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On Thursday, the Bureau of Land Management approved the controversial Ambler Road Project that will route a 211-mile private access road through Alaska's Gates of the Arctic National Preserve.
The proponent of the road is Ambler Metals LLC, a subsidiary of the Canadian company, Trilogy Metals, Inc. The company hired Interior Secretary David Bernhardt's former law firm, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck to lobby for the project. The road will provide access to copper and other mineral deposits. The company claims the shortest route for accessing and hauling the mined materials is through the national preserve.
Opponents of the road object to routing it through a national preserve and disturbing 4,500 acres in the process, as well as potential impacts to subsistence hunters and caribou migration routes. Erica Watson with the Northern Alaska Environmental Center said of the BLM's decision, “The impacts to the region’s water, food, and cultural sovereignty are unacceptable. Alaska’s wealth is in our lands, waters, and people, and we will not allow the state to trade that wealth for multinational companies’ profit.”
Trump administration expected to approve Alaska's proposed Pebble Mine today
The Trump administration is expected to conclude that a proposed gold and copper mine in Alaska will not cause environmental harm, reversing the decision made by the Obama administration that the proposed mine poses potentially irreversible environmental risks. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is expected to declare that the Pebble Mine “would not be expected to have a measurable effect on fish numbers” in the Bristol Bay watershed, which supports the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.
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Young people and people of color, especially, are leading a powerful and justice-driven environmental movement—a movement that looks like America. We need to pay attention to these voices of Black and Indigenous people and people of color, as well as younger generations that have the most at stake, to deliver lasting progress."
