How We Protect It Forever
Bristol Bay, Alaska,
is irreplaceable
We need legislative action that will permanently protect the entirety of the Bristol Bay watershed from large-scale mining.
The 2023 Clean Water Act veto by EPA put the brakes on Pebble Mine. While we work to codify EPA’s protections through the recently-introduced Bristol Bay Protection Act, durable legislative safeguards for all of Bristol Bay’s irreplaceable lands and waters are still urgently needed.
How We Got Here
For more than two decades, Bristol Bay was under threat from Pebble Mine. If built, the mine would have produced billions of tons of poisonous waste that would have permanently devastated the economy, ecology, and way of life of the region. But in January 2023, EPA answered the call of millions of Americans by finally issuing a rarely-used Section 404(c) Clean Water Act veto of the project.
The veto provides important protections for a portion of the Bristol Bay watershed by stopping Pebble Mine from operating in specific areas, as well as restricting future mining at the headwaters of Bristol Bay. But legal challenges from Pebble Mine and future large-scale mining projects wanting to develop outside of the area protected by the EPA veto still threaten the region.
We need our elected leaders to pass legislation that fully protects all of Bristol Bay and nothing less.