Saying Goodbye to Bobby Andrew, Defender of Bristol Bay by Joel Reynolds

Saying Goodbye to Bobby Andrew, Defender of Bristol Bay
by Joel Reynolds, Western Director and Senior attorney, NRDC, Los Angeles

I didn't expect the Pebble Mine would outlast Bobby Andrew. He was a fighter who never seemed to get tired. Over 70 years old, and he was always willing to make the trip - whatever the trip, wherever it took him -- to talk, to testify, to tell the terrible story of the uniquely reckless scheme by international mining giants to poison the communities and wild salmon fisheries of Alaska's Bristol Bay with a gigantic copper and gold mine.

photograph © copyright, Natural Resources Defense Council 2015@NRDC @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd 

Pebble Mine 2014 Year in Review: "And Then There Were Lawyers . . . ."

Pebble Mine 2014 Year in Review: "And Then There Were Lawyers . . . ."
by Joel Reynolds
Western Director and Senior attorney, NRDC, Los Angeles
published in Huffington Post, Posted: 01/05/2015 1:58 pm EST

When someday the story of the Pebble Mine is told, 2014 may be best remembered as the year when all that remained of the once formidable Pebble Partnership was a bunch of lawyers for hire. By the end of 2014, all of the mining giants and their funding - Mitsubishi, Anglo American, and Rio Tinto - were gone, leaving only Northern Dynasty Minerals to keep the reckless vision of the Pebble Mine alive. The Partnership's new CEO is a lawyer from the Washington, D.C. law firm of Steptoe and Johnson, and mining activities have ground to a halt.

By the end of 2014, Pebble's public face had become lawsuits and lobbying against EPA, targeting its authority to do what Alaskans had petitioned it to do - i.e., to protect Alaska's wild salmon fishery. Three lawsuits had been filed against the agency, and legislation to constrain the agency's review of the Pebble project had been introduced in both houses of Congress.