Please help stop the Pebble Mine

[Blue_In_AK]

Canadian Company, Northern Dynasty, is proposing a gigantic mine in the Brisol Bay headwaters, with some of the highest dams in the world to hold back the toxic waste (this is earthquake country, remember). They have just announced a partnership with international company Anglo-American. This mine is potentially a far greater ecological disaster to Alaska than drilling in ANWR ever thought of being.

http://www.adn.com/money/industries/mining/story/9185871p-9102376c.html

'Billions' for mine, British company says

CONFLICT: Company's entry gives Pebble critics a big target with a worldwide track record.

By ELIZABETH BLUEMINK
[e-mail]

Published: August 2, 2007
Last Modified: August 2, 2007 at 04:37 AM

The debate over Alaska's controversial copper and gold Pebble prospect is surging to a new level with the world's third-largest mining company entering the project this week. Now there's money and know-how to push Pebble forward. London-based mining giant Anglo American said it has committed up to $1.425 billion to develop Pebble near Iliamna in Southwest Alaska. Building a huge mine in the remote area will likely cost "billions," according to Anglo. That doesn't daunt the company.

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Hackney said his Anchorage-based group's overall anti-Pebble message won't change: that Pebble can't be developed in the midst of the world's largest salmon fisheries without causing problems. The group, led by conservative Alaska businessmen, has been organizing and bankrolling much of the advertising and lobbying fight against Pebble for the past few years.

Since 2005, Pebble's opposition has grown to include some of the Native villages and tribal organizations in the Bristol Bay region; Alaskan and non-resident commercial, sport and subsistence fishermen; and environmentalists. The breadth of the opposition is "unlike things that some of these mining companies have encountered before," said Hackney, an Anchorage political consultant.

"We're making this national," he said. "We're making this international." Alaskans can expect an "ever-increasing tide" of national media coverage about Pebble that might create problems for the mining industry at large, he said.

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For much more information, go here. http://www.renewableresourcescoalition.org/pebble_mine_news.htm
I can't stress enough how potentially devastating this project could be to the salmon fisheries and to the subsistence lifestyle of the people of this area.