It’s pure hogwash and one that has been used to manipulate the ignorant and illiterate and to give them a sense of importance while the species of salmon continue to decline here and there throughout the state. I am embarrassed that so many of my people are so easily suckered into believing knowledge passed down is science.

So now it’s ‘Social Science’ to continue to confuse the ignorant and illiterate and ‘Social Scientists’ are running around collecting data that is nothing new from what we know and have known for years with every tribes own personal twist of course. Pure and dirty hogwash. Thousands of good American dollars wasted to prove what? Every group has their own stories and if they want to preserve their stories let them foot the bill and use the money instead to help nature survive so that the people can survive.

Thanks to all who praise my little essays, I try to afford a unique perspective.

I will answer a few people specifically.

#34 bubbles
I have to correct you, I am actually an exploration geologist, but it is of course necessary to have a fairly broad understanding of what is possible in terms of mine engineering to make reasonable decisions about whether or not a give prospect is capable of development. Your question is quite appropriate. Without being thoroughly familiar with the situation I cannot be very sure of any conclusion regarding either the Pebble or the Kensington mines, but it is apparent to me that their containment designs for tailings disposal are simply the cheapest possible solutions, and as such, fraught with risks. The risks are easy to gloss over and difficult to understand. In the simplest possible terms the companies involved are simply externalizing costs and thereby improving their profit.

Can Pebble be developed in a responsible way? In general I would have to answer probably yes. Pebble is a little bit a-typical because it has an open cast prospect and an underground prospect. If I were the CEG on the project I would propose that in the first phase of development, the open cast, the tails be dewatered and emplaced. In the second phase of the project the tails would ideally be recycled into the underground workings as structural backfill to minimize the various problems of underground mines. It is possible that the reduction in grain size related to the processing of ore would require that some of the emplaced tails from open cast operations would be required to accomplish complete backfill. This is all highly speculative because the particulars about the deposit are not available on the net.

The Kensington mine is a different issue, I believe there they won a lawsuit that allows them to use an existing lake as a tailings impoundment. This is utter folly because by definition a lake communicates with the ground water and the ground water communicates with every stream in the watershed. It is too complex to explain why it is a bad idea to put fresh mine tailings into an existing lake but I might be able to answer that specific question in another post.

#38 NEO
I think I have answered your general question above but I want to say a little more, not to be argumentative but to try to inform. Mining is a dirty, nasty, dangerous, expensive and in some ways corrupt business just like every other business. People may object to that assessment but I can’t come to any other conclusion as long as the sole motive for any business is profit when we all know that there is no such thing, in fact the opposite is true. I’ll resort to a layman’s version of thermodynamics to explain. The first law is you can’t win. The second law is you can’t break even. I am a geologist, it is my job to find resources that can be exploited. Usually the criteria for exploitation are purely economic and most discoveries don’t cut the mustard, but they might in two or three decades. It would be fine with me if there was some mechanism in society that allowed us to just scientifically try to understand the whole world that exists beneath our feet. But it is not so, instead we are driven by the need to consume raw materials. As time passes, it becomes increasingly difficult to find concentrations of raw materials that can be utilized economically. It is a very complex problem and that is what I have chosen to devote my life to.

I don’t know if Salmon and mining can coexist, I probably don’t have the necessary knowledge or skill set to make a reasonable determination, but if I could contrubute something to the study of it, I would be willing.

#33 LiladyNY
While I agree that statistics can be used to lie, they can only lie to those who do not understand statistics. Statistics are a vital tool to science because we have to deal with the unknown. Properly applied, statistics are what we use to determine whether or not our data is representative of anything in the real world. The problem is further confounded by the fact that nature is not random. Good science depends upon accurate statistics. Unfortunately, statistics are apparently not intuitively obvious to everyone. So yes they can be and often are abused by those willing to lie to achieve their objectives.

Thank you for your encouragement, I enjoy this forum and I enjoy contributing my point of view when it is relevant. That is not often the case but I am content with it.

#27 kssunflower
Egad, yes that “homeland” meme is kind of ugly. In Germany it was the patriarcal, “fatherland”.

On the education issue you are more or less correct I think, I am not a student of these issues but if my memory serves me, it was in the 1980s that the decline of public funding for education began. We had a president who basically made the claim – look at me, I am an idiot who knows nothing about anything and I am president of the United States and the most powerful person in the world!

If human beings were not gullible, carnivals would have gone out of business two centuries ago.

I cannot tell if there is any hope for the world, I am but one individual. But unless many individuals seek and come to a common understanding of what we all confront, then in my opinion, we shall see unprecedented chaos.

I hope I have addressed what has been put forth.

Cheers,

K.N.-can you give us some input? I can’t see how salmon and mining can coexist.
Professor Steiner-thank you. Please keep speaking out. Some of us do listen.

For everyone, Please explore all of knikriver.org website to learn what is transpiring at the headwaters of the Cook Inlet. Alaska DNR has managed to create, through rude misinterpretation of legislation and BAD planning,
an unlimited motor use ‘park’ in an area named by prior DNR & F&G Commissioners as critical habitat.
Science and much publicly funded planning was tossed here, too.

i love KN’s posts also….tickled to see him and zyxomma make friends.

KN is an expert in mining engineering. what he don’t know probably not worth knowing. i wonder how he would go about mining at Pebble if he had all the time and money and resources in the world his disposal. could it be done in a way that would benefit the environment? just curious.

The vast mountains of money spent to prove or disprove a particular ideological or political viewpoint on these studies and studies to study the study and more studies could fix this country in a day and feed the world in a week (well, maybe I exaggerate)! And all they do is delay and obstruct fixing the original problem, while more land is lost and more creatures perish and suffer. I forget who it was who said: There are lies, dam*ed lies and statistics. Interesting thing about statistics; they can be skewed to present information in whatever way the statistician wants it to represent. I don’t believe statistics for a moment. I believe that if Beluga whales are not thriving over a period of time and they are not reproducing in numbers to support a healthy population, then there is a problem and that needs to be addressed. Another study will not increase their numbers. I believe every creature has evolved to fill a niche that is important from the lowest plankton to the mighty blue whale and we need to respect that or we shall certainly rue the day.

Sorry, I went off on a tangent and a rant.

@Krubozumo Nyankoye ~ I always enjoy reading your thoughtful, intelligent and meaty posts. We do not hear from you enough.

It is upsetting that the legislature never do anything to correct the corruption even when it is so obvious. The Governor has too much power in appointing the Attorney General, commissioners and high ranking officials.