Morons Want to Pave Alaska

NONDALTON, Alaska -- Fly overhead in a bush plane -- there are no roads between native villages -- and see eight giant rivers braiding across hundreds of miles of wetlands, carving ribbons through snow-coned mountains before emptying into Bristol Bay.

For more than 100 years, the wealth of this southwest Alaska watershed has sprung from the salmon nurtured by those wild rivers. Bank-to-bank, gill-to-gill, tens of millions of the silvery fish thrash upstream to spawn each year, unrestrained by dams, untainted by pollution.

It is the largest sockeye run in the world, accounting for more than one-quarter of wild salmon harvested in the United States, feeding millions at a time fisheries are dwindling around the world.

But if fish have made the region's past and present fortune, the future sparkles with the promise of precious metal. Beneath the rolling tundra, straddling the headwaters of two of the watershed's most productive rivers, a Canadian company has discovered North America's biggest deposits of gold and copper, worth about $300 billion in today's soaring commodities markets.

The question is whether Alaskans will have to choose between the two -- and whether the watershed, its fish and a variety of other wildlife will be casualties of what could be one of the world's biggest mines. The project would entail five earthen dams, of which two would be bigger than China's Three Gorges Dam.

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