The Bristol Bay Pebble Mine victory, a 2023 EPA veto that blocked what would have been North America’s largest open-pit mine, earned Yup’ik leader Alannah Acaq Hurley the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize.
The Bristol Bay Pebble Mine victory capped over two decades of organizing led by Yup’ik leader Alannah Acaq Hurley, executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay. Acting on behalf of 15 tribal nations, she built a coalition of Indigenous communities, commercial fishermen, and national environmental groups that pushed the EPA to use its rarely invoked Clean Water Act veto authority, only the 14th such veto in the agency’s history.
Canadian company Northern Dynasty Minerals first proposed the copper and gold mine in 2001, planning a pit roughly 2.5 miles wide and 600 feet deep at the headwaters of Bristol Bay. Hurley described the scale bluntly: “The pit would be so big, you could literally see it from the moon.” The mine threatened to produce billions of tons of toxic tailings that would require containment in perpetuity, sitting atop a watershed that supports the world’s largest sockeye salmon runs.
Hurley began organizing during college summer breaks, traveling to rural communities accessible only by boat or bush plane to explain the mine’s risks. Tribes petitioned the EPA in 2010 to prohibit large-scale mining in the watershed. The agency instead launched a three-year scientific assessment, ultimately confirming what local communities had argued: the project would devastate the water, the fishery, and everything that depended on them.
The path to the Bristol Bay Pebble Mine victory was neither straight nor certain. Protections proposed under one administration were withdrawn under the next, challenged in court, and reinstated on appeal across multiple presidencies. More than one million public comments supported protecting the region during the EPA’s renewed review. In January 2023, the agency finalized its veto, formally protecting 25 million acres of wilderness, rivers, and wetlands, an area roughly the size of Ohio, along with a commercial fishery worth an estimated $2.2 billion annually.
Bristol Bay supports the world’s largest sockeye salmon runs and a $2.2 billion commercial fishing industry that the Pebble Mine would have threatened. Photo by Misty Nielsen, courtesy of the Goldman Environmental Prize.
Does the Bristol Bay Pebble Mine victory mean the fight is over? No. Northern Dynasty and the Pebble Limited Partnership sued, arguing the EPA veto was unlawful. Alaska’s governor and state government joined the challenge against the tribes’ own federal protections. Hurley and UTBB formally intervened to defend the veto in court, with oral arguments held in June 2026 before the U.S. District Court in Anchorage. Hurley describes the tribes’ position as resting on decades of administrative record and scientific evidence, while remaining “cautiously optimistic” rather than certain of the outcome.
The Clean Water Act veto covers only the Pebble deposit itself. More than 20 other active mining claims remain within the broader Bristol Bay watershed. Tribal leaders have pushed for permanent, watershed-wide protection through state legislation, including Alaska’s proposed Bristol Bay Forever Bill, but the measure has stalled in the state legislature amid a difficult political environment. Hurley has been explicit that Pebble was never just one project: building it would have created the infrastructure enabling an entire mining district across the watershed.
What happens if the current litigation succeeds in overturning the veto? The protections finalized in 2023 would evaporate, reopening the path for exactly the development Bristol Bay’s tribes spent over twenty years fighting to prevent. That possibility is precisely why Hurley and her coalition remain engaged in active defense rather than treating 2023 as a closing chapter.
The Goldman Prize recognition arrives at a politically fraught moment. The current federal administration has moved to roll back environmental regulations and mining restrictions broadly, making the Department of Justice’s continued defense of the Pebble veto in court notable, though not a guarantee that the position will hold through appeal.
Hurley’s prize places her among six 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize winners, marking the first time in the award’s 37-year history that every recipient is a woman. She received $200,000 in prize money, along with recognition for what she simply calls “a fight for humanity.”
The Bristol Bay Pebble Mine victory demonstrates what sustained Indigenous-led coalition organizing can accomplish against a well-funded mining company across successive federal administrations. It also demonstrates how fragile such victories remain. A regulatory veto, however historic, is not a permanent legal wall. It is a position that must be actively defended in court, year after year, against opponents with a strong financial incentive to keep challenging it until they win.
