Think Out Loud

Environmental win in Alaska affects Oregon fishermen

By Elizabeth Castillo (OPB)
Feb. 7, 2023 7:09 p.m.

Broadcast: Tuesday, Feb. 7

An important region for sockeye salmon will remain protected according to a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency.

An important region for sockeye salmon will remain protected according to a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Courtesy of Thomas Quinn / University of Washington, Environmental Protection Agency

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Bristol Bay in Alaska will remain protected under the Clean Water Act, according to a recent decision by the Environmental Protection Agency. The decision effectively blocks a proposal to build a gold and copper mine there. The region has a bountiful sockeye salmon fishery. Oregonians head to Bristol Bay during the summer to fish commercially and sell their catch to buyers in the Pacific Northwest. We hear more about what the decision means for Oregonians from commercial fishermen Perry Broderick and Reid Ten Kley.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced what could be the nail in the coffin for a long proposed mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Bristol Bay is the site of the largest sockeye fishery in the world. It’s also where, for the last 20 years or so, the company behind the Pebble Mine was hoping to mine gold and copper. For more on what this EPA ruling will mean, I’m joined now by two commercial fishermen who are based in Oregon but who have deep ties to Alaska. Perry Broderick is a second generation fisherman who’s fished in Bristol Bay for more than 20 years. He’s also communications director for Oceans Outcomes, which is a sustainable fisheries advocacy organization. Reid Ten Kley helps manage his family’s Iliamna Fishing Company. Welcome to Think Out Loud, to both of you.

Perry Broderick: Good to be here.

Reid Ten Kley: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: Perry Broderick, first. Can you describe Bristol Bay for those of us who’ve never seen it or never been there?

Broderick: Yeah, I’m happy to do as much. Bristol Bay is a mecca for salmon. It is one of the most amazing wild salmon ecosystems left on this planet. It’s expansive. It’s vast. It’s a watershed that is interconnected by boggs, tidal zones, streams, ponds, and great rivers that just teem with wildlife. It’s very remote. It’s essentially the heart of Alaska, in that there’s no roads really in or out of Bristol Bay and very few people, only about 7,000 people live in the region as a whole. Everything in the Bay circulates around salmon, from fishing industry to recreation, to native culture, to all of the wildlife that exists in the region.

Miller: Reid, what are your earliest memories of Bristol Bay?

Ten Kley: Well, I first visited Bristol Bay when I was nine months old, so I don’t have a lot of memories of that particular trip. But on every subsequent trip I’ve built my memories because it’s really the fabric of my family. My grandparents homesteaded on Lake Iliamna, which is the headwaters of Bristol Bay and near the proposed site of the Pebble Mine. And so I have a lot of experience growing up in that area - both visiting family because my family are from the villages there and my wife’s family are from the villages on one of the other river systems adjacent. And so it’s really just become who we are.

Miller: So Perry Broderick can you give us a sense for what Bristol Bay means for different kinds of salmon fishing, for commercial fishing or the recreational industry, which I guess includes just outfitters as well as native fisheries?

Broderick: Yeah, absolutely. So you could think about the fishery there in three overlapping concentric circles. The first being commercial fishing, which my family has been involved with for a long time, recreational fishing, lodges, anglers, the upriver fisheries, and then subsistence fisheries being that third component. And that’s largely local and native interests that harvest salmon for food, for culture, for art, which is used throughout the year. Each of these interests is allocated access to the resource in different ways. But I think what’s really important and really interesting in Bristol Bay, generally speaking, is that all of these interests collaborate and work very closely together which is, from my experience working fisheries around the world, pretty unique.

Miller: How do you explain that because as you noted, that’s not always the case?

Broderick: I think it’s difficult to explain. But I think one of the contributing factors certainly is just how healthy the resource is. And when I say resource, I mean the salmon runs. The returning salmon runs are staggering in size. We’re talking 50 to 60 million last year, almost 80 million salmon return to the Bay. And when there’s that much salmon, it generally seems easier for people and different interests to get along and work together because there’s enough to go around.

