How a 1985 Lawsuit Forced the Park Service to Weigh Past Mining in Alaska’s Parks

The ANILCA parks were vast, but within their boundaries were existing private uses, in a few cases whole towns. Mining was one of them, on patented property and on unpatented claims. Under the Mining in the Parks Act of 1978 the National Park Service (NPS) has jurisdiction over mining plans of operation and their effects on neighboring park land. John Quinley describes what happened when the government was sued over how it used that power.

Trucks hauling ore concentrates across monument lands to the port and storage facility (National Park Service photograph by Lynn Griffiths).

A suit, and a ruling

In 1985 the plaintiffs charged that the NPS had failed to meet its legal duty to protect Alaska's park resources and to account for the cumulative effects of mining. The courts eventually agreed, ruling that the NPS had to consider the effects of past mining when it evaluated proposals for new mining.

Impact statements for three parks

The order began a long series of environmental impact statements on mining in Denali National Park and Preserve, Wrangell-St. Elias, and Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. Investigators studied resources in and near areas with concentrations of claims: water quality and flows, soils, vegetation, fish, wildlife and historic resources. Earlier studies of mining in parks existed, but the requirement pushed the Park Service to gather more specific, in-depth information on cumulative effects on key resources, according to a manager in the NPS Mineral Resources Division in the late 1980s.

The statements set "resource protection goals," essentially limits on how much a resource category, such as vegetation, could change, so that managers could compare past uses and impacts with proposed ones. The studies also concluded that the NPS should buy mining claims in these park units and restore the environment around areas mined earlier, to reestablish natural conditions and processes.

What lasted

The goals, resource data, study areas and other decisions from the statements held up under public scrutiny and review by a federal appeals court, and became an integral part of evaluating new mining plans of operations in parks. In Yukon-Charley Rivers and Wrangell-St. Elias the data also formed some of the first baseline resource studies for the new parks, a forerunner of the later and larger Natural Resource Challenge.

Sources

• National Park Service, Alaska Park Science series The Legacy of ANILCA, Mining in the Parks, by John Quinley; rewritten in hubnx's own words.