The Pebble Prospect: Issues in Sustainability

As demand for the world’s natural resources continues to grow, exploration and mining activities are expanding into remote areas that are often critical habitat and provide vital services such as freshwater, climate regulation and bio-complexity. One proposed mine, the Pebble Prospect in the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska, boasts among the most significant discoveries of copper, molybdenum and gold in North America. The Pebble Partnership is promising it can bring prosperity to the region and lead the US on the path toward energy efficient "green" technologies all with no net loss to populations of the five Pacific salmon species that spawn in Bristol Bay’s freshwater tributaries. The salmon runs are considered to be among the world’s largest and support sustainable commercial and sport fisheries. Even though such minerals are essential for industry and society, there is much opposition for many cultural and environmental reasons. There are suggestions that a mine of this scale will directly transform the landscape altering ecosystem services, and in return, the important subsistence lifestyle of people in their region; requiring the region to ask about true risks and benefits of large scale resource extraction and how can one incorporate full cost accounting in to planning and policy.

A panel discussion and technical sessions held 22 September 2011 at the Arctic AAAS meeting in Dillingham, AK (a rural town and regional hub in Southwest Alaska) discussed many of the issues surrounding mining in Bristol Bay and fostered community interaction with the industry.  The debate helped to improve science literacy while addressed critical issues of sustainability including local to global topics from water quality to climate change.

One important outcome from the panel was the realization that the low human population, remote geography, and limited accessibility of the Bristol Bay region has allowed the region to retain many of the ecosystem services used for over  10,000 years.  Fisheries, account for nearly 75% of local jobs and subsistence lifestyle is seen by 90% of the residents as a resource use priority. Thus, the pristine nature of the region has value beyond mineral wealth. This sets the stage for investigations into the value of the region from many perspectives using many environmental and cultural as well as economic measures. Further, given the pace of global scale anthropogenic change, the region can be seen as a laboratory for the way nature responds to broad scale drivers.