News-Miner opinion: The Environmental Protection Agency's veto of the Pebble Mine proposal for using disposal land on Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska has caused an outcry. No one seems to be sitting on a fence.
In one corner sit investors, mine owners and some Alaska politicians, such as Gov. Mike Dunleavy. They want the federal government to stay out of the state’s long and just determination to use natural resources in a way that benefits Alaska residents monetarily. No question, Bristol Bay holds a Midas vault filled with copper, gold and molybdenum.
In the opposite corner sit fishing interests, wilderness advocates, Alaska natives and other Alaska politicians, such as Republican Sens. Murkowski and Dan Sullivan as well as Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat. They feel the depredation of large-scale mining threatens salmon habitat. A single catastrophic occurrence could mean the loss of a longstanding seafood industry critical for the Alaska economy.
Pro-mine and pro-salmon advocates have their valid points. The issue is at a standstill. Opposition to the Pebble Mine is as muscular as is the support of the mine by those who advocate dig and drill politics.
The lid on the Pebble Mine project began to close last week when Pacific Northwest’s EPA administration hauled the Clean Water Act out of mothballs and urged a veto. Out in Washington, Joe Biden’s administration welcomed that recommendation and sealed the mine’s doomed fate.
Our position is to state the health of a once robust salmon industry can have no price tag attached. When salmon fishing is destroyed, it is destroyed. We need only look at the destruction of the salmon population in Southcentral Alaska’s Susitna Drainage area after voracious invasive northern pike were illegally introduced 60 years ago. In all that time, the salmon population, despite great government expense, has come back as a mere trickle. Assurances by the Pebble Mine executives that mining can somehow protect the environment and salmon are weak when it is seen how mining ruined waterways in other states.
However, make no mistake, on another important issue we are clear and adamant and loud. This veto by a federal agency telling Alaska what to do is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Alaska wants and deserves self-rule. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner vehemently opposes any repeat intrusion into our state’s rights. The Pebble Mine controversy should have died down years ago. We can even sympathize with its owners and backers, but in the end, preserving the purity of the salmon population is the only right call.
If there is one thing our governor and legislators should agree upon, it is that the federal government’s overstepping smacks of unconscionable meddling. Our view is that our representatives should collectively express defiance of the EPA and the federal government’s incursion into state’s rights.
The EPA has shown itself to be a slick and oily group that acts like puppets in the hands of any current U.S. president.
We are lawfully requesting what we in Alaska were promised: the right to petition our federal government. EPA, consider yourself petitioned.
