Alaska's Clash Over Salmon and Gold Goes National
Mostly roadless, the Bristol Bay area doesn't look like a battlefield, yet it's become a Gettysburg of natural resource conflict.
Located some 250 miles (400 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, the 40,000-square-mile (104,000-square-kilometer) region is home to the largest population of wild salmon in the world. Every summer, 30 to 40 million adult sockeye salmon return to the bay, then swim upstream to complete an ancient cycle of renewal. And that's where two vastly different interests have clashed, because located in the upper reaches of the spawning grounds, a few miles north of Iliamna Lake (map), is a world-class ore deposit containing about 80 billion pounds (36 billion kilograms) of copper and 110 million ounces (3 million kilograms) of gold.
On one side of the conflict are two companies—Northern Dynasty Minerals, of British Columbia, and Anglo American, an
