Think From The Perspective of our Grandchildren

This is an essay from Jim Gilbert, author, entrepreneur, sailor, surfer, fisherman... he says it clearly and better than I.

We waited until late morning, after the fog and mist had begun to lift, to enter a narrow, braided section of the King Salmon River. “It’s full of grizzly,” our fishing guide had explained. “The last thing we want to do is turn a corner in the fog and startle one!”

The water was so shallow it forced us out of our aluminum skiff. Banging on the sides as we went, we slowly pushed the boat downstream, staring at the hundreds of fresh bear tracks pressed deeply into the nearby sandy banks.

After a quarter of a mile, the stream became wider and straighter and the water grew smooth and still except for the swirls and splashes of thousands upon thousands of fish. Under the brightening mid-August Alaskan sky, the river turned crimson with sockeye salmon, their teeming, spawning bodies pressed together as far as we could see over the gently rolling gravel bars. “Welcome to the Red Sea,” our guide said reverently. “This is a sight few people see.”
My fly-fishing pal Jeff and I were in Alaska searching for trophy-sized wild trout that follow the salmon up the many rivers and creeks of the Bristol Bay drainage. We flew by float plane into a tiny, six-tent camp at the very edge of the tundra more than 100 miles from the nearest settlement. The drainage is a land of grizzly bears, caribou, moose and eagles living much as they have since the last ice age. It is a fragile place of short, intense summers and long, dark, numbing winters, where every living thing -- from the simplest lichens and insects of the tundra, to the largest carnivore in North America -- owes its existence to the salmon. Starting in early summer, successive runs of salmon – first chums, then kings, then sockeye and finally coho – make their way into every navigable creek and lake to lay their eggs and then die. All together, more 30-60 million fish return each year to spawn, making the Bristol Bay drainage one of the largest, most sustainable and best-managed fisheries in a world that is quickly running out of fish. More than 30 percent of the world’s salmon harvest comes from the waters of Bristol Bay, providing a livelihood for tens of thousands and a healthy, renewable source of food for millions of people around the world.

As we walked through the sockeye wonderland, casting our flies to the large trout darting in and out of the salmon redds, or nests, we passed hundreds of decaying carcasses, some more than three feet long, slowly depositing nutrients carried up from the far-off Bering Sea into the hungry, spongy soil of the tundra. It was odd to be in a place of so much life utterly dependent on so much death.

If there was wonder for us in the Red Sea, there was also sadness in the pall cast over this remote and fragile wilderness by the proposed Pebble Mine. Projected to be one of the world’s largest open-pit mines, Pebble Mine will be located in the fertile Bristol Bay drainage headwaters, which also contains some of the world’s largest gold and copper deposits. The project will build enormous dams across several salmon and trout streams to create vast settling lakes for the acidic mine run-off that, thanks to gravity, the forces of nature and the law of probability, will inevitably wreak havoc with spawning areas farther downstream. Roads will be cut through the pristine wilderness on the shores of Lake Iliamna, Alaska’s largest fresh water lake, which is now traversable only in winter when the frozen tundra permits travel by snowmobile or dogsled.

Walking past the seemingly endless schools of sockeye, following the same call to gather and multiply as their species has obeyed for more than 40 million years, I was struck by the thought that we all suffer from a blindness borne of our own self-interest, judging the acceptability of decline of a reef, river or forest based on the limitations of our own personal experiences and aspirations. Thus we are able to entertain the truly horrendous prospect of losing the world’s largest sustainable fishery as acceptable solely in terms of short-term economic benefits. By their own reports, Pebble Mine’s 3.75-square-mile open pit mine will be played out in 50-80 years. So the math is simple: a potential windfall of $150 billion versus the existing $400 million-a-year revenues from the existing resource. What doesn’t show up in this equation is that few, if any, of us will be around to clean up the 2.5 billion tons of toxic waste choking the bottoms of 1800-foot-deep lakes held in place by massive, 740-foot-tall earthquake-prone earthen dams. Managed properly, the salmon will provide food and jobs for hundreds of generations.
Every generation plays its own cost-benefit analysis at the expense of future generations, which enjoy none of the profit but get stuck with 100% of the negative consequences. This same mentality allows us to continue over-harvesting the sea, killing coral reefs, polluting our shores and filling wetlands. Our tendency to this sort of unenlightened self interest is perhaps our single most diminishing trait as a species and a perpetual challenge for those of us promoting the importance of sustainable marine ecosystems. I felt a moment of sadness in the Red Sea that, knowing what we know now, a project such as Pebble Mine would even be seriously entertained. I thought, if only we could see the world through the eyes of our great-grandchildren, what different decisions we would make.

While I feel blessed to have been able to see this part of the world, we don’t actually have to visit a place to know it’s worth saving. We humans are blessed with an extraordinary capacity to accumulate knowledge and experience to make sensible decisions. For instance, we know from history that all resources are ultimately finite. We know from business that we must calculate all the risks and benefits, both short- and long-term, to create accurate profit-and-loss projections. We also experience things with our heart that we have never seen with our eyes. If nothing else, just knowing that fragile wildernesses like the Nushagak and King Salmon Rivers still thrive in a world threatened by rapid global change and human development offers profound reassurance that we are heeding the lessons of the past and that we are, indeed, capable of sustaining the beautiful, bountiful paradise God has given us.