An international mining group is planning North America’s largest copper and gold mine at headwaters of Bristol Bay, Alaska. Environmentalists are outraged, as this is a “vital ecosystem” for salmon and other species. The National Resource Defense Council explains:
The only way to extract the low-grade ore from the region would be to use a brutal and pollution-prone technique known as hard-rock mining, which includes powerful explosives and massive drilling equipment. At one of the proposed mines in Pebble, a remote, roadless area sandwiched between two national parks, spongy, lake-studded tundra would be scraped away, leaving a yawning two-mile-wide, 2,000-foot-deep pit in its place. This would be the largest open-pit mine in the world — wide enough to line up nine of the world’s longest cruise ships end to end and deep enough to swallow the Empire State Building. At a second mine, explosives would be used to create a series of underground cave-ins to extract ore.