Mine would spoil untouched Alaska fishery

Lanny Carpenter and Gene Maltzeff are nearly neighbors in South Bay northeast of Olympia, but their bond is much stronger than that.

They are commercial salmon fishermen who both own permits to fish in Bristol Bay, Alaska, home to the largest remaining wild sockeye salmon fishery in the world.

In about two weeks, the two will join hundreds of other commercial fishermen who head north each year from the Pacific Northwest to join Alaskan fishermen in a fishery that is beyond compare in its abundance and size.

The forecasted Bristol Bay run for 2011 is 38.5 million fish, which is likely to translate into a harvest of 28.5 million fish well into late July.

Maltzeff, 60, has been fishing in southeast Alaska since 1977 on a permit that’s been handed down through three generations. Carpenter, 62 and a South Sound environmental activist who also drills wells for a living, is a relative newcomer to Bristol Bay, fishing there since 1992 and the owner of a permit since 2000.

“It’s not a job; it’s my life,” Maltzeff said. “When I’m not fishing, I’m either processing seafood or thinking about fish.” “I’ve always wanted to go up and fish in Alaska since I was a kid,” Carpenter said. “It’s a totally different world, a huge emotional roller coaster.”

In a good year, those few weeks on the water, where a productive set of the gill net can turn up 6,000 pounds of salmon, represent 50 percent of Carpenter’s annual income. In recent years, with the well-drilling business slowed by sluggish housing starts in South Sound, it’s more like 80 percent of his livelihood.

What makes Bristol Bay so special is the unspoiled habitat, including 40,000 square miles of wetlands, nine major rivers free of pollution, and the largest lake in Alaska, Lake Iliamna. The developed environment includes just a few remote villages and about 17 miles of paved road outside Naknek on the Alaska Peninsula that separates the Pacific Ocean from the Bering Sea.

The natural environment is an economic powerhouse with about 12,000 people earning a living from Bristol Bay fisheries and tourism, generating about $450 million a year, according to some estimates.

While Carpenter and Maltzeff are eager to get their 32-foot aluminum fishing boats – named Cascadia and Deluxer – in the water, they can’t help but think about a huge cloud hanging over Bristol Bay that has nothing to do with the notoriously cloudy, windy June weather.

There is a mining project of epic proportions proposed in the upper Bristol Bay watershed called Pebble Mine. A partnership between a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of Anglo American PLC and an affiliate of Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., a Canadian corporation, holds a mineral lease on some 153 square miles near the headwaters of two of the major rivers feeding Bristol Bay.

There’s reason to believe the land hides a mother lode of minerals including gold, copper and molybdenum, and smaller amounts of silver, palladium and rhenium valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.

To reach those riches, miners would dig an open pit mine up to two miles wide and 1,700 feet deep, making it the largest open pit mine in North America. The operation also calls for an underground mine of comparable scope.

The mine would generate some 10 billion tons of waste that would be stored behind a 700-foot-high dam in the headwaters of Bristol Bay.

The mine also would require pipelines, a power plant, transmission lines, roads and a deepwater port. An area that has been lightly touched by human hands for centuries would be transformed for minerals and thousands of mining and mining-related jobs.

The project has yet to move into the permit stage, but the mining conglomerate already has spent about $400 million preparing for that day. It’s a day Carpenter, Maltzeff and a considerable allegiance of project opponents including Robert Redford and Trout Unlimited hopes never arrives.

They and many others don’t think the salmon runs can survive this unparalleled threat of habitat loss and pollution.

“If they put that mine in there, the fishery will be gone,” Carpenter said. “It’s going to take a worldwide effort to stop it. We can’t let them destroy the last great fishery in Alaska.”

As a commercial fisherman most of his adult life, Maltzeff has watched fisheries in Puget Sound, the Columbia River and elsewhere succumb to habitat loss, pollution, hydroelectric dams and, yes, overharvest. Bristol Bay is living proof that pristine rivers and streams can support strong, sustainable fishing, he said.

“As fishermen, we’ve been chased to the end of the world,” he said. “Bristol Bay is one of the cleanest places left. It’s a powerful message of sustainability.”

John Dodge: 360-754-5444
jdodge@theolympian.com