Really, she was going to have to start keeping a scorecard. By using Alaskans native to the area he included everyone who wasn‘t Native, too. A feat of rhetorical gymnastics that many Alaska state legislators had yet to achieve.

The mine site sits in a high, broad valley facing southwest, between spurs of the Quilak Mountains. Global Harvest proposes building the largest dam in the world to contain the acid mine drainage and metal leaching produced when rain and snow fall on tailings and when chemicals used to process the ore leak or spill. Acid was a scary word right there. Acid rain, anyone?

This proposed dam will be made of earth, not concrete.

Ah, a little selective omission, an essential ingredient in every compelling argument. The planned dam was going to be bigger than the Three Gorges Dam in China, and the plans called for two dams, not one.

All five species of salmon who call these waters home—

Anthropomorphizing fish, now, reminding her again of PETA‘s fish kittens. A hard sell, she‘d have thought, but that was just her.

—along with rainbow trout, lake trout, arctic char, arctic grayling, and Dolly Varden spawn, migrate in the waterways downstream of the Suulutaq Mine. It is one of the richest and most unspoiled fish habitats left in the world. Entire coastal towns rely on the commercial catch of salmon every summer in the flats off the mouth of the Kanuyaq River. Sports fishermen come from all over the world to fish the mountain streams. Alaska Natives have been subsisting on the salmon catch from these waters for generations.

Now the prospective mine was poisoning the playground of the rich, not to mention the food supply of an entire race.

The valley where the open pit is to be dug is home to the Gruening River caribou herd. While a small herd by comparison to the Mulchatna and Western Arctic caribou herds, the Gruening River herd has been found to be biologically unique, a herd that may be a bellwether for all other North American caribou herds. As such it is targeted for extensive study by accredited global wildlife institutes. The Gruening River caribou herd has also been a traditional part of the subsistence lifestyle of the Natives in the area, a significant protein essential to their physical health and cultural well-being.

A little vague, there. What study had found the Gruening herd unique? Which institutes had done what targeting? Nice inclusive conspiratorial touch at the end, though. Most of us eat meat.

There was more about the grizzly bears (Kate could have offered up some eyewitness testimony to the health of the Park grizzlies but she refrained), the moose, the sheep, the goats, and the migratory birds, and the stated determination of the federal government to open up all eligible federal lands in the area to hard rock mining, a blatant Aprèsmoi,le deluge message if Kate had ever heard one. McKenzie‘s presentation lasted fifteen minutes and not one minute more, and concluded with a list of sponsors, as he reeled off names that featured green heavy hitters like the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, Ducks Unlimited, and Earthwatch. There were familiar corporate names as well, companies like Apple, Wal-Mart, General Electric, and, to Kate‘s secret amusement, RPetCo Alaska. The list ended with a lengthy catalog of do-gooder nonprofits, ranging from familiar names like Rockefeller and Carnegie to what must have been nonprofits new to the business of saving the planet, Clean and Green, Big Blue Marble, Alaskans for Sustainable Jobs, The Seventy-one Percent Society, Clean Air for All. She had to admit she was impressed. It argued a breadth of support that crossed ideological lines. Of course, she reminded herself, they could all have bought in at the lowest level.