RFK, Jr: Pebble Mine would "poison" Bristol Bay

An anti-Pebble flag, Dillingham, Alaska.The NRDC has been ramping up its attacks on the Pebble Mine over the past few weeks in an effort to raise the national profile of the fight to protect Bristol Bay. (See my Outside story on Bristol Bay and the Pebble Mine here.) And now they've really done it: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has co-authored, with Jean-Michel Cousteau and the NRDC's Joel Reynolds, an anti-Pebble piece on the Huffington Post. It's an advocacy piece, of course, intended to coax readers into signing the NRDC's anti-Pebble petition. As such, it's one-sided and its prose shades a bit purple and apocalyptic, but it does a good job of running through the mine's potentially devastating impact on Bristol Bay's ecosystem:

At Bristol Bay's headwaters, the Pebble Mine will spew a witch's brew of toxic waste -- deadly acids from mineralized rock, contaminated leacheate from tailings piles, and the toxic residues from processing chemicals. The mining moguls will detonate thousands of tons of explosives to open the earth, build roads and trample thousands of acres of wilderness and wetland beneath giant vehicles. Project construction will permanently alter the region's natural river drainage system, including de-watering an estimated 60 miles of spawning habitat in the world's largest intact sockeye salmon streams. An 86-mile road will link the mine to a new deepwater industrial port in Cook Inlet, increasing ship traffic and port pollution and further pressuring the Inlet's dwindling population of critically endangered beluga whales.

The Pebble debate is a fantastically complicated one, with profound implications for Alaska going forward. This take is a little simplistic, but it's clear that between this and the Obama administration's decision to protect the Bay from drilling (see below), the debate's national profile is on the rise.