The Color of Sacrifice: Pebble Mine and Red Gold

Coming unexpectedly upon such a trove a man is overcome by greed; by the mad desire to possess it all, to load his pockets, his knapsack, his truck with these hard lustrous treasures and somehow transport them all from the wilderness to the shop, garage and backyard.  – Edward Abbey

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There are no highways here. No railroad tracks. No hiking trails. No wide concrete landing strips. It’s a place most of us will never go. A place I might never have seen. But this is the most beautiful place on earth. And it’s a place that could be sacrificed forever.

From the air, it appears a pristine wasteland. There are no signs of life. Glaciers and snowfields thawing in the August sun, dissolving into the deep, violent rapids of ceaseless rivers. The jagged banks lined with the green shoots of summer, but no hordes of fishermen. The melted, mossy mush of beaver ponds, but no dams. The stern, white faces of craggy buttes, but no ski tourers or snow machines. Shadowy ravines and humplike hills, but no mountain bikers.

The place is the Bristol Bay region of Alaska, about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage and 70 miles from tidewater at Cook Inlet. And there is life here – this place is the foremost wildlife area in all of Alaska; the source of the most productive commercial and sport salmon fisheries on the planet; home to more than 120,000 caribou and tribes of moose and bear; and not least, the hut-filled habitats of Iliamna, Nondalton, and Newhalen – small villages of indigenous, subsistence peoples who’ve been in the region for thousands of years, building a culture and a lifestyle many would consider third rate and third world.

And in this place sits a great fortune – a treasure trove tucked in the tundra, resting as calmly as the grizzly bear and caribou herds that graze in its footsteps. The treasure, a vast depository of gold and copper, lies at the headwaters of the Mulchatna/Nushagak River and the Newhalen/Kvichak River – two of the most famous salmon producing river drainages on the planet, both of which feed into Bristol Bay, where an estimated 50 million salmon come to spawn each year. Experts say the metals could be worth up to half a trillion dollars.

A proposed open pit mine of almost mythical size – to be called “Pebble Mine” – would extract the metals while altering the landscape irrevocably. The multi-billion-dollar industrial excavation would require: the construction of bridges and dozens of miles of roads and electric power lines across wild, undeveloped terrain; the erection of prodigious pipelines for fuel and rock slurries; the impoundment of large quantities of surface water; and the frenzied transport and use of toxic chemicals.

Pebble Mine would be one of the largest mines ever built. Its open pit would carve 2700 feet into the earth’s crust. It would include the largest dam in the world, a structure larger than Three Gorges Dam in China – made not of concrete but of earth, in order to hold back the toxic waste created in the mining process. Each day, the resource-thirsty operation would soak up as much energy as the city of Anchorage.

The estimated seven billion tons of copper-laden, toxic-waste scrap-crap would have to be contained not for a month or a year but for perpetuity.* Controlling seven billion tons of anything is a shaky proposition in a region fraught with torrential rains, titanic gusts of wind, and winter temperatures swooning to 70 below. An active volcano spews its steam nearby. There’s also a fault line some 30 miles away, a geologic menace credited with several medium-sized earthquakes each year – and one capable of producing a catastrophic shock sure to crumble the constructs of men.

If a small portion of the seven billion tons of rock were not properly contained, if even traces of the toxic dust were to flow into the fish-filled streams, the red salmon – and by extension, all the wildlife in the area – would face extinction. Even copper concentration of 3 or 4 parts per billion in fresh water destroys a salmon’s ability to navigate and thus imperils its ability to spawn.

The impassioned, partisan hullabaloo over ANWR looks like child’s play in light of the proposed Pebble Mine, which is shaping up to be ground zero for the most important environmental, ecological, and political battle this nation has seen in years. In a New York Times feature, Bill Lardley wrote that the war is one “between economies and cultures, between copper and clean water, gold and wild salmon.”

Proponents claim the mine would be an economic godsend to the area. The multinational mining conglomerates, Northern Dynasty Minerals and Anglo American, say they will hire the rural peoples who have yet to enjoy the industrial innovations of the modern era. Others foresee broken promises, as the mining companies import skilled laborers from abroad.

Tribes of Yupik Eskimos, Aleuts, and Athabascan Indians are split. The business bigwigs boast of $70,000 per year salaries – the alluring promise of a better life and nicer things, the fruits of capitalism to which the salmon-smoking simpletons have never been privy. Supporters note that mining yields $200 million a year in state tax revenue; newly swollen government coffers could pave asphalt roads and concrete runways, building better schools and post offices and playgrounds. Copper, credit cards, and crew cuts. Bullion, Jeeps, and Jim Beam benders. The Good Life.

Others say that the real gold shines red, and it’s found in the salmon.** The Alaskan red salmon is a lavish renewable resource, the lifeline of rural Alaska and the darling of the state’s $300 million per year fishing industry. Precious metals are a finite discovery and yield finite riches. The salmon is forever. And so far it has been – from the time their ancient ancestors crossed the Bering Strait up until now, red salmon have been the benevolent beings by which the natives have survived.

The gold and copper lies dormant, waiting to be mined and processed and carted off in diesel trucks…or left alone. The mining process, opponents say, would likely destroy the infinite wealth restored each year by the silent churning of the cogs in the engine of the eternal ecosystem.

At its root, the conflict over Pebble Mine is one of human nature. It’s a battle of now versus later; instant wealth versus delayed gratification; greed versus prudence. At issue is man’s respect for the natural world by which he is sustained; man’s power to harness the pearls of the planet for his own needs and his own desires; and the treatment of the gift bestowed upon man and his transformation of it, for better or poorer, for the re-wrapping, and re-bestowment, of that gift upon the generations of men who will follow.

John T. Shively, head of the foreign consortium that’s pushing for Pebble Mine, may have said it best: “Perhaps it was God who put these two great resources right next to each other…just to see what people would do with them.” Maybe that’s right. It might be a biblical-scale challenge of character and conscience, a tug of war among men over a decision of sacrifice.

Religious doctrine is riddled with annals of sacrifice. Sacrifice, in its noblest manifestations, involves man giving up something he values – a possession or a pastime or a lifestyle or a resource – for something he deems greater. The sacrificial exchange: something ephemeral for something eternal; an object of desire for an object of necessity; the finite for the infinite; less for more.

Something valuable must be sacrificed. What color is the gold?

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*As one mine opponent put it: “Do you know how long perpetuity is?”

**This red-gold trope is borrowed from a film called Red Gold, which is awesome. Read about it here.