Miller: The exact opposite of, for example, the Columbia Basin, where scarcity created by all kinds of human actions has led to more conflict?

Broderick: Yeah, I think that’s a fair point. I mean Bristol Bay is kind of the antithesis to some of the fishery runs we have down here, salmon fishery runs that is, in that it’s a very remote region, completely untouched by things like mining and other human development. Therefore the runs are so substantial, still, that all of these interests can work together and benefit from what is a very, very healthy salmon run. And a lot of the reason that there was such a united opposition to Pebble is that it’s much easier to protect these places when they’re already healthy as opposed to try and regenerate them once they’ve been ruined.

Miller: Reid Ten Kley, can you give us a sense for what the proposed mine was actually going to be?

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Ten Kley: Sure, many, many years ago I remember some prospectors coming into the area when I was actually living in the area for a semester, going to school with my cousin in his village. And they were prospecting for gold from an airplane using some type of electromagnetic devices. And as a teenager, that seemed pretty cool. You imagined mountain men with their gold pan going up to these streams and then getting nuggets of gold out. But that vision for how the gold would be mined is very different from how this type of mining actually takes place. It’s called an open pit mine which is basically where they dig a giant hole in the ground and they have to process massive amounts of rock and crush it down into fine dust in order to use a chemical extraction process to get out these microscopic pieces of gold and there is a lot of gold in there. It’s just a very intensive way of mining it.

And so the outcome of it would be a hole, larger than any hole that’s made by man on earth. And all of the excess waste, which is most of what you’re pulling out of the ground, has been treated with these chemicals and needs to be kept separate from the environment for perpetuity. So you have to create these massive earthen dams and these earthen dams are expected to hold back this muddy sludge forever. And all of this is being done by a limited liability partnership, that is not going to have the desire, long term, to maintain those, what they call, tailings pools to a level that is, what we would consider, acceptable.

And we’ve seen that fail. Most recently, about six years ago in Canada, the same mining company who designed the tailings pools for this proposed mine had dams that failed and had a catastrophic pollution event coming down the river. So we could see why it has a problem there. And beyond just the catastrophic failure that we were all concerned about, is just the regular levels of pollution, what we would call the permitted pollution levels. So if the mine had been allowed to go through, they would be allowed to pollute certain levels. But all that pollution is going into a watershed that I grew up drinking unfiltered straight out of the water. And that is what is the breeding ground for our salmon. So these salmon spawn in this water, their babies grow up and then go out to the ocean and you have this quote unquote “acceptable levels of pollution” that are all filtering through those spawning beds. And that’s why for us as fishermen, we were really opposed to this type of a mine in this area. If it had been mountain men with gold pans, you know, I don’t think there would have been a big problem. But a huge open pit mine with chemical extraction, that was a problem.

Miller: Perry Broderick, can you give us a sense for what the organized opposition to this mine for two decades now, [has] looked like?

Broderick: I admittedly feel a little abashed to be in the limelight now because the opposition has been so significant on so many fronts and I could list the people that have been involved and be here all day. But I think what’s really important to note about this is, it has never been a partisan issue. 80% of the Bristol Bay region residents, the two thirds of which are Native, opposed this mine. Hundreds of businesses, Cabela’s, Trout Unlimited, to name a few, both Republican senators in Alaska, major mining companies have backed away from this project after initial feasibility studies proved that it would have such adverse impacts. This is really the wrong mine in the wrong place. And so over those past two decades, groups, individuals, organizations, and companies have been really trying to defeat this mine on a variety of fronts in a variety of ways. And this EPA ruling most recently is probably the most successful victory to date. But it’s not to say that there hasn’t been a lot of good work in other ways in the region as well.

Miller: Well, what went through your mind when you heard about the EPA’s determination last week?

Broderick: It felt really good. Goosebumps might be an exaggeration, but this means really really good things for the region, for Indigenous voices and needs, for the continuation of what I think is probably the greatest salmon fishery on the planet, and protection of just one of the wildest, greatest ecosystems that we still have.

