The fight over the Pebble Mine project near Alaska’s Bristol Bay is back on. Leading the fight against the plans for one of the biggest gold and copper mines in the world is a alliance of local fisherman, conservationists, and the Natural Resources Cefense Council. Here’s what they are fighting to prevent.

The proposed Pebble Mine site would create a two-mile wide open pit mine, thousands of feet deep, directly next to Lake Iliamna, which feeds a 40,000-square mile watershed and Bristol Bay.

As much as 9.1 billion tons of toxic mining discharge would be produced and stored in constructed ponds, covering at least 10 square miles.

Three of the tallest dams in the world would be constructed to hold waste from the mine, including cyanide, sulfuric acid, arsenic, selenium, and other toxic substances.

Here’s what the alliance is seeking to protect.

Both the Kvichak and Nushagak rivers and the salmon industry they support could be affected by the proposed Pebble Mine operations. These two Bay tributaries host the world’s largest sockeye and king salmon runs.

Salmon is one of southwestern Alaska’s most valuable renewable resources, supporting one of only two freshwater harbor seal populations in the world, generating tens of thousands of jobs and over $300 million in revenue each year.

The salmon also support a vast ecosystem, feeding grizzly bears, eagles, wolves, beluga whales, and killer whales.

Bristol Bay is an ecosystem surrounded by tundra, crisscrossed by rivers, and dotted with national and state parks, wildlife refuges and the largest freshwater lake in Alaska.

There are not too many examples in human history of conservation and foresight winning out over short-term greed and destruction, especially when it comes to gold. In this case the stakes are pretty clear; a huge open-pit mine and potentially dams full of toxic waste versus one of the most pristine wildernesses left on the planet and the local economy that depends on the existence of that wilderness. Hope may be on the side of those opposed to the mine, but they better be ready to fight long and hard, because human history and greed are stacked against them.

This is as much a rebuke for a federal agency that didn’t follow its own rules as it is to the corporation involved.

In a ruling with national implications for public lands, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today overturned the federal government’s approval of a land exchange with mining giant Asarco, Inc.

In a 2-1 decision, the three-judge panel ruled that the federal Bureau of Land Management violated several federal laws in agreeing to trade public land with Asarco. The company first proposed acquiring the public land 15 years ago as part of a planned expansion of its Ray copper mine in Arizona.

Here’s some interesting wording.

The court faulted the BLM’s assumption that Asarco would carry out mining operations on the land in the same manner whether or not the land exchange occurred.

As a result of this assumption, the BLM’s final environmental impact statement and its Record of Decision on the land exchange contain no comparative analysis of the environmental consequences for the different alternatives proposed as the law requires.

It’s possible that someone inside BLM thought they were making an argument for the government to trust Asarco based on its record, but the judges more likely read the “in the same manner” argument as an excuse to ignore the regulations. And if Asarco is currently in any kind of violation, that argument breaks down to an assertion that wrongful behavior shouldn’t be regulated because the violator will go ahead and do it anyway. that’s not a position judges are likely to support.

The prospect of uranium mines near the Grand Canyon hasn’t ended, but the rush to open up public lands near the national park is at the very least being slowed down.

After carefully considering the issue of uranium mining near Grand Canyon National Park, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has decided to segregate nearly 1 million acres of federal lands in the Arizona Strip for two years while the Department evaluates whether to withdraw these lands from new mining claims for an additional 20 years.

“I am calling a two-year ‘Time-Out’ from all new mining claims in the Arizona Strip near the Grand Canyon because we have a responsibility to ensure we are developing our nation’s resources in a way that protects local communities, treasured landscapes, and our watersheds,” said Secretary Salazar. “Over the next two years, we will gather the best science and input from the public, members of Congress, tribes, and stakeholders, and we will thoughtfully evaluate whether these lands should be withdrawn from new mining claims for a longer period of time.”

The segregated lands include 633,547 acres managed by Interior’s Bureau of Land Management and 360,002 acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The Department of the Interior is the federal agency charged with segregating U.S. public lands for possible withdrawal. The lands are within portions of the Grand Canyon watershed next to Grand Canyon National Park in northern Arizona and contain significant environmental and cultural resources as well as substantial uranium deposits.

Wow, slow down, gather facts, and then use them to make a decision based on the best science and public opinion. That almost sounds like the way it’s supposed to work.

National forests and national parks seem to be on everyone’s minds today. First comes this dispatch from the NPCA regarding proposed mining operatons near Alaska’s Katmai and Lake Clark National Parks:

One million acres of prime wolf, bear, and salmon habitat adjacent to Lake Clark and Katmai National Parks could be opened to new federal mining claims with the stroke of a pen. Closed to mining since 1971, these wild Alaska lands are integral to Bristol Bay’s salmon-rich ecosystem that is anchored by these two grand national parks. A recommendation from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to lift this mineral closure and expand a modern day gold rush was issued in the last days of the Bush Administration and we need your help to send this bad idea back to the drawing board.

