Pits in the Crown Jewels

Summitville gold mine, in the San Juan Mountains of south central Colorado. The company, Galactic Res-ources Limited, went bankrupt in 1992. Cyanide, heavy metals, and acid runoff from disturbed sulfide-bearing deposits of the sort that abound in Alaska's Ring of Fire caused a massive fish kill in Terrace Reservoir and sterilized 17 miles of the Alamosa River of aquatic life. Cleanup of this Superfund site will cost taxpayers a minimum of $235 million.

Grouse Creek gold and silver mine, central Idaho adjacent to the largest wilderness complex in the contiguous US. In 1993, still in construction phase, it caused a major landslide, burying 100 yards of critical habitat for federally listed chinook salmon, steelhead and bull trout. Less than a year later the tailing impoundment sprang a leak. Operator, Hecla Mining, was cited for 250 toxic pollution violations. The Forest Service was obliged to post signs along Jordan Creek: "Caution, do not drink this water." In 1999, with a toxic lagoon breach imminent, the Forest Service issued a "time critical removal action." The bond posted by Hecla was $7 million, which has left taxpayers with a cleanup cost of $53 million for this Superfund site.

Gilt Edge gold and silver mine, west central South Dakota, in drainages of municipal water supplies for the Black Hills. Operated from 1988 to 1996 by Brohm Mining, the mine poisoned Strawberry and Bear Butte creeks with cyanide, and acid runoff wiped out fish in Ruby Gulch Creek. The $6 million reclamation bond didn't even cover a year's worth of reclamation and treatment costs for this Superfund site.

Maybe the best perspective on the Pebble Mine proposal comes from the most radical, anti-environmental, pro-development conservatives in America. Consider, for example, the recent spleen-venting by David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, in The Hill, the newspaper for and about the US Congress: "The so-called environmental movement has proved itself hostile to increased energy use or production, regardless of its source. . . . Instead, they tell us, we should scale back, give up our SUV's, abandon the suburbs and accept restrictions on our lifestyle. . . . To accomplish this, the do-gooders who run the movement have built themselves a multibillion-dollar empire of advocacy groups that rely on fear to raise money."

With all the standard invective and clichés, Keene goes on to pummel the vile and ubiquitous enviros for opposing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And then he makes charges that, while also false, are utterly fascinating and revealing: "Meanwhile, they [the enviros] have largely ignored what could be a real threat to the Alaska they claim to be so dedicated to saving. The Alaska of our dreams may not be found on the mud flats that hide the oil we so desperately need, but it can be found in the Bristol Bay watershed, where streams flow into Lake Iliamna and provide the habitat in which some 40 percent of the state's Pacific salmon breed, where the world's largest moose and brown bears are to be found alongside streams harboring the largest and scrappiest trout on the continent. . . . The environmental lobby hasn't gotten involved because it senses there is more money to be raised attacking our addiction to oil and SUV's and the people who run the oil companies than by taking on an obscure Canadian mining operation that may actually be putting the Alaska of our dreams at risk."

Then there are the admonitions of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), one of the angriest and shrillest anti-environmentalists in Congress whose typical response to people questioning slap-dash development is to scream "Liar," and who, until now, never saw a mine he didn't like. Listen to Stevens, as quoted by Alaskan media: "If this was some essential commodity that we absolutely had to have to run our economy, it would be a different matter; and even then I would want to have a lot better attention being paid to the environmental process. But this one, I just don't like it. . . . We really don't know what's happening with the reproductive capability of those streams out there. . .

"I'm not going to change, and I hope people will listen to us. That resource is an enormous resource not just for the Native people but for the Bristol Bay run, and it ought not be tampered with by a gold mine. . . . If that makes me a turncoat from being an extreme developer, so be it. . . . They [Northern Dynasty] are hiring people from all over the place to criticize me, to fly back to Washington to talk to everybody about my opposition to this mine. . . . My old friends in the mining industry. . . are ready to put a red-hot poker to my throat."

Shortly before he died in 2005 Jay Hammond--former Alaska governor and scarcely a better friend to the environment than the current one--published this "clarification" in the Kodiak Daily Mirror: "I had said I could think of no place in Alaska where I'd less rather see the largest open pit mine in the world than at the headwaters of the Koktuli and Talarik Creek, two world-class fishing streams and wild salmon spawning areas. . . . There is a location where I'd even less wish to see such a mine: right in the middle of our living room floor at Lake Clark."

Job-starved as they are, loud opposition issues from more than 70 percent of local residents and, in the form of strongly worded resolutions, from most municipalities and native corporations and councils.

All this bile from all these unlikely sources leaves me energized and hopeful. Finally, Scott Brennan, of Alaskans for Responsible Mining, makes an especially salient point: "This is anything but a done deal. To go forward the project would require enormous subsidies as well as permission to convert salmon habitat to industrial-waste storage facilities. There's a tremendous opportunity for people who care about this part of the world to get involved. It's still early in the processes."