The Last Great Wild River of the West

by Alexander Cockburn

The Taku River rises in the mountains of British Columbia and arcs southwest through forested canyons into Southeast Alaska, where it crosses the Tongass National Forest before emptying into the Pacific just south of Juneau. It's the largest unroaded watershed on the West Coast of North America, covering some 4.5 million acres.

In terms of wildlife, the Taku brings to mind Euclides da Cunha's famous description of the Amazon: "the last unwritten page of Genesis." Human impact has not decimated the original biota. In profusion sufficient to ensure their vibrant survival, there are wolves, mountain goats, caribou, moose and a wide range of birds from peregrine falcons to trumpeter swans. The Taku also harbors the healthiest population of grizzlies in the Northwest. In its waters flourish all five varieties of Pacific salmon, the chinook, the coho, the pink, the sockeye and the steelhead. At a time when salmon stocks up and down the West Coast of the continent are in a state of collapse, the Taku runs remain abundant, for simple reasons. There are no roads, no cows, no dams, no clearcuts, no mines. In this healthy state, the Taku is a $5.5 million fishery, and in terms of salmon, it's the underpinning of the Alaskan fish industry.

The Taku watershed is not devoid of humans. Since 2000 BC, the Taku River Tlingit have made their home along its banks, developing a culture that was described in admiring terms a century ago by Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology. The Tlingit have never ceded their title to what they call the Taku River Valley. In their language, Taku means "the place where the swans and the geese touch down to land."

This same place faces a doom from which U.S. diplomacy may well be its only chance of rescue. A Vancouver-based mining company called Redfern Resources has been given preliminary approval by the provincial government of British Columbia to develop a vast lead, silver, zinc and gold mine in the heart of the Taku watershed. The mine is scheduled to produce 2,500 tons of ore a day, with a 99 mile-long road being carved from the landscape, starting in the Canadian portion of the watershed.

This same road would be overture to the destruction of the Taku. Its proposed route requires 69 crossings of salmon streams. It would offer access to logging trucks, to poachers and to other mines. Redfern Resources wants to set the bulldozers to work on the road this coming summer.

Furiously opposing such plans are the Taku Tlingit, who have written a spirited letter to the BC government, saying correctly, "Control over the land is control over us. For us, the road is a drain on the spirit of the land."

The mine itself is a toxic disaster in the making. The wastes from the site would be highly acidic and loaded with heavy metals and other poisons. Outrageously, Redfern plans to build one of the tailings ponds within the flood plain of the Taku. Even the BC provincial government, long in the pocket of mining companies, admits that opening the mine "could result in a chronic discharge of effluent contaminated with acids, heavy metals, petroleum products and/or toxic reagents."

Putting it somewhat more graphically, Bob Riley of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently told an Alaskan newspaper that "it's like a loaded gun." In his detailed review of Redfern's plans published this last March, conducted for the EPA, the Seattle-based Riley concludes that there is a high likelihood that the slurry from the mine will not settle in the tailings ponds but eventually leach into the Taku, poisoning the salmon-rich waters.

It's not often that one sees the governor of Alaska standing up for the environment or for any creature not equipped with a gun, a pickax, a sport utility vehicle or a chain-saw, but Tony Knowles -- the present denizen of the governor's mansion in Juneau -- has been vociferous in his denunciation of the mine, which is being pushed by the BC government: "It is extraordinary and to my mind unprecedented to place the mine development in the flood plain of a major salmon-producing river."

The Canadians have thus far brushed off such complaints. But the Clinton administration has got a powerful weapon to hand, in the form of the Boundary Waters Act, signed by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1909. This grandfather of environmental side-agreements created a Joint International Commission, consisting of three Americans and three Canadians, to resolve disputes on transborder waterways such as the Taku.

Right now, the U.S. State Department has been asked by Knowles, the Taku Klinkit (the only North American tribe to have dual citizenship) and several environmental groups, including the Taku River League led by Ian Kean, to intervene under the terms of the 1909 law. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has been talking lately of the great new project of U.S. diplomacy, environmentalism. Now is her chance to demonstrate whether such language is anything more than hot air.