BLM recommended opening more lands to mining, but their faulty analysis failed to conduct sufficient scientific research on the impacts that these new mining claims would have on the region’s fish and wildlife. Plus, BLM’s decision ignored the overwhelming opposition of local residents and indigenous tribes! A new report issued by NPCA’s Center for State of the Parks clearly identifies this proposed mining district immediately adjacent to Lake Clark as the single biggest threat to one of America’s most pristine and wild national parks.

Next comes news that while the Obama Administration isn’t foollowing the Bush Administration’s lead as far as logging in the Pacific Northwest, it’s a different story in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

In a roadless area of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service has awarded the first timber sale under the new so-called Vilsack policy. Due to a series of lawsuits and conflicting court orders on the Roadless Rule, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced in May that he would personally review and approve timber sales in roadless areas across the nation.

The Orion North timber sale awarded Monday to Pacific Log and Lumber of Ketchikan will produce some 3.8 million board feet of timber from 381 acres in Thorne Arm on Revillagigedo Island near Ketchikan.

Roughly two miles of roads will be constructed to facilitate the harvest of timber for the sale, which is adjacent to Misty Fjords National Monument.

If the Tongass is cut up for timber, it will mean the end of the largest roadless forest left in North America. Alaskan timber interests may be happy about it, but for everyone else it’s the end of an era.

For over a hundred years, mining operations have received preferential treatment as far as use of public lands, and also in their requirements for cleaning up the messes they leave behind. A couple of stories in the news today suggests that such preferential treatment is about to change.

First, the EPA is drawing up new regulations that will require mining operations to pay for the cost of cleaning up after themselves.

Second, the Obama Administration has decided to make reform of the General Mining Act of 1872, which established preferential treatment for mining on public lands, a priority for the Department of the Interior. It’s been tried before and failed, but it just could be that attitudes towards use of public lands and management of the outdoors have changed enough, even among the western legislatures who have traditionally blocked the move, to get legislation passed.

A bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives that would prohibit uranium mining on public lands near Grand Canyon National Park.

Congressman Raul Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, has reintroduced legislation prohibiting new uranium claims, exploration, and mining across one million acres of public lands watersheds surrounding Grand Canyon National Park.

The lands covered by the bill are the last remaining public lands not protected from new uranium development around the park, which extends for 277 miles along the Colorado River in Arizona and receives some five million visitors a year.

Rising uranium prices and speculation regarding a re-birth of the nuclear power industry are fueling desire to prospect for and mine uranium on the lands surrounding the Grand Canyon. There are plenty of reasons to think this is a bad idea, the most immediate of which is the potential for groundwater contamination and the near certainty of waste being dumped into the Colorado River.

A related note of interest is that Congressman Grijalva was one of the early names mentioned as a possible candidate for Secretary of the Interior. Janet Napolitano, the new Secretary of Homeland Security, is also on record as opposing uranium mining near the Grand Canyon. That’s a pretty good indication that Grijalva’s bill will have the support of the Obama Administration, and the effort to prevent the mining of uranium near the Grand Canyon, with all the potential for environmental damage which that entails, will be a success.

An Alaskan mining company is looking to dump the waste from its gold mine into a lake, and they want the Supreme Court to say its OK.

A lawyer representing an Alaska gold mine urged the Supreme Court on Monday to uphold the mine owner’s permit even though he acknowledged that the company’s plan to dump metal waste into a nearby lake would kill all aquatic life.

The company’s argument relies in part on redefining their toxic wastes as “fill”, At least one Supreme Court judge isn’t buying it.

Justice David Souter called that logic “Orwellian.” He said the mining company, Coeur Alaska Inc., and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which granted a permit for the mine, were “defining away” the problem by calling the wastewater discharge fill.

“When you are destroying the entire living (bodies) of this lake, it seems to me that it’s getting Orwellian to say there are rigorous environmental standards,” Souter said.

The case involves one mining company and one lake, but a ruking in favor of the company could have serious consequences for the whole country.

The high court’s decision in the case could set a precedent for how mining waste is disposed in the nation’s streams, rivers and lakes.

A ruling in favor of the mining company could allow such waste to be dumped into waterways throughout the United States, said Tom Waldo, a lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice.

“The whole reason Congress passed the Clean Water Act was to stop turning our lakes and rivers into industrial waste dumps,” Waldo said.

it could very well be that Bush appointees on the Supreme Court will swing the vote in favor of the company, just one more parting gift from an administration that has set the cause of outdoor conservation back a decade or more, and threatens to throw out a generation’s worth of effort to protect the environment.

The people of the Peruvian provinces of Huancabamba and Ayabaca have a problem. After they expressly voted against it, their government is giving the forest that they live by and the clean water it supplies away to a mining company for the building of an open pit copper mine.

The government of Peru has approved the request of British mining company Monterrico Metals to acquire a buffer zone around eight core mining concessions of the company’s Rio Blanco Project in the high mountains of northern Peru.

The additional area granted to Monterrico comprises 27 mining concessions totaling 21,794.69 hectares located in the provinces of Huancabamba and Ayabaca in the Department of Piura. The newly approved concessions more than quadruple the original amount of land open to mining by Monterrico.

