"Carving the Heart Out" of a Watershed

Never mind that five major jewelers, including Tiffany’s, have promised to never use gold from Alaska’s proposed Pebble Mine because of its promised impact on Alaska fisheries. The hot debate among Alaskans has spurred an even more aggressive move by miners to push the U.S. government to allow hard-rock drilling on 700 more square miles nearby.
“What is clear is that the mine — wedged between Lake Clark and Katmai national parks — would entail a staggering scale of industrialization. If the full resource were developed, as much as 12 billion tons of earth would be excavated and milled to extract the tiny flecks of metal: about 82 million ounces of gold, 67 billion pounds of copper and 4 billion pounds of molybdenum.” Margot Roosevelt in The Los Angeles Times.