Alaskan voters, in a curiously self-defeating turn, have chosen not to impose strict pollution limits on their state's mining industry - thereby allowing the development of unnecessarily polluting mines that will leak toxins into nearby salmon fisheries. The measure would have first affected the Pebble Mine, a new development exploiting gold and copper deposits near Bristol Bay, a prolific and (currently) healthy salmon fishery.

Them's the breaks with a referendum issue, we suppose, but we can't help but wonder what sort of logic makes it preferable to continue the degradation of the Pacific coastal salmon fishery to avoid controlling the flow of heavy metals from tailings heaps and mine drainage.

The Alaskan mining industry would have the public believe that any sort of environmental controls or protections affecting their operations would make it impossible for them to mine at all, which may or may not be the truth. However, one questions the logic of degrading a sustainable fishing industry that contributes $250 million a year to the Alaskan economy and supports 12,000 jobs in favor of giving a leg up to an unsustainable extraction industry that contributes half as many jobs and $50 million per year less.

Fisheries have supported Alaskans for thousands of years, and with wise management could continue to do so for thousands of years more; mining, with its booms and busts as commodity prices fluctuate, can only do so for a few decades at most. We're hardly surprised by our society's continuing determination to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs to make room for the one that lays eggs of copper, but it never fails to dismay us.