Every year, tens of millions of salmon return to the pristine shores of Alaska’s Bristol Bay. They linger in the bay’s cool, shallow waters before charging up nearby streams to spawn and create another generation of wild salmon. Their thrashing silver and red presence draws an abundance of life. Bears, wolves, seals and whales thrive on the salmon, but so do people. Bristol Bay’s wild salmon support a $480 million annual commercial fishery that employs 14,000 full and part-time workers. The salmon also sustain Native communities that have relied on subsistence fishing and hunting for thousands of years.
But now this wild place and its great salmon nursery are under threat from the proposed Pebble Mine, a giant gold and copper mine that would be carved out of the spectacular untamed wilderness above Bristol Bay.
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