Save Bristol Bay - Say 'NO' to the Pebble mine!

More than 9,000 cubic meters of waste water penetrated a sewage tank and flowed through a drainage culvert into the Tingjiang River. Photograph © 2010 What's On Xiamen, Inc.

SAY NO TO THE PEBBLE MINE BY SIGNING THIS NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL (NRDC) PETITION!

Understandably, Americans are currently focused on the Gulf oil spill and the damage it is doing to one of our most productive fisheries. Less noticed by our media, in Fujian province in China the countries largest copper plant leaked 2.4 million gallons of acidic copper waste into the Ting river threatening that fishery and killing enough fish to feed 72,000 people for one year.

The polluted water devastated fish farms near the river. 
 Photograph © 2010 /CFP   
SAY NO TO THE PEBBLE MINE BY SIGNING THIS NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL (NRDC) PETITION!

There are only so many wild, clean fisheries and supportive habitats left.  We seem to be damaging or outright destroying them on a very large, global scale. In North America, Bristol Bay and southwest Alaska remain one of the most productive, bio-diverse and intact systems on the planet and it is ours to nurture or destroy. The Obama administration has taken Bristol Bay out of consideration for oil and gas exploration, but a Canadian mining consortium that includes Mitsubishi and is backed by European gold and copper speculators plans to build the Pebble. Proposed to be the largest open-pit copper and cyanide gold-leach mine in the world, it would create a mega-mine complex or roads, structures and tailings ponds in the middle of the most important headwaters in the southwest Alaska fishery habitat and directly between two national parks.

Shanghang county workers collecting water samples.  
Photograph © 2010 /CFP  
SAY NO TO THE PEBBLE MINE BY SIGNING THIS NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL (NRDC) PETITION!

Why would we compromise this extraordinary American food resource for foreign profiteering? Who will pay to clean the site after it closes? The copper acid and cyanide slurry lake left after the mine leaves will have to be 'perpetually impounded' by a dam larger then Three Rivers Gorge in China. As southwest and the Alaska Range are one of the most seismically active areas of the world and it also rains a lot, how long before this lake is breached or overflows becoming yet another news story like the Ting river? Don't let this happen to our American food resources, they grow more precious every day!

Photograph © 2010 Robert Glenn Ketchum

SAY NO TO THE PEBBLE MINE BY SIGNING THIS NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL (NRDC) PETITION!

#rgk