In a major victory for conservationists fighting to stop the disastrous open-pit Pebble Mine, the mine's lead owner, Anglo-American, cancelled its plans for the gold & copper mine development at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, Alaska home to one of the world's largest remaining salmon runs. The astounding announcement was made yesterday. Described as a "
hard nosed" mining operation, Anglo-American sunk $500 million in the planning process including an extensive propaganda campaign intended to convince local Alaskans that a pit mine producing
10 billion tons of contaminated waste was in their best interests. The salmon run on which many rely for their livelihoods surely would have been sacrificed on the altar of Mammon. Native groups and fisherfolk opposed the mine from its beginnings realizing it was an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Millions of concerned citizens around the world sent in messages protesting the mine. Two hundred thousand messages from
NRDC members alone were delivered directly to the company's new CEO, Mark Cutifani asking that he abandoned the Pebble Mine project. The pressure helped convince the company to write-off $300 million and wash its hands of the project, joining Mitsubishi before it.
The Pebble Mine project is not dead, but it is severely
hobbled with the departure of financial giant Anglo-American. Its former partner, Northern Dynasty Minerals must now go it alone trying to convince regulators and the public it can put the massive mine into production without causing severe and irreparable damage. EPA found in its environmental assessment of the project that the mine posed "catastrophic risks". Another international mining giant, Rio Tinto, owns a 20% share of the Canadian company, Northern Dynasty. NRDC's goal is to protect Bristol Bay's watershed from pollution forever by prompting EPA to use its regulatory power under the Clean Water Act to ban large scale mining there. Forty million spawning salmon and the life that depends on them will know the difference.
