Elusive State of Jefferson by Peter Laufer

Author:Peter Laufer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TwoDot
Published: 2013-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Karuk biologist Ken Brink, whose shirt informs, “I’ve come back to my native place.”

He answers with a question. “Do we want to start making another species go extinct over gold? Is gold worth the existence of a living species?” He is an intense, fast-talking advocate, a hefty man wearing a gray tank top emblazoned with the words “I’ve come back to my native place” in Karuk. Sunglasses parked on his head, Ken Brink’s smile and eyes radiate a warm personality, a look similar to the welcome I received from trailer park owner Bruce Johnson. “From a tribal perspective, gold is great. Money makes the world go round. We understand that. But the creator put these species here on this earth for a reason. They’re supposed to be here. These small mussels may be the keystone species to the whole ecosystem. Maybe if you take away one little part of the system, we’re going to have a big collapse. We don’t know if the mussels go away what condition the river is going to be in. The river could become so toxic that gold miners might not be able to be in it because of the toxic algae levels that these little creatures help excrete out.”

His sales pitch is emotive and heartfelt. He and his counterpart Bruce Johnson perform as if they were trained in the same acting school. They could make ideal partners were they not working different sides of the street. I ask tribal biologist Ken Brink what I asked trailer park owner Bruce Johnson. Why not sit down for a beer with your nemesis and seek common ground, find a compromise. It’s that naïve outsider’s question again.

His voice slows. “The dredgers and the tribes have big issues. We got the credit— basically the blame—for stopping suction dredging. We have people harassing us every day, saying we took away their livelihood.” But he questions the validity of such claims. “A lot of these people who come around dredging are older retired people. They’re just doing it for their hobby. These guys already lived their life,” he dismisses their role on the river. “They’re just trying to find a hobby to make money.” With the price of gold at record heights, there is money to be made on the river. But for Brink, the dredging must be seen with historical perspective. “Whole mountains have gone,” he says about the effects of the commercial hydraulic mining companies that worked the river during the nineteenth-century Gold Rush. “They strip-mined the river so bad that we’re still having the effects of heavy metals from the dredgers when they pick up mercury pockets.”

Vast quantities of mercury were used by the nineteenth-century miners. Mercury binds readily with gold, making it relatively easy to extract the precious metal as it slips from ore aided by its partner, the deadly quicksilver. Today’s miners say they help clean the river when their dredges suck up a mercury pocket. But their opponents counter that not all the newly stirred up mercury—not to mention other toxic compounds from past mining operations—is captured.

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