The Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association (BBRSDA) has some important questions to ask you:
- Do you eat wild, sustainable seafood or sell it in your restaurant?
- Do you dream of going to Alaska and/or have you already been to the Last Frontier?
- Do you believe that wild salmon matter and are worth protecting for future generations?
If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, then we think you’re probably interested in taking a few minutes to help protect the millions of sockeye salmon that depend on Bristol Bay (along with more than 14,000 people’s jobs) from the threat of development. And not just any kind of development – the largest open-pit mine in North America, generating up to 10 billion tons of waste and threatening our nation’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.
On July 18th, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a draft set of restrictions designed to protect Bristol Bay’s salmon from the harmful impacts of large-scale mining (in particular the proposed Pebble Mine). They are accepting public comments between now and September 19th – you can use this easy method to send a public comment to the EPA. But don’t delay – they will only be taking public comments on the proposal until September 19.
The BBRSDA has a ton of useful information on their website along with an easy way to send comments to the EPA. We hope you’ll join us in the fight to protect this amazing natural resource.