Alaska conference focuses on transboundary mining concerns

Participants in a transboundary mining conference in Juneau last week said recent natural and industrial disasters show why their heightened concerns are justified.

“I think that people are realizing that more and more this is an emergency situation,” Wrangell’s Esther Aaltséen Reese, president of the Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission, said in an interview Aug. 28. “We can’t just keep coming to these meetings and saying the same thing.”

The third annual Transboundary Mining Conference began two days after a major landslide hit Ketchikan on Aug. 25, one of several landslides...