Bristol Bay is home to an abundance of animals that need pristine habitat.
Bristol Bay has more grizzly bears than humans. It is also home to otter, geese, beavers, marmot, puffins, bald eagles, fox, lynx, wolves, black bear, caribou, ducks, whales, walrus, seals, and countless other birds, fish and mammals. (Not to mention a lot of mosquitos!) These animals rely on clean water. They rely on us humans to speak for them. If the rivers get flooded with cyanide, they cannot be moved to a city. They will die. If the salmon stop returning, they will die. The salmon are a keystone species. Through their cycle of spawning and dying, the bring in tons of biological mass into the ecosystem. They are relyed upon by everything from brown bears to eagles to the tiny microbes in the water. The balance of this ecosystem is flawless. The addition of a dam larger than Three Gorges Dam in China would greatly upset these webs. As Henry Beston has said, “We patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
