SEATTLE — It has always been a match made in peril: One of the biggest copper and gold mines in the world perched in the watershed above Bristol Bay, Alaska -- the last, best refuge for millions of Pacific wild salmon.
The proposed Pebble Mine would dwarf all the others operating in the Alaskan wilderness and generate up to 9 billion tons of ore, most of which would have to be sifted and disposed of near the ponds and streams that feed into Bristol Bay.
It also would generate hundreds of jobs in troubled southwestern Alaska, and as much as $300-billion worth of copper and gold.
In an attempt to head off the project before it gets too big to stop, a coalition of Alaska Native village corporations and others filed suit this week in Anchorage, charging that the state was violating its Constitution by allowing drilling and other exploration to proceed without full environmental review.
The mine would cover 15 square miles, with a 1,600-foot-deep open pit stretching across two square miles. Early development proposals have called for holding the hazardous tailing behind massive dams -- one 740 feet high, the other 450 feet high. The exact plans won't be known until 2010 or 2011, when Pebble Partnership submits its development permit applications to the state.
Conservationists worry that the millions of dollars spent on exploration while officials conduct public hearings and await the environmental impact statement will give the project political momentum that even Alaska's powerful fishing industry would find hard to fight.
The lawsuit invoked an article of the Alaska Constitution that requires hearings and analyses to determine whether state-owned natural resources are being managed for the common public good. Specifically, the suit argued that Alaska should conduct studies to determine whether exploration at the mine was affecting other users of public land, water, fish and wildlife.
"This kind of activity is being treated . . . as if there's some guy out there with a mule, a pick ax and a shovel turning over a little bit of rock and looking for a nugget. But this is in essence industrial-scale activity," Steve Cotton, executive director of the public interest law firm Trustees for Alaska, said at a news conference in Anchorage.
Representatives of Nunamta Aulukestai, a coalition of eight native village corporations that filed the lawsuit, said they already were seeing effects from the exploration. Fewer caribou linger in the area, they said in court papers, and waste from exploratory drilling has trickled into streams and ponds.
