A few weeks ago, the Alaska delegation sent a letter to President Biden expressing concern that Canadian mine operations in British Columbia “will increasingly endanger U.S. communities and resources, such as salmon, without any mechanism for recourse or compensation.”
A couple weeks later, Senator Murkowski, in a video address, spoke forcefully about her commitment to protecting Alaskan communities from upstream mining pollution. The Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Coalition, with 17 member tribes, has been equally forceful in its calls for action.
These sentiments seem to be swimming upstream. As the world transitions to electric vehicles and renewable energy, the demand for critical minerals like lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite is growing rapidly. China exerts unrivaled influence over the critical mineral supply chain, and the United States is working feverishly with allies like Canada to increase access to critical minerals. However, despite the growing recognition of the importance of Canadian mines, the Alaskan coalition emphasized that “there is no need to sacrifice environmental protections in order to safeguard our security and power our communities.”
What is driving these concerns?
There are hundreds of proposed, operating, and abandoned mines in Canada near its border with the United States. What also frequently escapes attention is that most of the existing and proposed mining areas drain into Alaska, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. This means that polluted water from Canadian mines will likely impact communities in the United States if either water treatment falls short or accidents happen. Unfortunately, there is a long history of both, and the concern only grows with the prospect of rapidly expanding mining operations.
The United States, Canada, and indigenous Ktunaxa Nation recently inked an agreement to engage the International Joint Commission, which was created by the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, to begin addressing a decades-long dispute over mining in British Columbia’s Elk Valley that discharges pollutants like selenium into Montana and Idaho.
To the west, the EPA and its sister agencies are working with tribes, first nations, states, and local governments to address concerns involving a massive proposed mine expansion that would create one of the largest tailings dams in the world. A tailings dam breach could discharge toxics into the Columbia River system with far-reaching downstream impacts.
Perhaps nowhere is the issue felt more acutely than in southeast Alaska, where abandoned mines like the Tulsequah Chief continue to threaten downstream salmon fisheries and the communities who subsist on nature’s bounty. A slew of mines proposed within miles of the border between Alaska and British Columbia pose a profound threat to Southeast Alaska—a threat brought home by a recent disaster at Victoria Gold’s Eagle Mine. Failure of the mine’s heap leach pad “released some 2,000,000 metric tons of material, including hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of cyanide solution, into the environment.”
The Law and Policy program’s Jamie Pleune and John Ruple were recently invited to participate in a conference on transboundary mining pollution convened by the Upper Columbia United Tribes and hosted by the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. During the conference, John participated in the “Legal Tools to Support and Protect Transboundary Tribes and First Nations” panel.
John and Jamie are excited to be working with colleagues in Alaska, Washington, and Montana to address the challenges posed by transboundary mining and strengthen environmentally sustainable critical-mineral supply chains. Like other Stegner Center initiatives, their work is an example of legal scholarship addressing pressing environmental problems.
Jamie Pleune is an associate professor of law (research) and a member of the Law and Policy Group in the Wallace Stegner Center.