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Angling Publications - Index

Angling Publications - Fly Fish America - September 2007 Issue - Index

12
In June, we toured the mine site and fished the local rivers and lakes, and came away from
the experience committed to do everything in our power to stop this worst of all bad ideas.
A new Superfund site at the headwaters of Bristol Bay is the last
thing we need-a bazillion gallons of toxic waste just waiting to
wipe out the greatest wild salmon runs in Alaska, and the biggest
rainbow trout in the world.
In 1964 Anchorage, Alaska-only two hundred miles from the
Pebble site-was leveled by an earthquake that stands to this day as
the most powerful seismic event ever recorded in the United States.
Alaska is a hotbed of geothermal activity, with dozens of active volcanoes
and frequent earthquakes. In fact, if you read down the U.S.G.S.
list of the largest earthquakes in the United States, you'll count twelve
Alaskan earthquakes before you come to the San Francisco Earthquake
of 1906. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand what
happens when an earthen dam gets whacked by a major earthquake.
So that's the problem. What's the solution? Politics, of course.
At least 67 state and federal permits are required for the Pebble
project to go forward, and there's no question that the State of Alaska
could kill it by denying the necessary state permits. Murkowski the
Hun would have signed those permits in a heartbeat, but Alaska now
has a new governor, Sarah Palin. She has the multiple distinctions
of being the first woman governor of Alaska, the youngest governor
of Alaska, and the only governor in U. S. history to win the Miss
Wasilla beauty pageant (1984, and well deserved). None of which,
of course, amounts to a warm puddle of spit when it comes to where
she stands on the Pebble Mine project.
So where does she stand? Good question. Obviously a fast learner,
she's straddling the fence, waiting for the political winds to decide