New Film Takes on the Pebble Mine in Defense of Bristol Bay

Renowned film-maker and environmental activist Mark Titus has turned his attention to the battle against the reckless Pebble Mine.  In his latest film, The Wild, Titus employs a range of new voices to portray what has become one of the most widely condemned development projects anywhere today—a proposal to build a massive, open pit copper and gold mine at the top of the watershed that feeds the most productive wild sockeye salmon fishery on Earth, in Bristol Bay, Alaska.

Overwhelmingly opposed for decades by the people who live in the Bristol Bay region, the project has been abandoned by four major international mining companies, condemned virtually unanimously by the World Conservation Congress, rejected by Tiffany and Co. and 60 other major jewelry companies, and characterized as potentially “catastrophic” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) based on a three-year, twice peer-reviewed risk assessment. Time and again, it has been called “the wrong mine in the wrong place,” including by former EPA Administrators from the Administrations of Nixon, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. 

But as Mark Titus explains, this reckless scheme has been thrown a life-line by the Trump Administration, and the project has once again necessarily become the focus of intense advocacy to protect the incomparable Bristol Bay eco-system from the mindless environmental destruction at the heart of the Trump agenda.  It’s a story brilliantly told and essential to hear, because if we can’t stop a project as relentlessly indefensible as this one, it is hard to be optimistic about our collective prospects for a livable future.

The screening, principally sponsored by Trout Unlimited National Chapter, is scheduled for September 19^th at 7 PM at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.  A stellar panel, including Titus himself, will answer questions after the film.

Go see it—and then join the fight against the Pebble Mine. It’s a battle we have to win.