The Battle for Bristol Bay - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 264

La Porte shrugged and set a course back to the town of Iliamna, on Lake Iliamna. “It
was no big deal,” he recalled. “Phil just looked out the window. He didn't jump up and
down or say much of anything. I really didn't think any more about it.”
On Thanksgiving Day, not long after the flight, St. George and a crew returned to
the colored hillsides by Pebble Beach—the land is owned by the state and is between
Lake Clark and Katmai National Parks—where he staked out a mining claim on behalf
of Cominco Alaska Exploration (CAE), a Vancouver-based mineral company. In 1988,
St. George took a drill rig up to Pebble, sank a few holes, and hit more than one vein of
high-grade gold. he following year he sank more drill holes and found traces of cop-
per.
He had no way of knowing the enormity of the forces that he had set in motion be-
cause he had no way of knowing that this was one of the richest mineral deposits in the
world.
Bristol Bay is an austere, silvery-gray expanse of briny water that lies 180 miles southw-
est of Anchorage, between Cape Constantine to the north, and the Alaska Peninsula to
the south. It is fed by five major rivers and empties into the Bering Sea, south of the Arc-
tic Circle. The terrain is green, yellow, ocher, and often snow-streaked, with wide, flat
tundra, rolling hills, and dark, sharp-edged mountains. It is stunningly beautiful, home
to Native tribes that have lived off the land for three thousand years, and is endowed
with a rich trove of natural resources—including the last pristine salmon fishery in the
world, fifteen species of whale, and four migratory flyways that bring birds from Africa,
Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas, making it one of the most diverse avian habitats on
the planet.
As the human demand for minerals, food, and energy rises to new heights, Bristol
Bay has become the focal point of a resource war—pitting constituents for each resource
against each other and against those who oppose commercial development of the ecolo-
gically rich zone. At the heart of the controversy is water: how much of it could be used,
how it could be used, and what could end up in it.
By the time I arrived on the Alaska Peninsula in the summer of 2008, geologists
had revealed that the Pebble Deposit—which sits on state-owned land—holds the single
richest load of copper, gold, and molybdenum (used in alloys for armor-plating and air-
plane parts) ever discovered in the United States. As exploration of the site continues,
estimates of the resources in the deposit have steadily been revised upward. As of 2010,
Pebble was said to contain at least 80.6 billion pounds of copper , 107.4 million ounces of
gold, and 5.6 billion pounds of molybdenum, in addition to “commercially significant”
amounts of silver, rhenium, and palladium. These minerals are estimated to be worth
some $250 billion to $500 billion, and perhaps more.