Foreign Companies Threaten an American Paradise with 10 Billion Tons of Mining Waste.

Despite overwhelming local opposition, foreign mining giants Anglo American and Rio Tinto are pressing forward with plans to build a gargantuan, open-pit gold and copper mine above Alaska’s Bristol Bay — threatening the world’s greatest sockeye salmon runs and the very last 284 beluga whales of Cook Inlet.

This video, narrated by Robert Redford, tells the story:

Near my home in Utah, Rio Tinto’s massive Bingham Canyon Mine is one of the biggest man-made excavations on Earth and has rendered a large area of local groundwater too polluted for human consumption. Now, the Rio Tinto and Anglo American companies want to build an even bigger mine — the Pebble Mine — at the headwaters of our planet’s greatest wild salmon river systems. It’s an environmental tragedy waiting to happen. ~ Robert Redford, Conservationist and NRDC Board Member

Here’s what’s at stake:

The Pebble Mine would be gouged out of an American paradise filled with salmon, bears, moose, caribou, wolverines and whales that has sustained Native communities for thousands of years.

This gargantuan gold and copper operation would produce an estimated 10 billion tons of contaminated waste — 3,000 pounds for every person on Earth. All this in an active earthquake zone at the headwaters of the largest sockeye salmon runs in the world. The threat to Bristol Bay just below is undeniable.

[Source: NRDC Save Biogems]

Your Voice Counts!

Sign the NRDC Petition today and tell these two corporations not to build a mega-mine against the will of local citizens.

Click here to help NRDC run their ad in the NY Times.

Photos via NRDC Save Biogems.

* originally posted on I Count for myEARTH.