By Jessica Ostfeld
Red, white, and blue. Blue ocean. White body. Red blood.
Beluga whales are distinguished by their white bodies. When they are struck by ships, however, they bleed red into the ocean blue. This is already too common in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The inlet is home to an endangered group of beluga whales. Now they are endangered by a new threat: the proposed Pebble Mine.
Pebble Mine is a proposed massive open pit mine, situated between Cook Inlet and Bristol Bay, 200 miles southwest of Anchorage. The Canadian company Northern Dynasty Minerals has been trying to develop it for gold and copper for more than a decade. The US Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) has nearly completed the required Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) review process. Controversy, however, haunts the process.
Location of Pebble Mine, denoted by black star.
Many Alaskans are (rightfully) concerned about the mine’s potential impacts on their livelihoods. The mine would be situated at the headwaters of two rivers that feed into Bristol Bay, endangering an extraordinarily pristine and productive salmon fishery of importance to both commercial fishermen and Native Alaskans. Less discussed are the mine’s potential impacts on local beluga whales. To service the mine, a new port would be built at Cook Inlet, an area designated as critical habitat for Cook Inlet beluga whales. In 1979, the Cook Inlet belugas numbered 1,300. Today, only 279 remain.
Why is Pebble Mine such a big threat to the Cook Inlet beluga whales? The new Cook Inlet port, built to ship ore from the mine abroad, would greatly increase shipping traffic. Beluga whales use an extended repertoire of sounds to communicate and rely on echolocation to locate prey. Increased shipping traffic would increase sound pollution, interfering with the whales’ ability to communicate and hunt, and heighten the risks of fuel spills or vessel strikes. These new environmental stressors jeopardize the future of the Cook Inlet beluga whales.
The Army Corps’ draft of the final EIS, however, does not adequately evaluate the environmental impacts Pebble Mine poses to Cook Inlet belugas. The document only mentions beluga whales once in the context of indigenous subsistence hunting, blaming the Cook Inlet beluga’s decline on indigenous groups without sufficient evidence. It reads: “(indigenous) subsistence harvest of Cook Inlet beluga whales prior to 2000 led to population decline and severe limitation on the subsequent subsistence harvest.” Though groups and agencies, such as the Environmental Investigation Agency, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, have raised these and other environmental concerns to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, they have not been thoroughly considered in the EIS. The Fish and Wildlife Service even recommended that the Pebble Mine Project should be denied a permit due to environmental impacts.
In light of these and other environmental concerns as well as the major disruptions COVID-19 is causing, concerned organizations, such as the Bristol Bay Native Corp., the Bristol Bay Native Association, and Commercial Fishermen for Bristol Bay, are calling on the Army Corps of Engineers to extend the timeline for the environmental impact study and the deadline for cooperating agencies to provide comments. Without an extended timeline, environmental concerns, such as those regarding beluga whales, will have no chance of being incorporated into the Final EIS.
To help remedy this situation, please email Col. Phillip Borders of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at POA.ExecutiveOffice@usace.army.mil or tweet at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In your email or tweet, please ask that he and the agency extend the timeline for the Final EIS development for Pebble Mine, and for them to take this opportunity to more fully consider its impacts on the endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales. To strengthen your comment, consider including why the protection of beluga whales is so important to you. Maybe there is an interesting fact about them that stuck with you, a memory, or a story. Help the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers understand why belugas need to be more thoroughly considered in their environmental impact statement.