Miller: Can you put this determination in context? I mean, the EPA didn’t say you cannot have this mine here. It was more specific, if I understand correctly. It was saying you can’t discharge the processed water in this particular place. So what does that mean in terms of the future of this proposal?

Broderick: Yeah. Good question. I’ll let Reid chime in here after me because I’m a fisherman, so, by nature, I’m adverse to dense legislation. But my understanding is that The Clean Water Act regulates and governs water pollution. The mine is so vast and, as Reid described, would need so much water from the surrounding watershed to mine that the EPA essentially vetoed the mine’s ability to use that water. And that water would have to be treated, put back into the watershed, contaminant free which, even if possible, it seems unreasonable, that it would be done consistently and indefinitely. So the EPA initiated this Clean Water Act ruling, which has only happened three times in the past 30 years and only 13 times in the EPA’s history. I think the important thing to take away here is that the EPA did its due diligence. They looked at the science, they listened to stakeholder voices on both sides of the table. And this ruling is 15 years in the making.

Miller: Reid, how concerned are you that with, say, a change in the presidential party in just two years, that this determination could be reversed?

Ten Kley: Well, we’ve seen over the past 16 years, some steps forward and some steps back. So, I’m a little bit apprehensive to dance on the coffin at this point until we get a little further down the road and we understand better the implications for the protections that we have won. I was just looking at my notes before our program today and realized it was just about 10 years ago to the week that I went with a lobbying group to Washington D. C. to first raise awareness with our senators and representatives about the importance of this Bristol Bay issue to their constituents here in Oregon and also Washington state. So at that time I thought, for sure, we were just about to seal the coffin. So it is going to take a little bit for it to settle in, for me personally, because I want to do a little more research and make sure that all the loopholes are closed for the possibility of this moving forward. And at the time we went to Washington, D. C. it was really about getting some closure to this. Because when you have a big industry like Bristol Bay Salmon Fishery or the sports fishing lodges that operate in Bristol Bay and you have a very large decision like this looming, it creates uncertainty in the industry. And when you have uncertainty, it’s hard to garner additional investment. So people are hesitant to invest further in the industry. So removing some of that right now, certainly has gone a long way to take that cloud away from people.

Miller: I just want to turn to broader regional questions here because you’ve both talked about what makes Bristol Bay so special ecologically and culturally and socially. But I’m curious about what you both see as the connections between Bristol Bay’s fishery or fisheries and Oregon or Washington. What are the connections?

Broderick: I would say there’s a lot of connections, parallels in development interests and in conservation interests. But from a practical standpoint, thousands of people from Oregon and Washington go up to Bristol Bay each summer to work in the fishery. That includes me and my whole family and my friends that we hire. Related, you buy sockeye salmon here in Oregon at New Seasons, at Costco and more likely than not, it came from Bristol Bay. So, it seems like it’s a long way away, but almost on a daily basis we’re interacting with the Bay in some way if you’re involved at all with fisheries or seafood.

Miller: And Reid, what do you see as the connections between Bristol Bay, Alaska and the southern part of the Northwest?

Ten Kley: Sure, yeah, I would echo what Perry said. I just was running some numbers here and it looks like, in the 16 years that we’ve been personally fighting this mine, our family has served about 1.9 million sockeye salmon meals to the members of our community supported fishery here in the Portland metro area. So that’s 1.9 million meals served. And that’s a lot of good quality protein that people are getting in their diet, from a sustainable resource, at what we believe is a reasonable price. So it has a lot of implications beyond just our buying club. Like Perry was saying, when you go to Costco these days, you go to New Seasons, Whole Foods, Fred Myers, almost any time you see sockeye salmon in those local retailers, it’s coming from Bristol Bay, Alaska.

Miller: Reid Ten Kley and Perry Broderick, thanks very much.

Ten Kley / Broderick: Thank you.

Miller: Reid Ten Kley is a commercial fisherman with the Iliamna Fishing Company. Perry Broderick is a second generation commercial fisherman who has fished in Bristol Bay in the summers for more than 20 years now.

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