In the era of being "green," it is often difficult to find a balance between reality and doing the right thing.
\Should you carpool? Should you sacrifice safety to get a fuel-efficient car? Should you go so far as to give up driving?
For someone who is environmentally conscious, every day can be a struggle, and within the issue for which they are passionate, they must find their own niche and their own way to make a difference.
One of the issues where it is completely possible to make a difference is the wild Alaskan salmon fisheries. In the past, the major concern of Alaskan salmon fisheries was the burgeoning farmed salmon industry. This new industry continues to threaten both wild salmon markets and, quite literally, the very existence of wild salmon, but today the Alaskan salmon fisheries face an even greater threat: A large mining company called the Pebble Limited Partnership wants to open one of the world's largest open pit mines at the headwaters of the world's largest sockeye salmon return. The mine would be up to a mile deep and four miles across. Over the life of the mine, it might produce $350-$500 billion in gold and copper, but continually threaten and possibly destroy Alaska's sustainable commercial and sport fisheries, which produce nearly $400 million every year. Although the Pebble Limited Partnership promised that the mine would be absolutely foolproof, no open pit mine has ever been constructed without later causing major environmental issues.
One of my close friends lives in Butte, Mont., home of The Berkeley Pit, a former open pit copper mine. She says it is now a tourist attraction and remembers the media storm that surrounded the deaths of 342 snow geese that landed in The Pit after becoming lost in a winter storm.
Outside magazine cited a study by a branch of the Montana Department of Justice that had run tests on the geese to find the cause of death. It described "carcasses that loomed like a nightmare version of Mother Goose: feathers matted with sticky yellow residue, skin blistered with lesions, bodies ravaged with a grisly variety of internal injuries - corroded esophagi and tracheae, livers and kidneys bloated with presumably toxic levels of copper, manganese, zinc, and cadmium" (http://outside.away.com/outside/magazine/0996/9609fesn.html).
This gruesome tale is just a minor illustration of the damage an open pit mine could cause. The Pebble Mine would be four times as big and threaten the lives of 40 million spawning salmon as well as the entirety of a nearly untouched ecosystem and the livelihoods and traditional cultures of thousands of Alaskan fishermen.
Want to learn more and make a difference? I urge anyone who is interested to come to the free screening of "Red Gold," a documentary addressing this issue, on Feb. 10 at 7 p.m. in Cataldo. A panel discussion including Pebble Partnership CEO John Shively, Iliamna Development Corp.'s Lisa Reimers, and Norman Van Vactor, plant manager for Leader Creek Fisheries in Naknek, Alaska, will follow the film.
Sierra Golden is a senior at Gonzaga.
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