Legal Defense Fund victories continue to force cleanup of Alaska’s placer mining industry. In November, the federal district court in Anchorage struck down a mining regulation that had allowed scores of commercial placer mines to strip mine for gold in streambeds on public lands in Alaska without approval or environmental review by the Bureau of Land Management.
The ruling promises to have widespread ramifications for an industry that as recently as 1986 caused 80 percent of the water pollution in Alaska, fouling more than 2,000 miles of rivers and streams.
