Big Legal Win For Six Tribes In Donlin Mine Battle

As several conservation/environmental groups and local Native Alaskan tribal organizations have fought to block the controversial Donlin Mine in Southwest Alaska, mine opponents won a significant legal battle in court this week. Here’s the Alaska Beacon with details:

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason agreed with tribal government plaintiffs that argued the environmental study that led to federal permitting for the Donlin mine illegally omitted analysis of the impacts of a major tailings dam failure.

“I think it’s a major victory for the tribes and for the region,” said Hannah Foster, an attorney from the environmental organization Earthjustice, which is representing tribal governments fighting against the mine.

At issue was the environmental impact statement on which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers relied when it issued a key permit in 2018 for construction of the gold mine, which would be one of the biggest in the world.

The environmental impact statement should have fully analyzed the possibility of a breach in the 471-foot-tall dam planned to hold hundreds of millions of tons of tailings, which are the crushed pieces of rock leftover after minerals have been extracted.

One of the major concerns is for damage to Kuskokwim River salmon runs from potential mine breaches.

“As Tribal nations we have been calling on the Army Corps to put in place the protections that we know the majority of Yukon-Kuskokwim residents want, and to protect our ways of life by rejecting this ill-conceived, outdated mine proposal,” Anaan’arar Sophie Swope, Director of the Mother Kuskokwim Tribal Coalition said in a press release last year.  “The Army Corps environmental impact statement process lacked climate analysis, relied on an incomplete human health impacts study, did not take into account the now occurring fisheries collapse in the Kuskokwim River, and contained wholly inadequate Tribal consultation. Under the law, inadequate consultation alone should compel the Corps to conduct a new analysis.”