Jewelers Choose Salmon Over Gold

It seems strange that major jewelry retailers like Tiffany's, Zales, and Fortunoff would refuse to buy gold. Selling precious metals and gems is, after all, how these corporations make their millions. Many jewelers are forgoing gold in favor of another valuable resource — wild sockeye salmon.

More than 30 jewelry retailers teamed up with Earthworks, an environmental non-profit, in taking the Bristol Bay Pledge. These jewelers vow that they will never buy gold from the Pebble Mine Project, a proposed copper and gold mine in Alaska. The reason for the bling-y boycott is that the mine, a joint venture between Anglo American and Northern Dynasty Minerals, will threaten Bristol Bay, the world's most important and plentiful wild sockeye salmon fishery.

Right now the mine is still in the exploration stage, but it's already getting a lot of heat not just from jewelers, but environmentalists, fishermen, and Alaskan locals. Mines are generally disgustingly dirty, generating billions of tons of waste every year. Much of that waste ends up contaminating surrounding land and waterways — in this case, the Bristol Bay. The Pebble Mine Project would also industrialize (read: destroy) salmon habitat, decimating one of the world's healthiest fisheries.

According to The Independent, fishermen catch anywhere from 10 million to 30 million sockeye salmon every year during an intense weeks'-long fishing season. The fishery is not only sustainable, it provides jobs and a plethora of seafood. As Earthworks told The Independent, Pebble Mine "would destroy salmon spawning habitat in a designated fishery reserve and jeopardize the community fishing industry and the livelihoods of the Alaska native communities in the region." Gold is already pretty expensive — turns out it comes at a far higher cost than most consumers even realize.

That's where jewelers come in. Jewelry demand accounts for about 80 percent of global mine production of gold. While the Pebble Mine Project would also pimp out copper, the real money is in the more valuable metal, gold. If jewelers state publicly that they will not source any of their gold from Alaska's Pebble Mine, there will be little to no market for this gold. Once developers realize there's no market for Pebble Mine gold, we can kiss the Pebble Mine Project goodbye.

It's encouraging to see so many jewelers signing the Bristol Bay Pledge at such an early stage of the project's development. Right now, Pebble Mine is in the exploration stages. In order for it to get the green light, it still needs to go through a pre-feasibility study, licensing, and permitting. Eliminating a market for Pebble Mine gold at its very earliest stages of development will ensure that the project never takes off. By preventing the Pebble Mine project from getting off the ground, we can make sure that wild sockeye salmon stay in the bay.

Photo credit: Harmageddon via Wikimedia Commons