Travel Forum - Traveler Mania

Bristol Bay, Alaska
 
 
 
 The Nushagak and Kvichak rivers that flow into southern Alaska's Bristol Bay, along with their tributaries, are home to the last great wild salmon fishery in the world.
 
 For more than 10,000 years, indigenous families have sustainably harvested salmon returning to the rivers during their annual migration. The same waters support a commercial fishery worth U.S. $350 million for its rainbow trout, char, dolly varden, and five salmon species.
 
 But a proposed, 2-mile-deep (3.2-kilometer-deep) open pit mine at the headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak rivers has tribes and environmental groups worried. Opponents say the Pebble Mine, in its production of copper and gold, could consume 35 billion gallons of water each year that normally course through nearby streams.
 
 In turn it could produce 10 billion tons of waste, including antimony, arsenic, copper, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, zinc, and sulfate. To contain the waste, the mining company would build an impoundment taller than Hoover Dam, which could further impede the fishery. The tribes and environmental groups are asking the Environmental Protection Agency to use the Clean Water Act to prevent Pebble Mine from going forward.

Chicago River, Illinois
 
 
 
 Six million residents of Chicago and the surrounding region depend on the human-made Chicago River, which flows through the heart of the city. Chicago and the Chicago Park District have invested tens of millions of dollars in river access and improvement over the past decade. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) dumps 1.2 billion gallons of sewage that hasn't been disinfected into the Chicago River system every day. The effluent comprises 70 percent of the water in the Chicago River system.
 
 American Rivers, in naming the Chicago the nation's fourth most endangered river, is encouraging the Illinois Pollution Control Board to approve proposed water quality standards for the Chicago River that would require the MWRD to disinfect the effluent.
 
 The District argues that studies have not been done to prove there would be any health benefits from disinfecting the effluent, but that disinfection would carry a high price tag for taxpayers. The tax-funded District is actively promoting the concept that the waterway was designed for shipping and sewage.
 
 "Without the man-made waterway system, operated by the MWRD, the Chicago area would revert to being the pre-settlement swamp it was and every basement would become a floodwater reservoir," according to materials on its website that oppose the disinfection idea.

Hoback River, Wyoming
 
 
 
 Western Wyoming's Hoback River begins with springs, seeps, and wetlands in a roadless area of the Bridger-Teton National Forest and ends in an 8-mile (13-kilometer) stretch that was designated as a Wild and Scenic River in 2009 for its untrammeled character and its wildlife, including a thriving population of native cutthroat trout.
 
 But American Rivers says a proposed industrial-scale natural gas drilling operation could inject toxic chemicals, including known carcinogens, into the ground that would threaten the ecosystem and local drinking water supplies.
 
 Plains Exploration and Production (PXP), a Houston-based energy company, has plans to begin hydraulic fracturing near the Hoback's headwaters pending the go-ahead by the U.S. Forest Service. In its draft environmental impact study of the drilling proposal, the Bridger-Teton National Forest did not require a comprehensive baseline analysis of the area's groundwater before development, which the environmental group says precludes accountability by PXP for the pollution that's sure to result.