The conflict of people versus corporations and governments doesn’t get much more clean cut than this. Votes were held, the people said no, and the government and corporation decide to go ahead anyway. The stakes are high. Exploitation of one of the world’s largest remaining sources of copper, or preservation of the environment that sustains the local population. There’s lots of money involved, and that’s motivation enough for some to ignore the law.

That doesn’t mean the people aren’t fighting back.

But the citizens of Ayabaca and Huancabamba are outraged by the government’s approval and are planning to do what they can to pressure the government to cancel its decision.

The Collective in Defense of the Environment of Ayabaca, CODEMA, has called a strategy meeting of the directors of rural communities, local governments, environmental nonprofit organizations, workers’ guilds and the general public for Saturday in Ayabaca.

They have some legal standing of their own to fall back on.

Many local citizens believe that with Decree 024-2008-DE President Garcia has given away their community territory against the popular will. A public referendum on September 16, 2007 resulted in an overwhelming rejection of the mining project.

Ecologist Craig Downer, an American who has spent decades studying the ecology of the Piura area, said Decree 024 is in direct conflict with a decision of the Peruvian Congress’ Agrarian Committee in December to declare the cloud forests and paramos remaining in this area of the Piuran Cordillera “of special interest” to the nation.

So the conflict in Peru is pretty clear. It’s the locals and their desire tom protect the environment they depend on to feed and support themselves, or turn it over to a mining company which stands to make a lot of money in the process. With dwindling resources, oil isn’t the only thing we’re going to be running short on, and rising demand, the pressure on governments to allow exploitation and ignore environmental concerns and the wishes of the people is only going to increase. It’s an issue in peru right now, but one that people all over the world are going to be facing in the not so distant future.

They’re going to do it. The Bush Administration is rewriting the rules in order to make it easier for coal mining companies to knock the top off one mountain and dump the leftovers in the valleys and streams below.

The Interior Department is poised to issue a final rule that will make it easier for mountaintop mining companies to dump their waste near rivers and streams, the agency announced Friday.

The environmental impact statement released Friday afternoon by Interior’s Office of Surface Mining overhauls a 1983 regulation protecting water quality that has been regularly flouted by mining companies. It marks the next-to-last step in a 4 1/2-year battle over how companies should dispose of the rubble and slurry created when they blow the tops off of mountains to get to the coal buried below.

The revised rule will take effect after a 30-day review by the Environmental Protection Agency, making it one of the last significant changes to environmental regulations by the Bush administration.

For a quarter of a century, the government has prohibited mining operators from dumping “valley fills,” massive piles of debris created by mountaintop removal, within 100 feet of any intermittent or permanent stream if the material harms the stream’s water quality or reduces its flow.

Mining companies are already famous for ignoring the law the way it is. Give them an out only requiring them to “show why avoidance is not possible” when it comes to dumping near streams and the Clean Water Act will become little more than a myth in the coal mining regions of the U.S.

President Bush’s propensity for trying to sneak rule changes through before a new President and Congress can take over is sort of cute when it comes to something like bicycles and parks, but the mountaintop removal rule protecting clean water in lakes and streams is a lot more serious matter, and a better example of the damage Bush can still do. This rule change is a give away to the coal mining companies that will come at the expense of the heath, welfare, and enjoyment of everyone who lives near a mountain being destroyed for coal.

The fight, however, goes on. There will undoubtedly be a lawsuit challenging the rule change, maybe it can be held off long enough for a new president and Congress to make a difference. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about mountaintop removal mining, or are interested in helping fight it, a good place to go is iLoveMountains.

Just over a year ago, the people of rural Peru voted overwhelmingly to reject proposals for open-pit mining in the Andes region. That decision has proved so popular that a year later they’re celebrating.

Campesinos and townsfolk from Ayabaca and outlying rural communities in the Piuran Cordillera are celebrating the first anniversary of their citizen referendum rejecting the open-pit mining projects proposed for this Andean region.

Since September 1, they have been participating in a series of conservation talks and festivities centered around enhancing public appreciation for the unique cloud forests and treeless paramos that remain here and their vital role in supplying water for humans and wildlife.

The vote wasn’t necessarily the final say in the matter, however. There’s still the matter of enforcing that decision, and the mining companies don’t give up easily.

Conservationists here, however, remain on guard to prevent the type of violent repression they have experienced from the mining companies and their well-heeled and aggressive supporters.

Today, more than 300 residents of Piura state are being investigated under charges of terrorism for exercising their rights as citizens to vocally oppose the mining projects that threaten diminishing wildlife populations, their water supply and their way of life.

Additionally, dozens of Piuran citizens are imprisoned for protesting the mining proposals and for insisting upon the enforcement of laws governing environmental protection and the upholding of community and individual rights, including those concerning property and the right of citizens to determine their own future.

The people of Peru are standing up in order to protect their environment and their way of life. In doing so, they are setting a standard for communities to follow all around the world.