NRDC staff attorney Taryn Kiekow and I were in Washington, D.C. this week for meetings at the White House, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of the Interior, and congressional offices. After a month of activism by NRDC members and activists asking President Obama to protect Bristol Bay from the Pebble Mine...

If you're the Pebble Limited Partnership ("PLP"), you have to be relieved to see 2012 fade into history.

According to PLP, 2012 was to be a year of gathering momentum for the Pebble Mine (or at least a year in which shareholders and investors would see that real progress...

Last month, Grover Norquist surprised a lot of people when he appeared to take up the cause of renewable energy, noting in a Politico column that copper is a necessary component of wind turbines. In his view, therefore, we need the proposed Pebble Mine, the massive open-pit copper and gold...

When a mining partnership, having already spent hundreds of millions of dollars to advance its proposed mine, hires a consultant to conduct an "independent scientific review," there is reason to be skeptical.

This is the situation in the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska, where the Pebble Limited Partnership...

The August 16, 2012 "Pebble Update" from the Pebble Partnership summarizes testimony they consider most persuasive in discrediting the U.S. EPA's Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment process. It's a pretty predictable but surprisingly weak effort given the ties of these "experts" to the Pebble project and the mining industry....

If the proposed Pebble Mine has a best friend, it is silence.

That's why the Pebble Limited Partnership -- the consortium of foreign mining giants behind the uniquely destructive mega-mine planned for the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska -- hates the Watershed Assessment prepared...

In May, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a draft scientific assessment of the potential impacts of large-scale mining -- like the proposed Pebble Mine -- in the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska. And the results are sobering: the mine would generate 10 billion tons of toxic...

The proposal to build one of the world's largest gold and copper mines at the head of the Bristol Bay watershed -- the massive Pebble Mine -- has generated a lot of press for the risks it would pose to the health of Alaska's incomparable wild salmon fishery and the...

You may have heard that, after 15 months of study, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week released in draft for public comment its Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment, characterizing the natural resources in the region and documenting the potential impacts on those resources of large-scale mining, like the...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took a major step forward today in its review of petitions to intervene in the intensifying battle over the proposed Pebble Mine in the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska. After 15 months of study, the agency released in draft form for public comment

Someone sent me a blog post this morning titled "Don't call me an environmentalist," arguing that "we need to look beyond the divisions and understand that most of us are on the same side, regardless of the labels we place on ourselves." Wouldn't it be great if that were all...

Last Thursday in London, in support of the communities of Bristol Bay opposed to the massive Pebble Mine, NRDC delivered another 400,000 opposition petitions to the management of Anglo American and Rio Tinto, the two mining giants backing the mine. Full page ads appeared in the

The two mining giants behind the proposed Pebble Mine -- Anglo American and Rio Tinto -- are holding their annual shareholder meetings this year on Thursday, April 19, in London. As in past years, we will be there to testify in support of the residents of the Bristol Bay region...

The battle against the massive Pebble Mine is intensifying.

Later this month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to release for public comment a draft assessment of the potential impacts of the Pebble Mine on streams, rivers, and other natural resources of the Bristol Bay region that feed...

The opposition continues to grow.

According to a poll released November 22nd of over 2,000 shareholders of the Bristol Bay Native Corporation -- the regional Native corporation and largest private landholder in southwest Alaska -- 81 percent of the company's shareholders now oppose the proposed Pebble Mine,...

October 17, 2011, the votes were counted in Bristol Bay, and, in a historic result against enormous odds, the Save Our Salmon initiative has prevailed.

In the Lake and Peninsula Borough, where the massive Pebble Mine is proposed to be sited by a consortium of foreign mining companies,...

Governor Jerry Brown's veto of SB 833, just minutes before the midnight deadline Sunday night, is inexplicable in rational terms.

The bill, sponsored by Senator Juan Vargas from San Diego, would have prohibited siting of a garbage dump on the banks of the San Luis...

In Vernon, the state's first large-scale commercial toxic waste incinerator spews deadly dioxins and furans near schools, churches, and the residential communities of East Los Angeles. In Richmond, a commercial center is constructed on the Breuner Marsh, filling wetlands and severing the San Francisco Bay Trail. In Santa Monica, Occidental...

Tuesday October 4, 2011 -- was a big day in southwest Alaska. It marked the conclusion of voting on the Save Our Salmon ("SOS") initiative being considered by the residents of the Lake and Peninsula Borough, where the massive Pebble Mine is proposed to be built. If approved,...

Oil is at the center of our daily lives; it fuels our cars, powers our airplanes and is embedded in the plastics and other products we use day in and out. Its excavation is the stuff of tall tales, with "gushers" and boomtowns shaping our imagination. But many residents probably...