’s another particular from the report that caught our eye and is again almost unimaginable…
The Bristol Bay basin is one of the top producing wild Pacific salmon systems in the world, yielding up to 40 million mature salmon each year.
Don’t know about you, but I can’t really visualize 40 million mature salmon in any given place at any given time. Hell, I’d be hard pressed to imagine 400 mature salmon in any one place at any one time. I’m even less able to visualize a 1.33 million mile long train of ore snaking over the Alaskan tundra.
How big is ginormous? Mind-blowingly, national-debt-level big, absolutely unimaginably big.
Pebble has become the poster child for juxtaposing the grandiose plans of man against mother nature, clean watersheds and native fish. The scale of the Pebble project is so large it defies comprehension; the risk the Pebble project poses is even greater. Just say no.
