Proceed with caution on mining
Threats to watersheds: Elected officials must act to preserve dwindling salmon stocks
The return of the echoing song of the varied thrush is my annual reminder that it is time to start getting the boat ready for the spring return of king salmon here in southeast Alaska. In addition to contemplating what the lack of snowpack is going to mean for future runs of chinook, I’m engaging this ritual with even more anxiety about the more substantial threats posed by dozens of mines proposed, permitted, and in production in the Canadian headwaters of the Taku, Stikine, and Unuk Rivers. I took time off from de-mossing my skiff this weekend to write to urge my elected officials to do everything in their power to stop these mines on our shared Transboundary rivers.
You will have to forgive me if this seems alarmist, but for folks of my generation from the Pacific Northwest, caution seems prudent. Like a lot of kids from the Northwest of a certain age, I learned the virtue of patience sitting in the back of my grandparent’s boat. As we motored around the Straits of Juan de Fuca between Port Angeles, Washington and Victoria watching stout trolling rods bounce to the beat of Abe and Al Flashers, I patiently hoped they might bend to something more than the banana weight and provide a little excitement. My two boys will be learning the same lesson soon as we take to the waters near our home in Juneau in our little skiff, hoping to fill the freezer.
This year will be especially poignant for me, because when I was my older son’s age — he will turn eight this summer — my grandparents hung up their rods, sold their boat, and stopped fishing, a sad but necessary response to diminishing returns on their trolling efforts. As the stocks dwindled in the 1980s, the regulations got complicated, the fish too few, and my grandparents lost the heart to go. I lost the only anglers in my extended family.
Nobody can point to one single factor that led to the dramatic declines of salmon stocks in the Northwest; it is more a death by a thousand cuts than a single catastrophe. But experts all agree, fish need healthy water, intact habitat, and humans to pay attention to these simple needs.
At eight, all I knew was that we weren’t going fishing anymore. I managed to find the sport again in college; and for the last 20 years, fishing has been integral to my life outside — and for the last several years, my income as well, as I work as a fly fishing guide here in the summer. I’ve never made up for the lost time of my youth, however, and I always pursue salmon with a sense of gratitude and, above all, caution.
Worried the rug might be pulled from under my fishing again, I’ve spent most of my adult life doing my best to ensure we leave enough water and habitat for the fish, pushing back against threats to both. As we can see in the extraordinarily expensive efforts to restore runs, it is easier to preserve habitat and adopt a cautionary approach when we still have salmon returning to intact watersheds. The threats posed to salmon habitat by the Transboundary mines are serious, as we saw in the tailings disaster at the Mount Polley mine last year, but the mining industry doesn’t seem interested in changing their plans to deal with toxic tailings, even following the well documented destruction of substantial fish habitat and the strong recommendations by an expert review panel (see “No shift in tailings strategy since Mount Polley failure” Vancouver Sun, April 5, 2015).
To my ears, today’s assurances from the mining industry echo the assurances from the timber companies of my youth. Despite what they cavalierly predicted in the 1970s and 80s, everything isn’t fine for salmon in my home state of Washington. The lesson is simple: we should do everything to avoid making the same mistakes.
As permitting goes forward and mines rumble toward operation, the time to act is now. I’ll leave the diplomacy to the professionals, but I hope our elected officials on both sides of the border can convince industry to think not just of immediate profits, but of the future, too.
While there are remnant runs trickling in down south, salmon fuel a renewable billion-dollar-ayear industry here in Southeast Alaska, worth much more than the metals we rip from their habitat, forever damaging the only thing salmon can’t live without in the process.