The challenge
Bristol Bay is home to the greatest wild sockeye salmon fishery left on Earth. For thousands of years, it has fed the region’s Native Yup’ik, Dena’ina, and Alutiiq peoples. Today, it powers a $2.2 billion industry, supports 15,000 fishing jobs, and makes the bucket lists of thousands of tourists and anglers each year.
Despite the magnificence and productivity of the region, foreign mining interests long sought to construct a massive, open-pit gold and copper mine, known as the Pebble Mine, at Bristol Bay’s headwaters, which threatened to poison the watershed and destroy its communities and industries. The region’s diverse stakeholders—Alaska Natives, commercial and sport fishermen, among others—banded together to say, unequivocally, “Not here.”
A coalition was formed, led by the local Tribes, to oppose the threatening project. The coalition’s first goal: an EPA Clean Water Act veto to kill the project and eliminate the immediate threat. These protections were nearly completed under the Obama administration, but the Trump administration derailed the effort, posing a challenge to maintain momentum and placing extreme pressure to make headway at the turn of the next federal administration.
The impact
Our years of work developing multiple campaigns helped launch an uprising of grassroots and political pressure upon a process that led to the eventual defeat of the proposed Pebble Mine. By the end of the last EPA comment period, four million American comments had been filed against the disastrous proposal. The EPA finalized its Clean Water Act veto on January 31, 2023.
Communities around Bristol Bay and Alaska tearfully celebrated. For the first time in two decades, they’d be able to live and fish without the threat of Pebble Mine looming over their lives, the lives of their children, and their businesses.
In May 2023, local leaders were joined by President Biden in the Rose Garden at the White House to mark the momentous occasion and offer their remarks of gratitude. We can think of no greater culmination to a campaign that lasted decades, as Bristol Bay leaders who started this fight as teenagers in Bristol Bay villages, stood side-by-side celebrating with the President in our nation’s capital.
We won 17 national awards for the campaign, including Best in Show in the “Overall Public Affairs” category at both the 2021 and 2022 American Association of Political Consultants Pollie Awards.
