On behalf of my fellow Bristol Bay fishermen, past and present, I would like to issue a friendly challenge to the Pebble Limited Partnership, and specifically its Chief Executive Officer, John Shively. But first, let's review a few things that we know about the Bristol Bay watershed and the proposed Pebble Mine:

• The salmon runs of Bristol Bay have sustained residents of this region for approximately 9,000 years, or about 350 generations.

• The proposed mine will sit atop a seismically active saddle that separates two of the most productive salmon-spawning drainages on Earth, Alaska's Nushagak and Kvichak river systems.

• The mine as envisioned for build-out will produce up to 10 billion tons of tailings, which, when exposed to air and water, will produce sulfuric acid.

• The Pebble Limited Partnership suggests that their gigantic lakes of poison stew will be contained in perpetuity behind earthen dams taller than the Space Needle.

"In perpetuity" means forever, which presents a problem for Earth-based business planning, so in order to frame this in something other than cosmological time, let's give Pebble's bean-counters an undeserved break and tell them they only need to come up with enough money to contain the mine tailings for the next 9,000 years.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch>>