Biden is protecting the land where the fat bears thrive

Welcome to Fat Bear Week 2021! Katmai National Park and Preserve’s brown bears spent the summer gorging on 4,500-calorie salmon, and they’ve transformed into rotund giants, some over 1,000 pounds. The Alaskan park is holding its annual playoff-like competition for the fattest of the fat bears (you can vote online between Sept. 29 through Oct. 5). Mashable will be following all the ursine activity.

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Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed — which yields the largest runs of sockeye salmon on Earth — is a wild, thriving ecosystem firing on all cylinders.

The result? Extremely fat, successful bears, including those in Katmai National Park and Preserve.

Yet, the purity and natural riches of this wild region were mired in doubt during the Trump administration. A Canadian mining company, Northern Dynasty, sought to build a copper and gold mining district in Bristol Bay — replete with roads, power stations, a 188-mile gas pipeline, wastewater treatment plants, a new port, along with a mine that could be some 2,000 feet deep. Crucially, the Trump administration rejected the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency’s 2014 conclusion that such a project could result in “significant and unacceptable adverse effects” to the pristine region. Instead, the Trump administration breathed new life into the development by allowing a formal environmental review of the Pebble Mine to proceed.

A majority of Alaskans opposed the project, and the possibility of such a mine appalled many ecologists, biologists, fishery experts, and legal experts. “It is absolutely preposterous,” Joel Reynolds, a senior attorney and the western director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization, told Mashable in early 2019. “How does helping this underfunded Canadian company make America great again?”

Ultimately, the mining project failed to receive a crucial permit in the expiring months of the Trump administration. But Bristol Bay will almost certainly see more mining proposals (including from Northern Dynasty) in the coming years, and beyond.

To conserve this ecologically rich watershed, the Biden administration announced in September its first plans to permanently protect this wild, bountiful realm. Ecologists think it’s a prudent move.

“Protecting Bristol Bay is the single most consequential land-use decision in North America that is on the table at this time,” said Carl Safina, an ecologist at Stony Brook University.

“The Bristol system and its rivers are truly a world treasure”

“The Bristol system and its rivers are truly a world treasure, something that should be able to continue to yield riches to people and to many other kinds of wildlife that rely on salmon,” Safina added. “It needs federal protection as an intact system that is working for people and for wildlife, especially the salmon.”

How to protect Bristol Bay

Some areas in Bristol Bay, like Katmai, have high levels of protection against development. But to protect the overall, expansive Bristol Bay region, the Biden administration’s EPA will use the Clean Water Act, a strong law that allows the agency to regulate pollutants discharged into U.S. waters. Yet using the law to protect Bristol Bay is not a quick undertaking. It’s a longer administrative process.

The process may take a year, explained Taryn Heimer, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who leads the organization’s Bristol Bay work. A spokesman for the EPA told Mashable the agency is “working expeditiously to protect the Bristol Bay watershed,” but it doesn’t currently have a specific timeframe.

So far, the EPA has taken the very first, though critical, step in the process. In short, in June a federal court found the Trump administration’s 2019 withdrawal of the 2014 Obama-era EPA’s proposed protections of Bristol Bay was not up to par. (The court said the Trump administration failed to sufficiently prove that the mine was unlikely to have severe impacts.) So the court kicked that Trump-era reversal back to another federal court for additional review, where on Sept. 9 the Biden-led EPA asked this court to basically trash Trump’s 2019 withdrawal. If granted by the court, the decision would reinstate the original 2014 Obama-era proposal.

Ultimately, the EPA is signaling that it wants to turn the unfinished “proposed determination” (it was stuck in limbo and not finalized due to lengthy lawsuits) from 2014 into a “final determination” that gives the watershed long-term protection. (As EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan recently stated: “The Bristol Bay Watershed is an Alaskan treasure that underscores the critical value of clean water in America.”)

“This is a decision that puts us back on track,” said Heimer. “Permanent protections are now possible.”

“We got derailed and now we’re back,” she added.

The EPA will likely seek public input about their proposal to protect Bristol Bay, among other administrative requirements. But, crucially, the agency isn’t starting from scratch. They can build on all the scientific work completed by the Obama administration in 2014, which found the Pebble Mine would be unacceptably destructive to the region’s water and wildlife. Originally, the Obama-era EPA’s proposal greatly restricted how much damage a mine could do to Bristol Bay. This time around, the agency could prohibit large-scale mining altogether, explained Heimer.

To give Bristol Bay robust, long-term protection, the EPA plans to employ an extremely powerful, but rarely used, part of the Clean Water Act, its “Section 404(c).” This gives the EPA a “veto authority” to “restrict, prohibit, deny, or withdraw” the use of a region to discharge pollutants into waters if it “will have unacceptable adverse effects on municipal water supplies, shellfish beds and fishery areas, wildlife, or recreational areas.” So even if another agency potentially gives someone a mining permit in Bristol Bay, the EPA would be able to say “nope.”

The EPA has only used its 404(c) authority 13 times in its over 50-year history. “It’s such a strong tool but they use it sparingly,” said Heimer.

A wild treasure

Biologists emphasize that even a mine in one portion of sprawling Bristol Bay can be enormously destructive to its flourishing salmon productivity. As Mashable previously reported:

Research shows the stability and productivity of Bristol Bay Alaskan rivers is dictated by the vitality of smaller components of the greater watershed. A small portion of the river system may be incredibly productive one year, supporting or stabilizing a river’s salmon population while other areas see weaker fish numbers.

“Different chunks, components, and patches tend to be more or less important in a given year,” Sean Brennan, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and lead author of the study, told Mashable in 2019. “Any given year, some really small area could be disproportionately important.”

Healthy runs of salmon, and consequently fat bears, rely on untrammeled watersheds, where the natural world can thrive. To the majority of Alaskan locals and scientists, digging up part of this largely pristine ecosystem is an unacceptable risk.

“At the end of the day, do we really want to risk what is truly one of mother nature’s wonders of the world for copper and gold?” Bristol Bay resident Norm Van Vactor told Mashable in 2019. “I don’t think we do.”

What’s more, once one mine goes in, this paves the way for more degradation to follow, ecologists warn. For example, the salmon fisheries in the Pacific Northwest — subject to damming, logging, overfishing, toxins, warming waters, and beyond — are badly now degraded. Many salmon species there are endangered.

“Salmon have been dying-out to the south,” noted the ecologist, Safina.

“We are not the only living things here, and we are not the only ones who matter.”

To ecologists like Safina, protecting Bristol Bay is fundamentally about respecting the natural world; a world where the fat bears can continue thriving.

“Our job is to respect the rest of creation and the living world, to hold it with reverence and treat it with restraint,” said Safina. “We are not the only living things here, and we are not the only ones who matter.”