small fish in a big tailing pond

Source Photos: Nina's Soul Food, Remsol

“The Keystone XL controversy may currently be consuming most of the U.S. government’s attention, but it’s not the only environmental crisis-in-the-making coming our way via Canada. A pro-development push north of the border is paving the way for large-scale mining projects located at key watersheds. Downstream in Alaska, commercial fishermen, conservation groups and others who fear for the mines’ potential to damage their homes and livelihoods can do nothing but watch. […]
     [The] KSM [Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell mine] is terrifying based on its size alone, but add it to the number of other large, open-pit mines being fast-tracked toward approval, and the risks multiply. In 2011, Premiere [British Columbia] Christy Clark, who trumpets mining as the province’s ‘comeback industry,’ pledged  to build eight new mines and expand nine others: right now, five projects in total are pending along the Taku, Stikine and Unuk watersheds, all of which are incredibly important, and delicate, salmon habitats.
     The same company behind the Mt. Polley disaster, Imperial Metals, has another major project pending at a main tributary to the Stikine River watershed, ‘one of the largest salmon producers in the Tongass National Forest.’ After Imperial Metals said it had no plans to slow down production in light of what happened at Mt. Polley, indigenous Canadians blockaded the mine in protest.
     'It feels like this big freight train that just continues to come' [Heather] Hardcastle [of Trout Unlimited] told Salon, 'and we’re doing our darndest to defend our rivers and way of life…we’re trying to scramble to keep up.'"
— Lindsay Abrams, Salon
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“Next spring, the sockeye eggs that are now being laid in spawning beds throughout the Fraser River system will hatch and the young fish – by the hundreds of millions – will migrate into lakes to rear.
     And that, at least in one lake, could be a disaster.
     Quesnel Lake, into which 24 million cubic metres of water and mine tailings flushed when the Mount Polley tailings dam burst, is one of the biggest and most important sockeye nurseries in the province [of British Columbia].
     No matter how hard Imperial Metals works to clean up the tailings that escaped, the heavy metals that swept down into Quesnel Lake are still there, settling out on the bottom, where they will slowly be taken up into the food chain.
     In the spring, vast schools of young sockeye – estimated to be up to 60 million in some years – emerge from tributaries, and flood down into Quesnel Lake. There, they spend a year before migrating down the Fraser to the Pacific, returning to spawn as four-year-olds.
     The year in the lake is a crucial period of growth in which the fish must become large enough to survive the rigours of the out-migration. No wonder then, that biologists and First Nations are worried not just about the immediate impact of the spill, but also about the long term.”
— Mark Hume, The Globe and Mail
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