Save Bristol Bay

Posted

We love our salmon any way we can get it.
Wild caught, of course. Broiled, grilled, smoked. Much of the salmon on our tables comes from Bristol Bay, Alaska. Thousands of fishers, cannery workers, and processors hailing from around the Salish Sea, including Port Townsend, trek every summer to Bristol Bay to ply the cold waters and ready salmon for market. Bristol Bay is home to the largest wild run of sockeye salmon in the world, a robust and sustainable fishery that creates 14,000 jobs and generates $1.5 billion a year. Indigenous Alaskan villages continue to subsist on salmon, as they have for thousands of years.
But Bristol Bay is in jeopardy. A Canadian corporation, Northern Dynasty Minerals, has proposed the construction of Pebble Mine, a copper and gold mine in a remote, hilly, water-saturated, earthquake-prone area in the headwaters of the Bristol Bay watershed. The Trump administration is poised to greenlight construction. Pebble Mine will generate vast amounts of waste ore and billions of gallons of contaminated processing water that they intend to contain behind pit-quarried rock dams, and monitor and treat for toxicity—forever. What if a dam fails? A water treatment plant breaks down? All of Bristol Bay lies downhill from Pebble. Forever is a long, long time. The risks are enormous, the threat to Bristol Bay is simply too high.
Join us to learn more about Bristol Bay and Pebble Mine.
The Last Salmon: Short Films and Discussion will be held at the QUUF, 2333 San Juan Ave., on Monday Nov. 11 at 6:30 p.m. Free admission.
Fishing is a livelihood—and a way of life. The salmon have fed us for millennia. We want to save what we love.

Kathryn Hunt and
George Esveldt
Port Townsend