Published: June 18th, 2005 Anchorage Daily News
Last Modified: June 18th, 2005 at 04:12 AM
As summer and the height of the fishing season approaches, get ready for the Murkowski administration to revive its highly unpopular proposal to allow new types of pollution in Alaska's fish streams. Last summer -- during fishing season -- the administration sought to change existing rules that prohibit virtually all pollution in these prized streams.
Instead of prohibiting pollution there, the Murkowski rule change would create "mixing zones" in these streams where it would be OK to discharge pollution.
How do they work? Mixing zones are areas where toxic and bacterial pollution are diluted so that state and federal water quality standards only are met at the edges of the zones. Despite the fact that salmon pass through these zones and that even minute quantities of certain contaminants can hurt fish, mixing zones allow "dilution to be the solution to pollution." Mixing zones thus ensure that only portions of streams are protected from pollution, rather than entire streams. Since fish live in whole streams and rivers and not just in portions of them, the mixing zone proposal clearly will impact Alaskan salmon and other fish.
Who wants mixing zones? The mining industry, among others. Their documented interest in this issue is "coincidently" timed with the proposed development of the Pebble gold-copper mine at the headwaters of the most productive wild salmon fishery in the Bristol Bay watershed. Since it is cheaper to discharge pollution without treatment than with treatment, the mining industry would benefit from mixing zones.
Despite industry pressure on the governor to allow mixing zones, there is strong, broad-based opposition to the zones from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Kenai Peninsula Borough, the Ketchikan-Gateway Borough and many Alaska cities and villages, including Kenai, Homer, Juneau and Port Graham. Other groups also have registered their concerns over this proposal, including United Fishermen of Alaska, United Cook Inlet Drift Association and Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association.
Written comments on the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation's mixing zone proposal ran about 15 to 1 against, and that does not even include form letters and e-mail calls to action. Gov. Murkowski's continued push for mixing zones despite broad-based opposition shows how out of touch he is with Alaska communities and, unfortunately, his disdain for public input into policy-making.
Currently the Alaska salmon industry is successfully marketing its salmon as clean and uncontaminated to customers increasingly wary of the chemical residues and contaminants contained in farmed salmon and fish caught from polluted waterways. The successful marketing of wild Alaska salmon is based upon customer perception -- and the current reality -- that the salmon are superior in quality and free of toxic chemicals like mercury, heavy metals, PCBs and other byproducts of industrial and municipal discharges into public waterways.
Allowing mixing zones would undercut these marketing efforts and undermine the distinction between wild and farmed fish upon which this marketing depends. Furthermore, salmon branding, marketing and certification entities such as the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, Kenai Wild, Copper River Salmon Producers Association, the Marine Stewardship Council and other regional salmon marketing efforts may be forced to lower their quality specifications to reflect that the fish were harvested from waters with heightened pollution from mixing zones.
Why do we need or want more pollution in our salmon streams? We don't. Alaska is one of the few places in the United States that prohibits mixing zones in fish-bearing streams. Once we allow mixing zones in salmon streams, Alaska's uniqueness as a source of clean, uncontaminated fish will be gone.
I urge anyone interested in high-quality Alaska fish and a diverse, sustainable economy to contact Gov. Murkowski as soon as possible and urge him to withdraw the mixing zone proposal.
Robert Ernst is a lifelong Alaskan, a commercial fisherman of 25 years, a teacher, a businessman, and president of Cook Inlet Keeper, an environmental watchdog organization. He lives in Nikiski