Bristol Bay’s salmon spawning grounds sustain a commercial fishing industry that generates more than $2 billion every year. (Courtesy Wild Salmon Center)
From the Washington Post: “The Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday that it would restore protections for Alaska’s Bristol Bay, blocking the construction of a massive and controversial gold mine near the world’s largest sockeye salmon run.
The policy shift, indicated in a court filing Thursday in response to a lawsuit filed by the mine’s opponents, deals a serious blow to a project that has been in the works for more than a decade and would have transformed southwest Alaska’s landscape.” Read the whole story.
Beautiful canyons such as this one dot the San Gabriel Mountains.
L.A. transportation projects are the big winners in President Obama’s budget, while the L.A. River is left out, according to today’s piece in the Los Angeles Times. The article quotes Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) saying that the “president provided no support for widening and restoring the Los Angeles River.”
Meanwhile, tomorrow a diverse group will speak to a joint U.S. House and Senate hearing about the current effort to restore parts of the Clean Water Act. The Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers have proposed a rule to restore protections to small streams and wetlands that contribute to drinking water. You can read more about “Waters of the United States” here.
According to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, 2 million miles of streams are without guaranteed protection from pollution, and those streams, in turn, provide drinking, swimming and fishing water to one in three Americans.
lariverflyfishing 