The Battle for Bristol Bay - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 269

controversial diamond company De Beers and with metal mines stretching from Zim-
babwe to Ireland to Nevada, has an environmental record that has been roundly criti-
cized. The joint venture was named the Pebble Limited Partnership.
PLP's first CEO, Bruce Jenkins , was a Canadian mining veteran with strong opinions
and a tin ear. When Native families asked how Pebble would affect them, Jenkins
replied, “We're committed to preserving your subsistence way of life. Does that mean
there will be no effects on your subsistence way of life? No, of course not. How could
you have an open pit tailings pond with zero effect on your subsistence way of life? The
real question is, what's the nature, the timing, and the magnitude of the effect?”
The locals were horrified by Jenkins's candor, and so were some of his colleagues. In
April 2008, Jenkins stepped down as CEO. His replacement, John Shively , was cut from
a very different bolt of cloth and came from outside the mineral industry. “He's really
bad news for us,” one Pebble opponent confided. “Shit, I actually likethe guy. He's a very
smart hire.”
For five years in the 1990s, Shively was commissioner of the Alaska Department
of Natural Resources (DNR), the agency responsible for permitting mines, oil and gas
exploration, agriculture, and parks on 80 million acres of state-owned land. In other
words, John Shively knew very well how Alaskan regulators evaluated projects such as
the Pebble mine.
One day in June 2008, I found myself at a small airport on the outskirts of Anchorage,
waiting for Shively, who had offered to fly me out to the Pebble site for a tour. (I am
leery of accepting favors from people I am writing about, but this was the only practical
way for me to see the mine site and spend time with PLP's CEO.) In the airport waiting
room were a Native girl dressed in pink and a young, buzz-cut guy holding a rifle case,
but nobody who looked like a corporate suit.
As I waited, a guy in a wrinkled brown shirt, rumpled blue jeans, and an old hat
wandered into the waiting room and looked around distractedly. He pulled a cell phone
from a leather case decorated with Native beads and mumbled into it, “Yeah, hey, this
is John Shively. I'm at the airport and I'm supposed to meet a writer. You heard from
him?” When Shively hung up, I introduced myself.
PLP's vaunted new CEO was not at all what I expected. Sot-spoken, with big eyes
that stared at the world with apparent curiosity, he'd occasionally flash a half grin. He
was friendly, low-key, and disarming. He'sColumbo,I thought. Disheveledintheway
that Peter Falk's seemingly absentminded detective was in the old TV series.
Shively came to Alaska in 1965, by way of the VISTA program (Volunteers in Service
to America), an antipoverty initiative championed by President John F. Kennedy. He
was posted to the town of Yakutat, where he befriended Byron Mallott, the young