Rejection of AK mining road seen as victory for national parks across U.S.
Eric Tegethoff, Producer
Monday, April 22, 2024
The Biden administration has blocked a mining road in Alaska and public lands proponents see the move as a win for national parks around the country.
The Interior Department has denied permission for the building of the Ambler Road project, which included more than 200 miles of road through Alaska Wilderness.
Alex Johnson, interior Alaska director for the National Parks Conservation Association, said a project like this could happen anywhere.
"We would hope that the people of Oregon are celebrating this win for salmon and for the fisheries of Northwest Alaska," Johnson noted. "There's multiple major rivers that flow out of the Gates of the Arctic park landscape, and those would have been threatened by this proposed mining road."
Johnson pointed out the decision is also a win for native communities and subsistence resources in the region. The company behind the project said the decision is a blow to revenue for local communities.
Johnson countered the action keeps a large, pristine landscape intact.
"This is a huge national park win for the largest national park landscape in the entire system, with 16 million acres of contiguous, wild, roadless parklands and over 20 million acres of national parklands in Northwest Alaska that would have been affected if this road had been built," Johnson outlined.
The mining road would have gone through the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and potentially hurt the migration route of the western Arctic caribou. The region is also home to 66 Alaska Native communities.
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