The proposed Pebble Mine isn’t the only place where gold mining could damage a fishery. Since four dams on Oregon’s Rogue River were removed in recent years, gold-seekers with suction dredgers have moved in to sift through the gravel that had built up behind the dams for decades. Many of these gold-seekers are from out of state and have come to Oregon because California banned the practice last year….
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The Orvis Conservation Blog speaks to our impassioned belief that if we are to benefit from the use of our natural resources, we must be willing to act to preserved them, an ethos we practice by committing 5% of pre-tax profits to conservation.
Pebble Mine of the East?
For a few years now, fly fishermen have been committed to stopping construction of the Pebble Mine, which threatens the salmon runs—and the entire ecosystem—of Alaska’s Bristol Bay. Felt Soul Media’s film Red Gold has helped to spread the word about the potential damage that could result from an accident at such a huge mine. But even much smaller extractive practices can do irreparable harm to fish and wildlife. In recent years, oil companies have been devoting more and more resources to getting at the huge amount of natural gas stored in the Marcellus Shale formation, which lies beneath some of the more fragile brook-trout habitat in the East. A unique geological formation more that 400 million years old—stretching from Columbus, Ohio, to Albany, New York, and south into northeastern Tennessee—the Marcellus Shale doesn’t give up its natural gas easily,…
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