SPECIAL ACTION ALERT!!
Road to Pebble Kicks Gravel at Hunters and
Fishers.
Kick it Back -- Join the Fish Fight!!
Here's how you can help STOP PEBBLE, if you act before November
30, 2005.
The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities
is proposing a 200-mile "Cook Inlet to Bristol Bay"
road, from Williamsport on the west side of Cook Inlet to
King Salmon. The purpose is to subsidize the Pebble Mine,
to the tune of $100 million.
That 200-mile road will start with a ferry from Homer, on
the road accessible Kenai Peninsula, to Williamsport, and
then a road to Pebble via Pile Bay, Pedro Bay, Iliamna, and
to the Pebble Mine. That road will serve the mine from the
coast, while the proposed Iliamna-Nondalton road will serve
the mine from the Iliamna Airport. Eventually, the road would
go to King Salmon.
The road triggers issues in the Kvichak River drainage related
to fish and wildlife habitat and fishing and hunting pressure.
Regarding habitat concerns, the Kvichak system produces more
sockeye salmon than any other in world and has about 150 related,
discrete populations exhibiting a variety of genetic characteristics
of run timing, spawning, size and other characteristics. Genetic
diversity is critical to the viability of a group of related
populations. Since the mid-1990's, these returns have been
at record lows, and the Alaska Board of Fisheries has designated
the Kvichak sockeye as a "stock of concern," meaning
that it will require a special management plan to limit commercial
harvest and restore the stock to acceptable levels. The most
productive streams in this diverse system are apparently those
that drain the eastern and northern drainages of Iliamna Lake.
That is exactly where the road would go. More than 200 peer
reviewed studies have documented the negative impacts roads
can have on salmon stocks.
In short, Pebble and its roads are the wrong things in the
wrong place at the wrong time, when the state and federal
managers and biologists are working out a plan to restore
the stocks.
With respect to increased pressure on hunting, Unit 17 has
already disallowed non-resident hunting for moose and
caribou within a 2 mile corridor on either side of all the
river drainages except for 75 special permits. If there is
ANY increased hunting pressure, the unit will become closed
to even resident hunters excepting only those with
a Tier II subsistence permit. If the road is approved, most
Alaskans will no longer be able to hunt moose and caribou
in the Bristol Bay area.
The negative impact will be tremendous on the existing subsistence,
sport and commercial uses of fish and game. For decades, Alaskans
have witnessed endless disputes between commercial, sport
and subsistence users over fish and game on the existing road
system. This road will expand those disputes to the Bristol
Bay drainages - all on account of subsidizing a mine. Those
impacts on existing users of fish and game, like the impacts
of Pebble itself on the fish and game habitat, must be addressed
in a comprehensive, programmatic environmental impact statement
under the federal National Environmental Policy Act. That
is the only way that the public and local, state, and federal
agencies get to tell the Department of Transportation what
to do with their road and its subsidy of Pebble.
So far, the Department has turned a deaf ear to such concerns.
It has declined to prepare a comprehensive environmental impact
statement. Instead, it has illegally "segmented"
the corridor into short, discrete, inter-connected segments,
such as the Iliamna-Nondalton project and the Williamsport-Pile
Bay project, to avoid complying a comprehensive impact statement.
Now, is your chance to help. By November 30, 2005,
the Federal Highway Administration in Juneau will decide whether
the state Department of Transportation is illegally segmenting
the Cook Inlet to Bristol Bay Corridor to avoid a comprehensive
environmental impact statement. Write or send an email to
the Federal Highway Administration and tell them this: "Stop
the projects on the Cook Inlet to Bristol Bay Corridor, including
to Pebble, until a comphrehensive environmental impact statement
is prepared. Give Alaskans, and all hunters and fishers, a
chance to speak their minds". Click
here to send your message to the Federal Highway Administration.
Please send your message, now. Thank you.
