The end of the road for Pebble Mine

Sarah Thiele stands in a black jacket, smiling, on the sun-soaked hillside where her home overlooks Lake Iliamna in Pedro Bay, Alaska. Fireweed blankets the land around her, tabulating the waning days of late summer with its spires of magenta buds that unfold incrementally from bottom to top. Her three grown daughters—a politico, a writer, and a commercial fisher, all home for the week—banter as they finish splitting birchwood for their smokehouse on the water’s edge.

Just beyond them, a school of salmon jockeys beneath the surface of the lake, awaiting some unknown moment to muscle up a nearby creek to spawn.

Thiele’s land—her family’s land and her community’s—is pristine. It’s pristine in the peaks of snow-capped mountains, in the narrow waterfalls, in the water so clear that one only needs to peer off the end of a dock to see fish swimming beneath the surface.

And Alaska Natives like Thiele, with support from WWF and other organizations, are trying to keep it that way.

This unspoiled landscape—and the entire Bristol Bay watershed, including the world’s largest wild sockeye salmon run—has for more than a decade contended with the looming threat of Pebble Mine, a proposed copper-gold-molybdenum mining project located in the headwaters of the Kvichak and Nushagak Rivers, two of the eight major rivers that feed Bristol Bay. Developers of the mine have exploited nearly every legal, governmental, and public relations avenue to keep the project alive. Their proposal suffered legal defeat only to crop up again like a prolific invasive plant at the whim of a friendly presidential administration.

More than 100 miles southwest of Pedro Bay in the small community of Naknek, fishers fill the Red Dog Inn, a local establishment featuring a painting of the namesake red canine holding an overflowing beer stein. Inside, the vibe is jovial. A woman leans over the weathered bar to clang a bell, signaling that a patron has purchased a round of drinks for the crowd. A band, packed tightly in a corner, plays at full volume, yet still competes with spirited chatter and laughter.

The celebratory atmosphere marks the culmination of the Bristol Bay commercial fishing season. And what a season: the sockeye salmon run numbered upward of 70 million and the harvest tallied more than 50 million—both measures shattering records.

The fishery underpins the economy in Bristol Bay, valued at over $2 billion and employing more than 15,000 people.

Earlier this year, the EPA cited its authority under the 1973 Clean Water Act to propose to ban the disposal of mining waste in the Bristol Bay watershed. More than 23,000 WWF supporters signed on to encourage the protection of the rivers, streams, and wetlands that support the salmon fishery and a subsistence-based way of life that has sustained Alaska Native communities for generations. A finalized proposal is expected by the end of the year.

A likely end to the mine, though, does not mean the end of WWF’s work in the region. Native communities in the watershed—many of which practice subsistence living—are preeminent stewards of the land with unmatched knowledge for conserving the area and wildlife. WWF aims to work alongside them to build long-term sustainable economies, including exploring new opportunities around salmon, increasing affordable housing, and encouraging young people to stay in the area.

“If we're going to work to remove the areas of the mining district, there has to be an alternative,” said Steve MacLean, managing director of WWF’s US Arctic Program, and an Alaska Native himself. “The best thing that we can do is work with those communities to find what that alternative is.”

And while the EPA’s proposal imperils Pebble Mine, the Native community of Pedro Bay made an equally impactful decision to stop the project, borne of thousands of years of culture tied inextricably to the land.

Chrisdene Cloud honors the practical and cultural importance of carrying on that tradition—and appreciates its weight. For her, it’s a way to not only learn subsistence living but to also pay homage to the people she and her family still remember and love. It is the most fulfilling thing she’s done in her life.

“My life's purpose, really, I think, is to be out here and to learn this and to save it for future generations so that this knowledge doesn't die,” Chrisdene Cloud says. “Because it will if people don't continue doing it and it's so important to our Alaska Native way of life.”

Shareholders and board members would need to vote: should they allow this road and quite literally pave the way for Pebble Mine, or should they protect their land, their livelihood, their culture?

As a board member, Beverly Cloud seriously considered the mining proposal. The village is remote and some who don’t live there full-time couldn’t afford to travel out there anymore. And working with the mine could bring money to the corporation and its shareholders. But when it came time to vote, a visual sprang to Cloud’s mind: the view from her office.

“I'd look out and look at this pristine landscape,” she says. “I’d literally look over there at the spot where they were going to put that road and imagine an industrial road. I said to myself, ‘no.’ I just couldn't do that. I couldn't live with myself if for some reason that were to happen.”

“It's a real estate transaction, basically, where the land ownership stays with the Pedro Bay Native Corporation, but there are no longer the development possibilities for it,” WWF’s MacLean says. “It is preserving the area and conserving it in a natural state.”

And it’s not simply the protection of ancestral lands; it’s safeguarding Native foods, Native culture, and Native stories. Coming to Pedro Bay year after year taps into the deeper truth of the place.

“For me, it's given me so much joy and connection to my culture, and more so than anything I've ever done,” Chrisdene Cloud says. “And just learning from my mom and knowing that she learned it from her grandmother and from other elders in our village, like Auntie Mary, and Hazel, and Uncle Walter, and all these people that we still remember and love. I don't know, it's really important.”

Chrisdene Cloud looks toward the kitchen. “Don't you think, Mom?”