February 17, 2014 — The Rhode Island fishing community is dealing with its own Pebble Mine, at least metaphorically. Huge tracts of ocean have been offered for lease by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). These options are being pursued by the likes of offshore energy and offshore mining.
Fishermen have come to realize that they are inextricably linked to the sum health of the ocean. Our very existence depends upon it.
Gone are the presumptuous times of our past, when people believed the world’s oceans were impervious to our every advance and forgiving of our every transgression.
When a single stock comes down with a cold, the fishing industry is arranged to contract pneumonia. We in the industry don’t reject the concept of accountability; we embrace it as a component of our survival. Healthy ecosystems support healthy economies. Should the system suffer, and stocks falter, we are the only quantifiable entity. As the ecosystem is compromised, so hardened is our journey, so lessened is the quality of our lives.
Several thousand miles from Point Judith, in Bristol Bay, Alaska, a battle is being waged that is destined for our backyard. Make no mistake about it: the Pebble Mine is our battle, too. It is a battle between David and Goliath, of big business versus small. It matches a globally driven, industrial lust for raw material against a community’s right to continue to enjoy a lifestyle based on resilient wild stocks. In short, it pits the needs of the global economy versus that of a local community.
Recently, fishermen came one step closer to protecting the wild Bristol Bay salmon fishery from one of the riskiest mining proposals in decades, the Pebble Mine. If constructed, this open pit copper and gold mine would be the largest in North America, located at the headwaters of two of the richest salmon-supporting river systems in the world, where it would put at risk a $15 billion salmon industry that supports 14,000 jobs.
Rhode Island has had its share of environmental disasters. Some were accidents and some were not. The North Cape oil spill killed millions of baby lobsters. Shell disease, suspected of being a function of mythyelprene, a pesticide that is used to combat mosquito larvae, may have done the rest. The lobster industry has never recovered.
Christopher Brown is president of the Rhode Island Commercial Fishermen’s Association.
Read the full opinion piece at the Providence Journal