Bristol Bay: When the Salmon Run Is the Economy

Every summer, between thirty and sixty million sockeye salmon return to the rivers of Bristol Bay in Southwest Alaska. It is the largest wild sockeye run in the world, accounting for roughly half of the global supply. Commercial fishermen from across Alaska and the Pacific Northwest come to work it. For the Yupik and Alutiiq communities whose villages line the bay's rivers, the salmon is not a fishery in the commercial sense. It is the calendar, the diet, the economy, and the practice that holds communities together when everything else has frayed.

Bristol Bay produces approximately fourteen thousand fishing-related jobs and generates more than one and a half billion dollars in economic activity annually. It is also, for the past two decades, the site of one of the most sustained resource-development fights in American environmental history.

The Pebble Mine, a proposed copper and gold project, would be located at the headwaters of two of Bristol Bay's major salmon tributaries, the Kvichak and the Nushagak Rivers. The ore body is among the largest known copper and gold deposits in the world. The mining company has argued that the project can be engineered to coexist with the fishery. The state of Alaska, the Environmental Protection Agency, commercial fishing interests, and virtually every Alaska Native community in the region have lined up in opposition at various points over the past twenty years, on the grounds that no engineering can guarantee that a mine of this size, in this location, will not destroy the run.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a preemptive veto of the project under the Clean Water Act. A subsequent administration reversed that veto. A subsequent administration reinstated it. The mine has not been built. The salmon continue to run. The permit does not exist. The legal fight does.